The Business of Chasing off Bears

At six o'clock in the morning there's not a huge demand for the piano in the Village Center, so that's when and where I go to practice. Formal piano instruction accompanied my third through fifth grade years, and as a consequence I can still read sheet music (one more half-learned language from years gone by), but can't play much of anything. I'm trying to pick it up again.

I'm staying in Lodge One for now. Soon I'll move, but for now a morning walk to the Village Center takes me right past the cafeteria and the Ark and the porch of Lodge Four. And it's true that someone was banging, loudly and repeatedly, on a window from inside Lodge Four, but at 6am it's also true that it took me a moment to realize this was something out of the ordinary.

And then of course I saw what the banger was trying to scare away.

There he was, a marauding, medium-sized black bear, pawing through the cans on Lodge Four's porch, slightly bewildered by the banging but untroubled since it wasn't much more noise than he was making himself. I took it upon myself to make things a little clearer.

I had Charles Dickens' Great Expectations in my hand -- I keep my sheet music tucked between the pages because then if all the pianos in the Village happened to be busy I would still have something to do. I started thumping on it and yelled, "Hey!" and moved in on the porch.

The bear loped away to the Ark, and our unwitting Garbologist came in on him from the other side. We stopped and waited for him to calm down and get off the tree in the Ark's middle, and at last he did and I moved in again.

I picked up a rock but didn't throw it this time, opting for some much less effective English yelling: "Get out of here!" and the like, while he loped along up Chalet Hill and cut across the woods. I had to follow him, weary and annoyed, because now he was just making for the Garbology Dock. And so I tripped along until he cut across the road and then across the footbridge and I lost sight of him.

It turns out a large part of my self-appointed Village responsibilities has been chasing off black bears. They're finding too much food left carelessly out in the Village, and that's a reward that will keep them coming, and keep them teaching their cubs to come. If we can't show them ourselves that entering the Village is no fun at all, it won't be very long before one or two or six of them are shot and I'm figuring out how to fix bear meat in the kitchen.

So I learned when a black bear tried to accompany the head maverick and me to church one night that I'm perfectly okay with throwing rocks at a bear. We chased him toward the river, tripping through mud and weeds, rocks in our hands, and when we thought he'd gone he came back only a minute later. So Daniel and I chased him again, and that's where the trouble started.

We got closer to the river and farther from one another, see. I circled around to the playground because I'd have hated to think we'd chased "Home-Dude" (as our former head maverick was fond of calling this one) right into a pile of kids. Narnia was off to my left. Daniel went off to the right, until I couldn't see him anymore.

In layers, there's the river, there's a line of trees, and then there's a foot-path about four feet wide, before the thicker trees and a line of buildings that includes Koinonia, the Village Center, and Narnia. I took the foot-path and thought sinkingly that if I were a bear and I were being chased, I'd be on that same foot-path for sure. Narnia came into view, and I heard kids shouting and playing and not being frightened by a bear, which was a relief for just a second because then I caught the flash of black fur at the river's edge beside me.

Whimpering and wondering where the hell the head maverick was, I dodged ahead to get between playground and bear, then cut across to the river bank.

And Home-Dude came out of the trees right in front of me.

"Hey!" I yelled, deep and loud, and I threw the rock in my hand. It went wide, but that was okay. All he needed was to see a human and he took off down the river's edge, away from Narnia.

"Jesus," I breathed, and went to church, where the head maverick had his feet up since his trip into the woods hadn't been nearly so eventful, and shaking I gave him the what-for as I sank onto the pew and stripped off my sweatshirt.

Confidential to Karl: I'll try punching him in the face next time. The bear. Not the head maverick.