Barely There

This morning, Ed set out to dismantle the decaying logs that make up the retaining wall in our front yard in order to replace them with a more permanent kind of retaining wall (that would be concrete blocks), while I took to the dye pots to turn hundreds of yards of tencel thread into variegated embroidery thread. Tencel is made from wood, like rayon, and has a wonderful sheen that really shows up beautifully on fabric, but I’ve never found a commercial source for it so am obliged to dye it myself, a fairly labor intensive activity. By three, we were ready for a coffee break with fresh cheese bread stuffed with ham. Sitting on our front porch on a day that had all the markings of early summer, I could not but think, ‘This Is the Life!’

Then, out of the corner of my eye, about 10 feet away but behind a bush, I saw a black dog coming out from under the carport. Once it got past the bush, I realized I was looking not at a dog but at a mid-sized bear, not as tall as me but outweighing me significantly. He was ambling along at a casual pace coming out to the driveway. He had the teeny eyes, that long bear-jaw grin, and a ratty patch on his left hind quarters reminiscent of a moulting buffalo. Clearly, this was last year’s abandoned young bear, now grown to late adolescent size.

‘Ed, there’s a bear.”
‘Where’s a bear?’
‘Just to your right.’

At about that moment, both Ed and the bear became acutely aware of one another. My first thought was, ‘Oh, dear; I am eating a ham sandwich, a sandwich that the bear is going to want.’ The bear’s first thought was apparently not about the ham sandwich but more about his sudden realization that two people lurking on their front porch were watching him, and he altered his pace from the shambling walk I had first seen to a much more sprightly trot as he turned left and proceeded to head for the open fields, but directly in front of us: maybe 15 feet away. Then he moved into a full bear run as he got past us and into and past the open field, and thence to the woods. Ed went after him but saw him no more.

We don’t see them very often, but when we do, I am always afraid first thing. I know that more people are injured by deer than by black bears, but I’m never afraid of the deer that pass by me as closely as did the bear. I know that the bear are more afraid of me than I am of them. But still, reason takes a back seat to the fear of bears. If Walt Disney had made a movie in the 1940’s about bears that was as heart-wrenching as Bambi was, maybe I’d feel differently. Instead, I grew up near Yellowstone National Park and each spring heard both my father’s and the park rangers’ endless lectures about how dangerous bears are. The head has a tough job when the heart has been reached, I guess.

This bear’s mother was killed a year or so ago, and he has been raising himself. I’m glad to see that he has learned to be afraid of us, as other neighbors had been concerned that we was too easy around people, spending too much time on house decks. Too easy around people, for a bear, means capture and removal or, more likely, death. He was at least getting out of our way once he heard us, even if he just walked past our kitchen door first. Good Bear!