When I was retired from the United States Army after a military career that spanned over forty years, my wife, Rilda, and I settled down in a town house in Lincoln, New Hampshire, a town of 800 permanent residents in the heart of the White Mountains.
Our home was in a mountainside development known as the Village of Loon Mountain. Despite the mountain on which the land was developed was named Whaleback Mountain, this community of homes was still appropriately named. This was because from the windows of the houses one could view skiers clad in colorful software gliding gracefully down the slopes of the Loon Mountain Ski Resort south of the East Branch of the Pemigewasset River that ran along New Hampshire Route 112 known as the Kancamagus Highway.
Our modest town house contained two bedrooms and a loft; a living room/dining area with an outside deck separated from the dining area by large sliding glass doors. Hanging above the deck's railing was a large bird feeder that attracted numerous birds indigenous to the Northeast and allowed Rilda and me to be amused by their antics while we enjoyed our meals.
The New Hampshire State bird is the Purple Finch, one of a large family of finches that included the Yellow Finch, the Pine Siskin, and the Evening Grosbeak. Larger birds such as the Blue Jay, Crow and Grackle tended to shoo the smaller birds away from the feeder, but then the smaller ones would also shoo away their counterparts as well. It was a colossal, colorful, crowd of combative avian species that was always a joy to observe.
The master bedroom in this town house was located on the lower level of the building while the living room/dining area and kitchen were on the upper level beneath the loft. A middle level, with a guest bedroom and window that faced the front of the house, was approached by the only entryway into our home, down several wooden steps from Big Rock Road. Across that street from our town house was a big rock, a really big rock, left over from the passage of a glacier some 25,000 years ago. Our younger grandchildren took great pleasure in demonstrating their ability to climb that big rock, easily fifteen to twenty feet in height.
It was somewhere in the vicinity of 0300 hours, 3:00 am to non-military Americans, when I was awakened from a delightful deep sleep by an unfamiliar clatter emanating from the upper level. Since no respectful military retiree would allow such an intrusion to go without investigation, and although I slept in the all-together, I still struggled from the comfort of our king size bed. Without bothering to don even a pair of shorts, I padded up the stairs to the upper level to investigate the source of the uninvited racket.
As I crested the top of the stairway, I looked across the dining table to the sliding glass door. I blinked several times to ensure that what I was viewing in the dim light of a half-moon was not a dream. The noise was being produced by a rather large North American Black Bear lying on his back and holding our beloved bird feeder up in all four paws and ecstatically pouring birdseed into a huge mouth, displaying humongous shiny white teeth, to travel on down his gullet. I say “his” gullet, because I did not think a female bear could outdo a male bear in size and this bulky black beast.must have weighed in at least 600 pounds.
I tip-toed over to the glass door and watched in awe as the bear completed his early morning repast and then casually tossed the broken bird feeder over the railing to the ground below. Then he rolled over onto all fours, and when he glanced through the glass door and spotted me, he rose up on his rear legs and propped himself up by placing his front paws with huge claws on the top of the sliding glass door. By this time my eyes had enlarged to the size of dinner plates and cold perspiration had erupted on my forehead. I had retained my six feet in height, down two inches from my youth due to my spine's vertebral compression, and this animal stood at least a foot taller than the top of my nearly bald pate.
The bear and I locked eyes and began a staring contest. After several nervous minutes, either the bear was not amused by my bare body, or he realized there was no future in wasting the moonlit night trying to stare me down when there were so many other bird feeders in the neighborhood to be plundered. He dropped down to the floor of the deck leaving his huge paw prints on the glass. When he turned toward the side of the deck, my heart beat diminished to only twice its normal rate.
