The blueberries are ripe, so I expect we’ll see signs of our old friend Bear soon – that is, if the birds leave enough berries for us and Bear to share.
The birds have been exceptionally busy in the garden, and I wish they’d pay more attention to slugs and bugs than to cherries and berries, but they don’t pay me much mind when I’m shouting this at them.
Bear first arrived many years ago; one morning we glanced out the window toward the garden, and there she was – young, but huge, and in the compost.
“Bear in the compost!” someone shouted, and we all crowded to the windows to look.
As she sensed our interest and lumbered off toward the woods, out of my doors burst all the male creatures currently in residence: the Husband, the Cellar Dweller, and the visiting friends, leaving me to restrain the First Hound from exiting through one of the windows after them.
The four dudes rushed to the compost, raced around it, then took off through the garden in several directions toward the woods, looking exactly like a pack of dogs hot on the scent of something wonderful. Once they reached the woodline they thought better of it and came back to the house, panting with excitement.
It was several years before we saw Bear again, but she left signs of her nighttime visits: one totally crushed compost bin, and another, made of chicken wire, with a perfect imprint of her big bottom denting one side; and lots of berry-filled scat on our long driveway, left as she meandered toward the marsh for a swim after dining.
I’ve often seen a bear on the periphery of Brother’s place, and one day I was gazing out his big front window toward the little brook that runs under the trees.
There’s a very large rock on the edge of the brook, and I was lazily contemplating how nice it might be to lie on the flat top of that moss-covered rock in the sun-dappled shade, the little brook bubbling just below, and read a book or take a summer nap, when I realized that someone who’d been lying out on the rock had just stood up to full height and was staring back at me.
“That’s just not right,” I thought, peering intensely at the spot. “Who on earth” and then the bear had had enough of our silent conversation, set down onto four paws, and ambled out of sight.
I’m full of wonder that my gaze from behind a closed window across a driveway and through a patch of trees could alert the bear that something other was focusing attention in its direction.
Late one dark night in an early spring, I noticed the cat people slinking around the house very fluffed up, headed for the dining room window. The barkie boys were sound asleep, snoring away, so I crept behind the cats and peered out the window with them, onto the deck. It was unusually dark, but the cats were intently watching something I couldn’t see. Suddenly, I realized the darkness was moving.
I reached over and flipped on the porch light; and still all I could see was moving darkness; but in a moment, the darkness moved again, and four feet in front of me appeared a face. Bear had emerged early from hibernation, and was having a snack off the deck railings, where I feed the winter birds.
We looked at each other for a bit; me thinking, “Whoa, there’s only a pane of glass between me and that large being, and I hope she doesn’t smell the cat food on the kitchen counter behind me.”
At the same time, Bear was thinking – actually, I don’t know what; probably something about turning that darned porch light off. We stared for a moment; she turned and lumbered down the stairs, then stood on hind feet and continued her snack.
I flipped the porch light off and locked the door, and the cats and I quietly, quietly, quietly snuck back through the house and upstairs to bed. I shut the door at the bottom of the stairs, just because.
That winter I’d kept the birdseed in a big plastic bin outside the kitchen door on the deck. It had a tight-fitting cover, and inside was a mug from NHPR, which I used to scoop seed.
In the morning, the bin was gone. We found the cover half-way across the field. We found the empty bin in the woods, on the far side of our swampy brook. But we never found the mug, though we hunted all over the area.
I’m pretty sure Bear took it home to hold her morning coffee.
(Debra Marshall lives in Wilmot.)