My Bear

by Julia Mallach

At 1:00AM forest sounds were neither peaceful nor reassuring. The scream of a
mating porcupine or the wail of a loon chick trapped in the beak of an owl was very
scary and the wind roaring through the trees sounded like heavy traffic. When I heard a
loud grunt coming out of the darkness, it got downright terrifying. So, alone in our lakeside Maine cottage, I took another slug of wine and planned my escape.

Unfortunately, the car was parked one hundred yards up the hill and I wasn’t about to go out into that darkness so the idea of a motel vanished and I took another drink of wine. I knew there were black bears out there, had even seen their scat but now there was only a plate glass sliding door between me and them. Never mind that they run when they see a human. Never mind that most are the size of a dog. I didn’t want to see it, hear it or have to get rid of it with the shotgun I held in my shaky hands. The breech was open with a shell in the chamber but my hands weren’t strong enough to close the gun and then cock it. So my options were pretty limited. I could drink myself into a stupor. I could bang pots and pans to chase the bear away and I could curse my husband for leaving me alone in the woods. What I could not do was call the Sheriff. We had no phone and cell phones were fifteen years in the future. We also had no electricity. That night I drank far too much and just about passed out.

The next morning I swallowed aspirins and coffee and carefully looked under the house for the bear. No scat, no sign of him and I slowly regained my equilibrium and got ready to drive to the Bangor Airport to pick up Dennis who had flown to New York on business. The glistening day made the night before less frightening and as I drove at five miles an hour over our potholed dirt road I was distracted by the brilliant sun shining through the leaves of the encroaching trees.

The woods never let go in our corner of Maine and they are a major player in the drama of living ‘off the grid’. They hover, engulf and sneak closer and closer to the cottage. They don’t stand like sentinels; they sway like dancers, always changing, always shifting. Their roots are shallow in the rocky soil so they usually don’t last more than sixty years. The forest continually renews itself and cutting a tree down is housekeeping not decimation and I pull up two-inch seedlings on my morning walk. Each tree has a personality if you know how to read it. Hemlocks drop tiny pinecones and a sticky sap that is so fine it almost like a spray. They are almost dainty with their drooping lacy branches. White pines have long stiff needles like spikes and thick stubborn bark. They grow very tall lording it over their smaller cousins. Spruces reach for the sky with a hopeful finger at the top and bluish needles at the bottom. They grow so fast that the tree I complained about the summer before as about to ruin the view does obscure that view entirely the following June. Birches are weak and willful, falling with a huge crash and breaking into pieces. The oaks and maples are the aristocrats up here and prized as firewood for not only do they burn completely but last twice as long.

It is rare to find a really gigantic specimen, but there is an eighty-foot Weymouth white pine on the edge of our driveway. Somehow, it got overlooked even though it would have made a great mast for a sailing ship a hundred and fifty years ago. This sense of ‘impending woods’ permeates and rather than celebrate each sapling, we are continually dragging fallen branches out of the way, pruning for the view, storing log rounds in neat stacks to dry and splitting wood for the woodstove. And that night in the dark listening to a bear grunt his way under my house and hearing the wind rush through these trees, I was convinced that building this little ‘camp’ had been the mistake I always knew it would be. Once again, I had let Dennis talk me into something I didn’t want to do.

I never thought about trees before my husband and I built our camp in 1978. The lot was partially cleared with a ‘road in—a big plus that we didn’t fully appreciate until we heard how much it would have cost if we had bought unimproved property. Our two hundred feet of waterfront was so overgrown that we were in shade most of the time—a blessing in August, a curse in June. We had wandered up the coast looking for an affordable lakefront lot and had found it with the added feature that it was only twenty-five miles to the ocean. We planned to use the land as collateral for the house and after being refused by two banks—“We don’t do seasonal property.” We found a bank that agreed with us that our New York City jobs and excellent credit rating was guarantee enough.

Over the years I grew to love my flower garden, hiking in Acadia National Park, garden tours and a growing circle of friends, some local some ‘from away’. But that was in the future. That first summer was a scary challenge and the night of the grunting bear was more than I could handle. However, the days were very different.

During the early morning calm I could kayak to within two feet of a loon. She’d turn her red eye my way, ruffle her feathers and then ignore me. If I were lucky I’d see the chick poke its bill out from under the mother’s wing. He was so small he rode on her back till he learned to fend for himself. That same loon at night crying wildly across the lake made my hair stand on end. The eagle that glided regally overhead every morning was menacing as he swooped toward a hysterical loon at dusk. I could hear the bats cheeping all day as they pushed their ugly faces out of our eaves. I could ignore this but at dusk they’d swarm out of the attic as they went after the millions of mosquitoes. If I tossed a pebble into the air, the bats would swoop down thinking it was a tasty morsel. One flew down our chimney and I opened the wood stove and one door to the deck. After a few minutes of flying circles around the cottage, he found the open door. I locked myself in the bathroom till it was over. The foxes really piqued my interest. During the day I’d see one loping along the camp road. If I were walking, he’d stop and try to stare me down. I’d shake my can of rocks and he’d look at me disdainfully and then slowly disappear into the woods. At night I could hear the foxes yipping—not quite dog, not quite coyote. A neighbor had seen them dancing on their hind legs in a grassy clearing. They sounded like a chorus and it was hard to dismiss their musical calls—very unsettling. Most unsettling of all were the fast, violent nighttime thunderstorms. During the day it was almost fun watching the lightning bolts stab the lake as they moved from west to east. I could sense the change in air pressure and smell the electrical charge surrounding me. I could feel the cooler, drier air coming from the west. I could count the seconds between thunder and lightning and gauge the distance from the camp. But at night when the whole place shook and every blast of thunder and every bolt of lightning seemed to be overhead, it filled me with dread.

The morning that I headed for the Bangor Airport that first time I realized how much Maine was changing me. I had learned to shoot a gun, chop wood, and recognize the wildflowers and to listen to the woods all around me. The natural world had never been a part of my life before and it slowly revealed its timetable and secrets: those tiny delicious strawberries covered by their leaves that appeared in June followed by the wild raspberries in July were on their own schedule and the day I found the first blackberry I knew summer was starting to shut down. The pale pink lady slippers bloomed in July, each one a jewel of the woods. The purple asters appeared the end of August and coincided with the finish of the blueberry harvest. The first red swamp maple leaves appeared on the road in the middle of August presaging fall by at least three weeks. The ruby-throated hummingbirds arrived from Nicaragua the second week in June and I was sure they were the same ones from the year before since they immediately went looking for the feeders in exactly the same places. These tiny creatures got so aggressive they would dive bomb me if I neglected to refresh their sugar water. They would hover over me and chatter while their wings beat so fast they were a blur. Our five birds would argue with each other for custody of the feeders, expending so much energy during their duels that I’d occasionally see one heaving for breath as he paused for a breather on a branch. By the time their chicks arrived in mid July and began to lobby loudly for their share, the hummingbird parents were in constant motion looking for nectar for their children and fighting off the attacks of the other birds. Everything looked so peaceful until one peered below the surface. All these progressions were new to me as I studied and learned to watch these silent changes. This was a slow process where every summer I noticed things I had not known before. But that day, as I maneuvered over the goat track that led to the highway I was simply eager to share my bear story.

“What’s wrong?” Dennis questioned as we headed for the parking lot. He had taken one look at my face and knew something was up.

“There’s a bear roaming around under the house. I was terrified and I couldn’t get the gun closed and I’m scared—that what’s wrong. I’m not staying there alone again.”
“You’re exaggerating.” he said after I demonstrated the bear grunt.

Later, at lunch he was still chuckling about my bear and as I was putting away the food, suddenly there it was—the moaning grunt.

“Get in here. Get in here. The bear is under the house.”

He dashed into the house heard the grunt and dove for the shotgun. He closed the breech, cocked it and got ready to scare it away. He checked all the rooms, went out on the deck and cautiously peered over the railing to inspect underneath. He came back inside, listened and then he put down the gun and began to laugh.

“What’s so funny? Shoot! It’s under the house.”

“It’s not under the house. Nothing is under the house. Listen to the grunt again. It filled the cottage and as he knelt down in the kitchen he said “It’s the gas refrigerator compressor—that’s your bear!”

And it was. The grunt was rhythmic and did sound like a bear. But I never lived down my bear story and as time went by, I could even laugh about it.