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two bear incidents, one bear
Wednesday, June 6 2018
I was installing one of the last three rafters early this afternoon when I heard a faint (though insistent) barking off to the south, perhaps a half mile away in the forest. Could that be our dogs? The pitch sounded wrong, but the way sound is distorted across such a distance (particularly given the filtering effects of landforms and vegetation along the way) made it hard to say. If they were our dogs, they were making the kind of frantic sound that usually precedes a either a visit to the vet or something just shy of that. It seemed best to investigate. So I grabbed my Nikon camera and phone and headed down the Stick Trail. For a time, it seemed the barking had stopped and I thought about returning home, but then I heard it again, and it was clear enough signal to cause me to change my trajectory, heading eastward to the Gullies Trail. Once I got to the escarpment just beyond that, the terrain dropped away and nothing blocked the sound. I could now hear the barking and it was also clear it was coming from at least one of our dogs. Unfortunately, to get down to where the dogs were, I had to descend an impossibly-steep slope. It was best to slide down on my ass or catch trees along the way to slow my descent. It wasn't long before I saw a large black bear with a surprisingly long snout in a stout chestnut oak. He saw me, got scared, and tried to descend, but then I saw Neville leaping up at him from below. Where was Ramona? The bear thought it best to climb back up the tree. By then Neville was distracted by me. His vision isn't so great, so he initially assumed I was some stranger. I thought it best to keep him distracted so the bear could come down out of the tree and escape, so I ducked behind a tree and teased Neville by peeking at him. But now I saw that Ramona was also at the bottom of the tree. I was going to have to go in and grab her. So I wordlessly marched up to the bottom of the tree, grabbed the collars of both Ramona and Neville, and immediately dragged them down the hill away from the tree with the bear in it. The bear quickly came out of the tree and then headed in an almost leisurely manner southward. Ramona almost lost her mind not to be able to give chase, but there was no way I was letting her go. With determination, I proceeded to drag both dogs a couple hundred feet downhill northeastward until there were too many downed trees to get them across. So I released Neville (since his bear obsession isn't so great) and focused on Ramona. I dragged and then carried her all the way to a target set up by the local hillbillies at the bus turnaround. In addition to a couple paper targets on the trunks of mostly-destroyed trees were several bullet-riddled metal chassis as well as the shattered remains of what appeared to be a flatscreen monitor. Closer to the bus turnaround itself, the soil was full of the plastic remains of shotgun shells. Hillbilly gun enthusiasts are apparently not the sort who clean up after themselves.
By now Ramona was out of her bear-induced psychosis and was reluctantly content to follow me home as we headed up the Chamomile and arrived homeward after summiting the escarpment near the greenhouse. On the way, I noticed that Crazy Dave had made a new path directly to his cabin (as opposed to through the yard of our downhill neighbor, his landlord). He'd even built some crude stone steps up through a steep section of the ravine. This meant that I could follow a trail most of the way home.
Not long after I'd returned to work, I heard the dogs lose their minds again. It sounded like they'd encountered a bear at the minimum. So I grabbed a leash and headed into the nearby forest south of the house. There he was, apparently the same bear I'd encountered earlier, up in a the massive red oak that grows just below the edge of the escarpment east of the Farm Road. Ramona was so careless in her obsession that she flung herself off an adjacent cliff. It's a low cliff and she wasn't hurt, but it's not the sort of thing she would normally do. I wordlessly grabbed both dogs and dragged them down the hill. Again the bear came out of the tree and headed off in the same manner he had before. Why was he now so close to the house? The only explanation was that he'd been kicked out of some other territory and was unfamiliar with this area.
[REDACTED]
Today's long-snouted bear.
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