A Naif in the Forest by Darrell Berger

Wing Tips to Hiking Boots: Musings of a New, Full-Time Poconos Resident 

Was winter finally breaking? My wife said, “We should think about taking down the bird feeders this weekend.” The anxious interval between bear arousal and the final retreat of the snow was upon us. We don’t wish to abandon the birds before their natural food supply returns, but neither do we desire repeating last year’s experience of meeting a black bear eye to eye as he was exiting our deck. The pole was bent from vertical to forty-five degrees, the feeders scattered. 

At eleven-thirty that night, Violet the Corgi’s barking woke everyone in house. From my years of interpreting her barks, she was saying, “Okay, be calm. There is a bear outside. He’s not on our deck. Yet.” The “Bear on deck!” bark last spring was considerably more urgent. 

I switched on the deck lights. No bear. I walked onto the deck and shined a flashlight around the grounds. No bear. Everybody went back to sleep, until about two-thirty, when Violet gave the same bark. I did the same inspection with the same result. No bear. 

I concluded that, while Violet might have been barking at some shadows earlier, she was not likely to have been fooled twice. Nor were her alarms likely to have been stimulated by lesser varmints. I have never known her to use that particular cadence and volume without a bear being within her smelling radius. I removed the feeders from the pole. Violet was silent the rest of the night. Everybody slept until morning. Bird feeding is reluctantly suspended until the hummingbirds arrive. 

Today, I examined footprints in the slushy snow near the deck. Were these Corgi footprints close together, or something larger? I assume it has been warm enough to rouse a bear from torpor. Every print was indistinct, shadowy. I don’t think any were bear tracks. The bear might have been far enough away not to leave tracks near the deck, but close enough for Violet to pick up the scent. 

Which is scarier, the bear you see, or the bear you don’t see?