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.

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.