Last night, while drifting
off to sleep, I heard a “sliding” noise… like a window being opened. I lay
perfectly still trying to hear other noises from a possible intruder over the sound of my pounding heart. Just when I was ready to dismiss it as my imagination, we hear a BANG!
Both of us spring up from bed and ran to a window.
Then I see him.
Bob. The biggest black bear
you’ve ever seen, has just smashed right through our fence, and is sauntering
down our driveway. How arrogant can he be? He’s as big as a car, and is easily 8 feet tall if he stood on his
back legs. According to Wikipedia (the source of all things true), “despite
their heavy build and awkward gait, [bears] can run quickly and are adept
climbers”, so CLIMB OVER THE FENCE YOU LAZY BEAST!!
In the midst of our adrenaline
rush, I managed to get a few photos of Bob.
Bob has quite the reputation
in our neighbourhood. When the moms at school say, “Bob came to visit last
night”, we all know we’re talking about a bear and not gossiping about a
midnight affair. You see, MOST of us have had encounters with him.
He’s broken our fence three
times now. He’s broken my parents’ fence I don’t know HOW many times. He’s left
claw marks in their trees. Teeth-marks in their garbage bin. He’s knocked over
COUNTLESS garbage, recycling and green waste containers around the
neighbourhood. (Maybe if people got the mandatory locks for their garbage bins
there wouldn’t be a problem, but hey, that’s just my uneducated opinion). Our
garbage is locked and in the garage, so he went after our recycling. Maybe the
toy fish on the Duplo box in the bin made him salivate?
Bob freaked the living snot
out of me last year (although technically, it was Colin’s fault). We were
watching TV and heard a noise. We went to the door to see if anything was
amiss. Before I could see out the door, Colin SLAMMED it, shouted “GET UPSTAIRS!!!!!!!”,
and proceeded to run up himself instead of helping his terrified wife (who
thought there was a crazed gunman at the door) clamber clumsily up the stairs,
receiving several bruises on her legs in the process.
It wasn’t a gunman, of
course. It was Bob. Riiiight outside the front door. We went out on the deck to
see Bob sauntering away from our broken fence. It was the first time we
actually saw Bob. He was walking the
same route he walked last night, and went across the street to the same house
he went to after ours last night.
Well, Bob. 2 years in a row you didn’t get
SQUAT from us (except maybe some slivers), so get the hint and STOP COMING!
Then there was that time
this exact week in September last year when a different, MUCH smaller bear got
stuck in our yard. I got home from work to a house decorated with police tape. That’s
a sign that your evening is about to get interesting…
The police showed up after a
few minutes to tell me that there’s a bear trapped in my yard. He’d eaten all
the plums off the neighbours tree, which makes them get woozy. So he came into
our yard and passed out like a drunken college boy after leaving 13 extra-large
piles of crap all over the yard. A lot of fruit will do that to ya.
The conservation officer and
police have their shotguns and tranquilizer guns out. We were new to the
neighbourhood at the time and the neighbours were really nervous when the
police tape went up. “What kind of gangster young family moved in here?” they
thought. So I invited the curious ones over to watch the show from my porch. Really
was a good icebreaker.
The police and conservation
officer decided that it was better to tranquilize the bear after they gave it a chance to run away on its own:
-
in a family
neighbourhood
-
at 4:30 in the
afternoon when the kids are home
-
on a hot sunny
day
Makes PERFECT sense, right? So,
they scared it, got it all mad and aggressive, and chased it up a tree. NOW
it’s time to shoot the sleepy juice. So that it will fall 30 feet when the meds
kick in. SMRAT.
Even though I was glad the
bear was being transported back to the mountain, hearing that “THUD” when it
fell wasn’t a particularly happy
sound.
I am SO TIRED of having
these visitations. I have 2 young kids. We can’t even let them play outside by
themselves. I’m more scared sleeping in our trailer when it’s in our YARD than
when it’s in a CAMPSITE for crying out loud.
I know there are readers out
there saying, “It’s not their fault, you are living in their territory”. Yah, yah,
I get it. Other people (ie. not us) are destroying forests and building houses on
their ex-territory. But for Pete’s sake, our house has been there for 35 years. Time to buzz off and find a
new home in the wilderness.
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