. . .I watched a bear and her cubs run down a mountain
in the twilight.
So buoyant, they seemed to be tumbling
to the meadow,
to the yarrow root they dug, rocking
to wrest it from the hard ground, fattening for winter.
They were breathing what looked like gladness. . .—Ellen Bass, “Fracture”
Hello Lovelies—
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Summer opens on the mountain. I return home to aspen leaves and tulips and a newly greened yard, to dandelions and clover spreading in the gardens. The Clark’s Nutcrackers feed their young on the railing and the hummingbirds swarm the feeders.
Each morning I wake early in the still dusky light to a robin calling in the woods.
On cue, the mice have moved in, though perhaps they have been with us all along, and it is only the shorter nights that make them bold. Each evening, I watch one doe-eared beauty come up over the lip of the stairs and run toward the kitchen.
Dottie, in her slow aching dotage, catches only the occasional specimen and leaves it under the bed, now too old to eat the head. I allow this trauma as a natural end for both mouse and cat, but I cannot bring myself to lay killing traps. So Greg orders live traps that come with instructions to take the mice at least a mile away and “leave food” because they might be “disoriented.”
This morning he kindly relocated two. And although it pains me that we might have separated the mice from their families, I draw the line when I find scat on the baking pans in the cupboard. Live-trapping seems the humane answer here to our co-habitation problem.
But now a larger problem has presented itself.
One of the twin yearlings I spotted just a few weeks ago has shown up solo without either mother or sibling. Perhaps the sow has a new cub and has kicked the twins out, I think, trying not to imagine a worse disaster for the bear family.
I first saw yearling bear nosing sunflower seed, blown from our deck over the long winter, in the yard a few days ago. Greg and I urged her to move on and make plans to hasten our spring clean up to get the seed bagged and out of the way of temptation.
Days later, the bear is back. A spilled hummingbird feeder lies on the deck when I return from town one afternoon while Greg is also away. The catch on the lid has been sheered from the force of bear yanking the feeder from its hook.
The next morning the bear returns. This time, politely sipping from another hummingbird feeder on the deck as she sits on the railing. She is maybe 100 pounds, with an unruly and beautiful tawny coat. I am delighted to see her up close but worry that she is comfortable in a human space.
I chase her off by banging a metal can on the wooden deck and then shoo her out into the woods, where she eyes me at a distance, reluctant to leave.
Over the next two hours we engage in a kind of petulant pas de deux. Me flying out of the house with a frying pan and lid, banging and yelling, she backing to a distance before cantering off or climbing a tree. It is exactly like trying shift the inertia of a teenager into action when there is something they do not want to do.
The bear is persistent and stubborn in a way that has me concerned.
I remove the sugar feeders. But again, the bear comes—scrabbling, up over the side of the deck, scaling one of the footers, this time trying for the seed feeder that hangs over the yard.
So in comes that feeders as well.
None of this would not be happening, I think, if River were still alive. I’ve held him by his harness as he lunged, Cujo-like, barking and snarling—enough of a warning shot to make whichever resident ursine it was move along.
This morning, Greg and I hang only the feeders next to the house, but this, too, is a gamble. I keep an eye on them all morning as I write, and when Greg and I go out for a walk, we bring them.
Today, I will go to town today to buy an airhorn.
Greg and I love feeding the birds, love watching fledglings flutter on the rail, but we also love living in a place where bears roam. We want to do the least harm.
And we want the bears to live; we do not want the bear to become a nuisance to the neighborhood. That end is always a deadly one for the bear.
This means a choice: For now we will curtail feeding the birds and I will sing to her at night and imagine her “buoyant. . .[and] tumbling . . . fattening for winter, and breathing what look[s] like gladness” on the mountain we share, in this place we both call home.
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Big love,
Karen
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