“how much their feet look like our hands”

Over the years we’ve become accustomed to bears. They have their season, which is usually late summer, early fall, when they lurk around, waiting for the crabapples to ripen. The bear in the photograph was one that was around for a couple of years, easily identified by the white patch on its chest. It would climb the tree, feast on crabapples, then loll around in the sunlight on the lane below. It wasn’t a troublemaker. Not like some of the bears who’ve come up onto the upper deck to pull tomato plants out of their pots or else push over the compost boxes. This time of year we leave the boxes open to discourage them from pulling the lids off. But the other day I closed the lid on one of them after emptying the bucket from the house into it. I remember smiling as I looked at the edge of the plywood lid, gnawed and clawed from past vandals. Because some of the bears have been vandals. In spring, one of them waited for us to leave for our morning swim, and then came up the stairs to the deck by the front door in order to pull down the hummingbird feeder. Maybe the feeder had half a cup of sugar water left in it. The bear broke it apart on the patio and licked up the sugar water. It was a reminder that they’d come out from their winter sleep to eat. Mostly in spring we notice they eat fresh grass–their scats are filled with grass!–or they turn over big rocks for insects or pull apart decaying stumps to get at the grubs inside.

Remember I said that I’d closed the lid of one of the compost boxes? It was like a signal! I hadn’t seen any sign of bears around for awhile and there are fish in the local creeks which is usually the food of choice this time of year. But this morning, as we were getting ready to drive to the pool for our swim, John opened the front door and then called to me, Theresa, are you out there? He thought I must be because the car door on the driver’s side was wide open. No, I was getting the towels together. That’s weird, he said. Maybe I left it open yesterday?

When we went out, we saw that yes, the car door was open, and the handle was covered with mud and leaves. What…? Then we realized that a bear had opened the door, looked in, and not seeing or smelling any food (because we don’t leave food in the car, not since years ago when we left a bag of dog food in the trunk overnight after grocery shopping and came out to find teeth marks in the bumper and mud over the trunk lid), it departed, but not before leaving a muddy print of its left paw on the window, where it must have rested it while it opened the door with its right paw. Oh, and it opened the lid on the compost, just in case anything good had been deposited since it visited last. Pineapple stalks, coffee filters, leek trimmings, a few sad beans.

When I’ve seen bear tracks in the sand by the lake on early summer mornings, I always marvel at how much their feet look like our hands. And now they can use them like hands. Interesting.