Last Friday morning the kids and I were buzzing down the road to school and work. We came around the curve and I said, “Look, kids, a bear.” Every time I see a bear in the wild I think first of a dog, but am immediately corrected by its pear-shaped body, stretched out neck and round rump. By the time the kids took notice he was an indistinct black shape disappearing into the trees.

I wasn’t surprised to see him. Two falls ago, before our back deck was built, something was tipping over our garbage cans every other day or so. One morning Jess found a white garbage sack (intact, no less) way up above the cutaway. No skunk or raccoon could do that. At our neighbors’ suggestion we strapped the cans closed with bungee cords, to no avail. Puncture marks started appearing in the lids and lips of the cans. But we never saw our thief. Within a few weeks two bears had been shot along our road, and our garbage-distribution problems stopped. (I have built the back deck so the garbage cans can be locked in.)

Fast forward to this spring. I came down to the shoop one morning and the compost barrel was missing. I thought, “I wonder where she put it,” because I thought that Jess had deemed it ugly (it’s a plastic 55-gallon drum) and moved it. A few days later when our kitchen compost bins were overflowing I asked her where she had put the compost bin. She said, “I thought you moved it.” Hmm.

Becca found the barrel fifty yards uphill from the shoop, lying on its side near the draw. When I examined it I found some slight puncturing and lots of smears, as of damp nose or paws, but the container was largely unscathed. Most of its edges are rounded and offer no grip to curious paws, however strong.

The drum is a good forty inches high and twenty in diameter; half-full at present, it weighs better than seventy pounds. With its smooth rounded surfaces, nothing but a bear could have dragged it uphill from there. He must have smelled the compost and tried to open it for a meal. Gratefully, he could not, and the compost is well-turned.

When we first learned about our ursine neighbors we were a little nervous. But then, we didn’t move into the woods to hide in the house. We pray for safety every day, and make sure the dogs are out when the kids go out to play. We’re just fine. And I’d rather have bears than what they might face outside in an urban environment.