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A FELINE FEEDING

[Father] ought to remember one special night when he left me by the barn of the field we called “the Mountain field” when I actually saw the nose of the bear between the bushes, only the nose, and it looked a good deal like a pig’s, but it made me very unhappy.

—Letter from Willa Cather to Elsie Cather, 1911

If Jessica Soule had known how close the bears were, of course she wouldn’t have gone outside that afternoon, no matter how damn hot her living room got. If she had known, the whole cat-eating affair might never have happened.

Soule says that the summer of 1999 was the first time she started thinking of Grafton’s bears as unusual. For many in town, it was already shaping up to be one more bad year in the seemingly never-ending string of bad years that nibbled away at the community’s fragile bonds.

The first half of the year unfolded in the midst of a severe drought; in the forest, every plant, from the mightiest oak to the tiniest wisp of lichen, felt the lack of moisture and responded by withholding the usual bounty of fruit and foliage. That’s when the burden of want fell onto the shoulders of the woodland beasts. Most could slake their thirst from the brackish ponds and small rills left from the once-bubbling brooks, but each day the scarcity of food drove them closer to the brink of desperation.

For Grafton’s human residents, wells were depleted and haying operations stood at a standstill; the town’s few remaining farmers watched the stunted grass, hoping against all evidence that it would develop into something worth cutting.

But those hopes slowly wilted.

In July, the drought was capped by a heat wave that scorched the parched grass to a sickening brown scrub; in vegetable gardens, tomatoes unlucky enough to be in direct sunlight literally roasted on the vine. The specter of fire—from a poorly extinguished campfire or through the spontaneous combustion of a few kerosene-soaked rags in an old barn—was everywhere.

Few Graftonites have air conditioning, so people tried to beat the heat in other ways. For many, including Soule, that meant sitting outside in the evening, often with a beer in hand, to enjoy the heat’s recession, sometimes speeded by a much-appreciated summer breeze.

As the sun sagged into the horizon, she slipped out the front door of her quirky timber-framed home to go sit at her backyard picnic table, her only company the newest members of her family—three small kittens, recently dropped off at her house in the middle of the night by persons unknown, wrestling in the grass near her feet. Wild Meadow Road, the dry dirt lane that ran nearby and was named by the region’s first white settlers, kept her house continuously dusted.

The liquid silver of what the native Abenaki would have called Temaskikos, the Grass Cutter Moon, slid silently down tree trunks until it gently limned the ground. Dusk.

At the same time, plumes of microscopic particles of Soule and her kittens rose into the overheated July air. They floated across her lawn, winding through the surrounding bramble and wood like the beckoning scent of a cartoon pie. Finally, some very tiny percentage of those particles were caught in a sharp snorting intake of air that delivered them deep into a pair of bestial nostrils, where they presumably triggered the same physiological response that causes human mouths to water in the presence of aromatic lasagna or a fine ribeye.

But Soule was unaware that she’d been scented. She was serene, allowing the melody of the crickets and the muted light show of the fireflies to off-gas the worries of the day, and relax her mind.

This was the sort of freedom that made living in Grafton special. Here, one could be an individual without facing much judgment from the neighbors, if for no other reason than that the ample distance between houses took the sting out of most criticisms.

Soule’s thoughts were interrupted when something rushed toward her back, something so heavy she could feel the vibration of the footsteps in the dry ground beneath her.

Before she could react, the bear was within feet of her. It didn’t go for Soule—perhaps, when it got close enough, it lost its nerve. (The sturdy forty-five-year-old had once used a shovel to beat off an attack by a large, vicious weasel.) In 1999, the bears of Grafton were not bold enough to attack a woman of Soule’s stature.

Instead, the bear blew right past her and continued on into the forest, the rustling of the dead leaves beneath its feet a counterpoint to the sudden frantic mewlings of two kittens—Jessica’s kittens—now in its mouth.

Beyond the tree line, the bear reemerged, a bulky silhouette against the moon. It stopped at a small creek running through the rear of Soule’s property. Now there were other shadows—bear cubs, crowding alongside their mother.

Soule said she could only watch, horrified, as the bears finished their prize. She’ll never forget the sounds.

Soule scrabbled in the tall grass near the tree line, searching for the third kitten and trying to watch in all directions for the return of the bears, which had disappeared from sight.

“Amber,” she stage-whispered. Her calls slowly grew louder, more plaintive, but produced no kitten. Not until morning did she find the bedraggled Amber, huddling beneath the carpet of leaves.

THE ATTACK ON Soule’s kittens—an extremely rare example of a bear eating a domestic cat—would have been strange in any circumstances. But Soule told me it was only the beginning.

The sow that ate Soule’s kittens apparently developed a taste for cats. It taught its two cubs to eat cats, and soon an extended family of bears was predating upon the cats in Soule’s neighborhood.

That this was not more widely remarked upon is perhaps not as strange as it seems.

Though the world thinks of Grafton as a single tiny town in the woods, it is actually broken up into even smaller, discrete historical villages that reflect an earlier era. Graftonites think of themselves as living in East Grafton, Grafton Center, Grafton Village, Slab City (audaciously termed a “city” by its residents, who number, literally, in the dozens), or West Grafton. Each little village is a neighborhood unto itself, and the encroaching forest has increasingly isolated the villages from each other.

Soule’s village, centered on Wild Meadow Road, is called Bungtown, named for one or more barrel bungs that once popped out during a carriage transport and spilled a remarkable amount of alcohol onto the roadway.

Outside of Bungtown, not many people made the connection between the shrinking number of housecats and bears. But Bungtowners found the bears’ taste for cats to be particularly unsettling.

Mightn’t eating cats, they wondered, be a kind of gateway drug to eating humans?

People took precautions.

While walking their dogs, they began avoiding the path that ran along the town’s rusty old rail lines and other known bear hotspots. Before doing yard work, they might strap on a firearm, just in case. And they began keeping a closer eye on small children, mindful perhaps of April 27, 1905, the day that two-year-old Elwin Braley ran merrily around the corner of his family’s Bungtown farmhouse, and briefly out of the sight of his mother. Young Elwin cried out—his mother would later say that it was difficult to tell whether it was with joy or terror—and was never seen again. The mother blamed a panther, or possibly a bear. Many in the community blamed the mother, though no criminal charges were ever filed.

At any rate, the cat-eating bears of 1999 were just a blip in Grafton’s ongoing bad year. June’s drought and July’s heat wave were quickly forgotten in September, when deadly Hurricane Floyd ripped through the region, disrupting power lines, peeling shingles from roofs, and uprooting trees. Over the course of a few days, the town went from parched to inundated. Soon, five-hundred-year-high floodwaters had gouged washouts up to eight feet deep into Grafton’s dirt roads and completely isolated some of its residents from the larger world. Grafton’s road crew, tiny and ill-resourced, was quickly overwhelmed by the scope of the work that faced them after the floodwaters receded. In a typical example of Grafton’s municipal dialogue, someone responded by angrily smashing the windows of the town dump truck.

It was Soule’s story of cat-eating bears that first drew my attention to Grafton. I was working as a reporter for the Valley News, a regional daily newspaper, and I was immediately captivated by the idea that Grafton’s bear population might be exhibiting behavior that lay somewhere on the spectrum of rare to unheard of.

At first, I was skeptical that many cats in Grafton were eaten by bears, or even that one cat in Grafton was eaten by a bear. There was no video evidence. And when cats are swallowed up by the New Hampshire woods, blame is typically assigned to other animals, like coyotes. As one pet recovery expert told me, “The only way you know is if you find those remains.”

I began paying attention to notices about Grafton’s lost cats, both online and on posters tacked to trees around town.

“Mostly white cat with dark tabby patches, or perhaps some black spots. Her name is Abby… We miss her much,” read one, while others pleaded for information about Buddha (large, orange, long hair), Bryce (brown/black tiger with white markings), and Brother (“This is the first time he has gone missing and we are devastated”).

Something, it seemed, was emerging from the underbrush to snatch up felines when backs were turned. If bears were indeed the culprits, Grafton was in the midst of an invasion.

Or, as I would soon learn, two invasions.