By this time, Rilda must have sensed my absence from our conjugal bed and ascended the stairway to find her husband standing in his birthday suit spotlighted by the waning half-moon. She at least had the decency to have slipped on a robe. I turned and placed my right index finger over my dry lips and pointed with my left one toward the bear stomping toward the side rail.
If my eyes had widened to the size of dinner plates, hers must have enlarged to the size of manhole covers. She immediately snatched up the telephone and called the Lincoln Police Department. The dispatcher said mechanically, “I am sorry, ma'am, but all our cruisers are out on assignments.” Rilda could not understand why all the cruisers would be out at 3:30 am in a town of 800 inhabitants.
She grabbed a telephone directory, located the New Hampshire Fish and Game insertion, punched the numbers, and handed the phone to me. When it was answered by a young male voice, I explained what we had just experienced. The response was, “Well, sir. You know you live in bear country.”
So we watched the satiated animal amble to the corner of the railing, perch on its top, and lick his lips with a tongue the size of a signal flag. By this time Rilda was smiling broadly as evidence that she was thoroughly amused, not only by the entire scene, but even more so by the support offered us by our public officials. After another several minutes passed, our uninvited guest stood on the railing with an amazing sense of balance and grace before he leaned over, grasped the trunk of a large Beech tree, and with claws dug into the bark, descended to ground level. I thought that Beech tree was the bear's elevator by which it had ascended to the deck.
We followed his trek around the rear of our house. When it disappeared from sight, we scurried down to the guest bedroom and looked out the window. Sure enough, our new found friend strode across the front of the house and over to the window. Then he turned and stood on his hind legs with his front paws on the window. He stared at us for a moment while we held our breath, and then dropped down on all fours, turned, climbed the bank up to Big Rock Road, and padded to its intersection with Flying Fox Run. We watched it waddle up the mountainside in search of dessert.
The only evidence left behind by our middle-of-the-night visitor was its paw prints on the sliding glass door. Rilda stubbornly refused to wash the door until our grandchildren visited and she could proudly point to the prints while relating the story to them who stared goggle-eyed at me, fully dressed. The older grandchildren were not nearly as infatuated with the story as were the younger ones, but they laughingly conjured up a vision of their Grampie standing buck naked while carrying on a staring contest with a huge North American Black Bear.
