Temporary Relief

We are about to be on the receiving end of the bears giving up their marauding and their instead just going down for a long and well-deserved rest.  In anticipation, though, they were marauding around this past week at the neighbor’s house, just up the hill.  The neighbors had left a downstairs window slightly open, there were apples stored in the downstairs, and the bear whacked through a window in hopes of finding a convenient route to the indoors.  Unfortunately (for the bear) a small, broken window doesn’t do much for the bear’s ability to enter a downstairs.  And, fortunately for the neighbors, the bear didn’t roam around and look for a larger window to break through.  Of course, the bear’s greater deficiency is his inability to deal with doorknobs, since people probably don’t much lock their doors at night.

It is surprising that they don't enter houses more frequently.  I have had friends report them wandering around on decks, checking out grills, sort of banging on windows; and I heard this year of one house where the bear had actually come in for awhile while there were people in the house (they locked themselves in a bathroom, I was told).  When the bear did his marauding down here in our yard last fall, I was pretty impressed with the teeth marks and the claw marks he left on the compost lid while trying to figure out how to open it.  Eventually, he figured out that just sitting on the whole thing would do the trick, but to see the deeply gouged claw marks on the lid surely gives one a sense of the bear’s enthusiasm for getting the job done.

But now that we are post-U.S. Thanksgiving and December closing in, the nights are getting colder, the trees have lost all their fruit, and the pumpkin, too, is gone from the ground.  And so, time for bears to bed.