
Image: A large brown bear sits, human-like, at a picnic table appearing to feast on the food left on the table. People stand close by watching the bear.
There was a bear in our kitchen the other day. It came up the deck stairs and pulled the screen off of the open window. It stood on the deck chairs and then climbed through the window, stepping into a sink full of dishes (miraculously none broke) and then stepping down into the kitchen.
C, age 12, was the only person upstairs at the time and she heard the intruder, stood up, saw the bear clambering through the window and she screamed. I heard her scream from downstairs at my desk and as soon as I heard the piercing tone of her scream I knew it was a bear.
Now - I figured the bear was outside on the deck and C had just been surprised to see a bulky wild animal moving around through the deck doors. I jumped up, no small feat to do as I had hip surgery a few months ago (a tale for another blog post?) And ran to the stairs, meeting C on the landing.
“A bear, a bear!” she rushed.
“Okay, okay,” I responded. “Out on the deck?”
“In the house! In the kitchen!”
It was a lot to process. This child was telling me that in broad daylight a bear had just entered our home and was, I assumed, currently fixing itself a snack?
I pounded on Eric’s office door yelling through it that there was a bear in the house. I could hear him tell someone on a Zoom call that he had to go and he opened the door. By that point, L, age 9, had opened her bedroom door and we all convened in the downstairs hallway to figure out a plan.
First things first - get the kids out of the house. We sent them out through a lower deck door to our neighbor’s house. Then Eric and I turned our attention to somehow getting a bear out of the house when our only can of bear spray was, you guessed it, upstairs on the kitchen counter.
Not that we wanted to spray bear spray in our house - what a mess that would be - but it was our only defense to a bear ranging around the upstairs and turning our kitchen into an all you can eat buffet.
We started advancing up the stairs yelling ‘bad bear’ at the top of our lungs. On the landing I decided I would try to go outside and see if it had exited or was in the process of exiting so back downstairs and out through the lower deck door I went.
Eric meanwhile advanced all the way upstairs with the idea of opening the front door wide enough to give the bear a path to escape from.
We rendezvoused outside, me out on the street looking up at the door and Eric on the deck looking down at me. In the time it took Eric to get all the way upstairs the bear had gone back out the kitchen window and down the deck stairs to the yard.
What we didn’t know was that as the girls were hustling to the neighbor’s house they looked up the deck stairs and saw the bear coming down carrying something in its mouth. The bear then followed their path perpendicularly for awhile until it veered off into the canyon below our house and they got safely to our neighbor’s where they told him all about the interloper.
At this point, you may be asking yourself, ‘what about your dog? Why not send the dog upstairs to get the bear?’ If you’re thinking that, I ask you to really think about the reality of sending a dog up against a big bear inside your home. Would you really want your dog to get swiped, attacked, or bit by a bear? Call me a softy, but I didn’t want Dash, our pandemic puppy, to get hurt, so we kept him in Eric’s office while we tried to sort out how to get the bear out of the house without anyone (or any pet) getting hurt.
Whew. And that isn’t the end of the tale. We called the girls back home and they came bursting in talking about seeing the bear carrying something away and how it followed their path as they ran barefoot down the street to our neighbor’s house.
In the kitchen, unbelievably, all looked okay. The bear could have broken dishes, opened the fridge, or eaten the cake on the counter or the fresh pot of beans on the stove but other than a destroyed window screen nothing seemed awry.
“It took one of our containers!” L insisted. And sure enough, when we looked, the bear had opened a cabinet (leaving no scratches) and taken out a plastic Lock & Lock container filled with Trader Joe’s sesame sticks.
She was a large, cinnamon-colored black bear with a white triangle on her chest. She had popped open the lid and was scooping out sesame sticks and handing them to her tiny, cinnamon-colored cub.
Wondering whether or not the bear had been able to open the container I looked out the kitchen window to the canyon behind our house and there was the culprit. She was a large, cinnamon-colored black bear with a white triangle on her chest. She had popped open the lid and was scooping out sesame sticks and handing them to her tiny, cinnamon-colored cub. It was a rather adorable scene however one that could not stand. The last thing we wanted was a mama bear thinking our house was a 7-11.
So Eric headed out to the canyon with Dash and a can of bear spray. Using Dash to our advantage outside versus in an enclosed space, made more sense. Bears hate dogs and their barking. Dash is a half mutt, half Australian Cattle Dog we got from a rescue in Los Angeles. Like a good herding dog he charged the bear and then circled back to Eric, barking and causing the bear to back up from the snacks. The cub bolted up the canyon at the first sign of Eric and Dash. The mama bear didn’t want to let the snacks go, but after more charges from Dash and a few sprays of bear spray in her direction, she went up the other side of the canyon and Eric darted down to where they’d been feasting and grabbed the cracked container.
If you’re thinking ‘why did you spray the bear with bear spray? Why not yell at it, bang things loudly? Etc’ I’m here to remind you that bears that eat human food and break into people’s homes often end up dead. Bears need to find encounters with humans uncomfortable so they don’t think that breaking into people’s homes is a way to get food - bears that do that often end up killed by officials because they become a danger to humans (and hence a danger to themselves.)
Image: a window screen with a large tear caused by bear claws
Living with bears is just another part of living in Mammoth Lakes. We’ve already had a bear destroy one of our cars (a story I’ll re-share soon), and another tried to claw its way through the siding of our house. There have been bears on our decks many times looking for a way inside. You could say that having a bear in our house was like checking off the last box on a living-in-Mammoth Lakes bingo card. Most of our neighbors have already had bears in their homes, we knew it would happen eventually to us too.
Bears up here rip up packages left outside, tear through screens to try to get in open windows, and will absolutely open doors if the handles are ones they can maneuver. It’s a strange reality to live in but the bears were here before us and I wouldn’t trade living in Mammoth for anything so here we, and the bears, remain.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/25/what-to-do-bear-sighting-attack/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fb_news_token=BankiILnpCE%2FubKavjuP6Q%3D%3D.NSA8cEFYZ%2F3XUzxblC6FCb6zwG99viAz4abtQ8MygCquH714J4Q6WC1h0BPCOE9CdUTRINWTHpjRsksxs33VLlzjFncPc9u0Q08BlGq1M%2Bv7TJriB%2BbVqn88mzeOo9wt5H98vzX9VQixPPfC933AGh%2FgjkGoJjYS49av%2FmG1Ginb0Ravsf%2BOsi9hTujMWPrAYDXeCozlD7o0jVGGsWQUWAC7W55ACNwniesNSStt%2BhQakbpWlpC6li8NitdY48gT%2FR%2FAWiKITuQN51YDObq3HQo5Q96zhqalodekS4ZE8nweY0e9KwBSHZxgAHxG4h8N0khvs0dVvXeYnk%2B46rnypjQO5eHBisBLinoZ1B3eb6k%3D&fbclid=IwAR2YAzUPtaCzqOu4COX43xFo35jSmWBx72Y5KXRn2LhyuH9qtXiQT3xreY8
Wow!! That is wild. So happy the bear left without harm to itself or any of you.