Carolyn Rordam’s three Siberian Huskies sensed that something was outside her home in Warner, something different.
Normally terrible watchdogs, quiet with happy tails, the trio barked and jumped on the couch. Rordam looked out her window and saw a small bear cub.
“I said to my husband, ‘Batten down the hatches, there’s a bear outside,’ ” Rordam said. “I looked for the mother and my first thought was that this was not right. I was on the driveway watching. I spent the time thinking, ‘What do I do?’ ”
Rordam, the vice president at Joppa Glass Works, called her friend and neighbor, Karinne Heise, a retired English teacher. Soon, word spread up and down Joppa Road. Neighbors like Sarah Allen, who just happens to be a wetlands ecologist, and Elibet Chase, in charge of cub publicity, signed on, forming a grassroots team that worked day and night, texting, calling, worrying over a four-day period to find that cub.
And they found it. Dan Bailey of New Hampshire Fish and Game caged the bear using donuts and vanilla extract for bait. He brought the malnourished cub to Ben Kilham, founder of Kilham Bear Center in Lyme, where the cub is rehabbing emotionally and drinking lots of milk.
“He is gaining a lot of weight,” Kilham said.
The rescuers named the cub Joppa. Kilham said Joppa was eight months old, nine at the most. He said Joppa weighed 20 pounds when he arrived at the center earlier this month. He was due to be twice that weight by this age. The cub needed to be saved. Or else.
“The cub would not have survived through the winter. There was not enough high-quality food out there. Bears have a social hierarchy, and when it comes to food, single cubs are down on the list,” Kilham noted.
They are high, however, on the Joppa Road Cubs’ list. One by one, as different residents saw the cub at different times, everyone noticed that the cub was small. Too small.
And, of course, it was cute. Too cute.
“It’s the first thing that caught my attention,” Allen said. “So small for this time of year. To me, that was the first indication that something was off.”
For four days, the group kept their eyes open and reported to the others whenever a sighting occurred. Maybe there was a pattern they could follow.
Heise, an amateur photographer, heard the sound of water being lapped up and spotted the cub. She took photos, turning the team’s social media site upside down with cuteness. Everyone wanted to help the bear, see the bear, pet the bear.
The Joppa gang also saw the cub climb trees, more than once. One time, after Bailey had been called in, the cub was spotted in a tree but gone by the time Bailey got there.
This went on for a while. The cub, never seen anywhere else except on Joppa Road, was spotted numerous times. On a driveway. In the woods. Up a tree. While walking their dogs.
That’s when Bailey set his trap. On the third night. Apples had been tried earlier. The donuts, Hostess, did the trick. The cage door dropped shut. Allen was walking her dog and cat (yes, her cat) early on Day 4.
“He caught it that night,” Allen said. “I went by in the morning and heard bawling. It was probably highly stressed. I had never heard that sound before.”
Rordam checked the traps early that morning. She heard rattling. She walked over.
“There he was,” she said. “He had finished eating the donuts. He ate all the donuts. I called Dan, and he was on it.”
Bailey had set up two traps. One had Joppa inside. The other one caught a possum. Bailey knew what he had to do: leave the possum; take the cub.
At Kilham’s compound in Lyme, Joppa lives inside, still trying to get acclimated. Soon, he’ll join other cubs on fields that go on forever, eight acres and more. Kilham says he’s rehabbed and freed about 350 bears since opening 28 years ago. He never knows when it’s going to get busy.
“The number of cubs goes up and down here, radically sometimes,” Kilham said. “In 2019 we only had nine this time of year and we ended up with 83 or 84.”
As for Joppa, Kilham said he must have lost touch with his mother somewhere along the line. Maybe she was shot and killed while raiding a chicken coop, he said. Perhaps she was hit by a car. She might have simply abandoned her cub.
Joppa has his story, his past. The one we’ll never know.
And a neighborhood has its story. The people on one particular road. Perfect fodder for Christmas with the grandkids.
“I had to be involved,” Rordam said. “I was looking for the bat phone when I first saw it. Was there a hotline? Was there someone to call?”
Be ready. As Kilham said, “If they’re not picked up, that’s when they can not put on the 30 pounds of weight they’ll need. That is when they show up at bird feeders.”
“Expect more cubs before the snow flies.”