Confrontation with a mama bear

 

I finally confronted the bear that has been bothering us the past seventy-two hours.

“Confront” is too dramatic a word. It was light evening, and we were inside the cool cabin relaxing, the pups under the bed. Foxy the Brittany, who has the best nose and is most curious and watchful and defensive, sprang up and ran to the screen porch and stood looking out, alert and snorting and growling. I got up and went out the screen door (Foxy snuck out behind me) to look around and take the opportunity to relieve myself. I walked across the landing to the compost bin at the edge of the old fir stand and standing there I looked over the compost bin into the firs cleared of undergrowth like a parkland and there was the blackness moving towards me.

The black bear in the evening shade of the woods is an amorphous thing, a pure black, undifferentiated moving shadow. I paced the distance this morning from the compost bin to that point at which Foxy caught sight of it and charged and the bear turned from me to my right, and it was sixteen paces. Sixteen yards. Forty-eight feet.

A black bear was checking out the neighborhood recently and found that Julie is growing a garden for him—or her. It’s a good thing the garden is fenced to keep away those pesky deer. Once everything is ripe the bear will come back and see if there is anything to eat, fence or no fence. Photo by Julie Schulberg

Foxy charged, but the bear just moved away. Foxy was like the dog chasing the train and the train really not going anywhere. She stood alongside the bear and howled.

“Bothering” is too accusatory. The bear has just been going about her early summer business, scavenging opportunistically before the berries ripen. She showed up a couple days ago in the creek valley, not bothering anyone, but the dogs got wind of her and heard her moving and set to barking and howling up a storm in her general direction from the height of land above the creek. So, it was the dogs’ barking that was really bothersome.

Except for the next night. The second night she did bother me, and I guess that’s why I went out to confront (in the weakest sense) her on the third evening.

On the second night it was after dark and we were inside reading with the single solar-powered light on. The dogs were under the bed and Foxy got restless and even Peppy growled, and I heard a crash outside the window. I got up and we went to the screen porch in the dark, and I latched the screen door from the inside so Foxy wouldn’t get out (she knows how to get out the screen door; the other two are baffled by doors).

That’s when I realized, in the true darkness, that it was a mother bear with her two cubs. Because I could hear the wheeze-purr of something eating the black-oil sunflower seeds at the shepherd’s staff birdfeeder, and I could hear another up on the corner of the tool shed where I had a hanging feeder with sunflower seeds, and the third I could hear up on the corner of the woodshed working on a suet feeder cage.

I got the headlamp and turned it on, because I wanted to see them working on all my stuff, or at least shine their eyes. But here’s the thing about trying to shine a light from a dark porch from a 1/8-inch mesh mosquito screen in the black hole of an early June night: it doesn’t work. My headlamp only picked up the screen in front of my eyes and made everything else blacker.

Anyway, that’s when all hell broke loose. The cub at the birdfeeder at the tool shed came crashing down with the feeder and landed on top of my recycling and a line of garden implements, and that spooked the other cub up on the suet feeder on the woodshed and he came tumbling down, and momma bear made some grunting sounds to call the cubs, and I heard them disappear totally. My pups were frozen on the porch. No barking. I was froze to.

So, I pieced it all together the next morning. The shepherd staff all akimbo. My beets and cucumbers trampled. The compost bin rummaged. Three suet feeders – Fruit and Nut, Mealworm, and Zesty Orange – gone (I found all three feeders piled together and emptied in the clean needle carpet of the old fir stand.

The bear is strong medicine. It is an archetype; it goes very far back with us and has a place deep inside us all. “Bear” is related to Old High German “brun,” our “brown.” Our Ursa from Latin ursus and akin to Sanskrit rksa. And to Greek arktos, “bear,’’ which also means north. The great thing of the North.