04/25/2026
At the Rocky Ridge Wildlife Rehabilitation Center nestled in the foothills of Colorado, every animal has a story of survival. But none captured the hearts of staff and visitors quite like the accidental friendship between Hazel, a two-year-old black bear, and a tiny whitetail fawn the team named Clover.
Clover had been found alone on the side of a mountain highway, trembling and dehydrated, after her mother had been struck by a passing truck. She was so small she could fit inside a shoebox. Staff bottle-fed her every two hours, and she grew slowly stronger — but she remained deeply anxious, flinching at every sound, refusing to settle no matter how gentle the environment.
Hazel had arrived weeks earlier with a fractured paw sustained in a snare trap. She was healing well but restless, pacing her enclosure with a low, rumbling unease. Staff placed her large indoor pen adjacent to Clover's recovery area, separated by a chain-link divider — mostly to help both animals feel less alone.
Within hours of the arrangement, Hazel had pressed her broad body flat against the fence, and Clover had crept across the pen and curled up against the other side. They slept like that, touching through the wire, for three nights straight.
On the fourth morning, the center director made a careful decision. Under close observation, the divider was removed. Hazel stood still as Clover cautiously walked toward her, sniffed her paw, and then simply folded her spindly legs and lay down against the bear's side. Hazel lowered her great dark head and rested it over the fawn's back with the quiet certainty of a mother who has done this a thousand times.
Volunteers watching from behind the glass wept openly. One later said: "We spend so much time teaching animals to tolerate each other. These two chose each other before we gave them the chance." Hazel and Clover were inseparable for the next eighteen months — eating together, sleeping together, playing in the morning light of the mountain meadow — until both were healthy enough to be gently released back into the wild they had always belonged to.
