5

A DELUGE OF DOUGHNUTS

One tablespoonful of honey will attract friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar. Bear’s buzz bothers bees.

But of this apart. At another time we may resume.

—James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922

The first time Doughnut Lady saw a bear behind her house had been back when Princess was still alive. One morning she was dragging a sled filled with grain and hay and water out to the cows when she spied a bear walking right toward her, on a logging road that ran through the property. Doughnut Lady abandoned her sled and hurried back to the safety of the house.

Though the encounter made her heart pound, Doughnut Lady also noticed how thin the bear was. Almost gaunt. No wonder it had acted so boldly—the poor thing was desperate for a meal.

Not much later, after going out of town for a pizza dinner, Doughnut Lady pulled into her driveway and the headlights illuminated a mother with three cubs sitting on a large rock. They looked hungry too.

“I just felt they needed something, you know?”

When the bears began raiding the sunflower seeds in her cylindrical bird feeders, her main reaction was to hope they would help the mother bear pack on a bit of fat for the upcoming winter. Soon she progressed to dumping a pile of sunflower seeds directly onto the ground. When the bear came, Doughnut Lady sat, delighted, on her second-floor porch, watching from among the potted flowers.

The bear would flop down onto its belly while eating the seeds. Its soft, pink tongue lapped them up delicately, seemingly one at a time.

Every day, on her way to feed her cows, Doughnut Lady began taking out a separate bucket for the bear. Sunflower seed was expensive—bears eat more than birds, after all—so she switched to grain.

Over time Doughnut Lady began to feel closer to the bear in her backyard. And that made sense, because she was closer to the bear. It had begun to anticipate her regularly scheduled delivery, and she could see it, watching and waiting on the periphery of the forest as she upended the grain bucket beneath a tree.

Over the years things spiraled in various directions. The number of bears spiraled up, the inhibitions between woman and beast spiraled down, and the cost of the food spiraled out of control.

It’s not clear how exactly word of Doughnut Lady’s largesse was being circulated throughout the bear community, but it quickly became clear that quite a few woodland bears were in need of help. She began taking out two buckets of grain per day; then four, with one feeding at sunrise and another in the late afternoon. She doesn’t want to say how much the enterprise was costing her.

“I’m embarrassed,” she said, “I really am.” She admitted only that it represented a significant portion of her monthly budget. People have told me that she had to back up her truck to a loading dock to receive the grain.

Rather than lurking on the forest’s edge, the bears began to wait closer and closer to Doughnut Lady’s makeshift feeding stations as she tottered outside, her weight steadied by two buckets full of grain. She carefully upended one beneath each of two trees, topping the steering wheel–sized piles with a dozen sugared donuts, the cheap kind from Market Basket.

Inevitably, the bears got to the point where they were waiting expectantly when she arrived, jockeying for position like cats anticipating that a dinner bowl is about to be set down.

That’s when she began to give the bears voice commands. She would shoo them off, in the way someone might warn a dog off a dropped bit of steak.

“Go away!” said Doughnut Lady, withholding the grain until they had given her enough space for her to feel comfortable.

“Go away, go away!”

The definition of “enough space” shrank until her shooing only moved the bears a few feet from the feeding station. There they sat, like rotund and feral wood-gods demanding tribute, on patches of grass wilted by the shuffling of a thousand paw steps.

Doughnut Lady’s endless stream of grain was repaid with an endless stream of entertainment. Every day she got a close-up view of multiple bears standing shoulder to shoulder, eating and huffing and snorting. How many people could say that? And along with the bears came other animals—coyotes and foxes emerged like silent forest spirits to share in the bounty.

Best of all were the cubs. When their mother sent them up a tree, their claws made a pleasant scratching sound as they scampered up the bark. One of the trees had Doughnut Lady’s satellite dish mounted on it. Sometimes the cubs edged onto the slick plastic surface until they slipped comically off, tumbling back down.

The bears, which were routinely killing livestock in various other Grafton yards, never laid a claw on Buttercup or Princess or, when he came, Monty.

“They all got along,” Doughnut Lady said. Sure, she had to begin keeping her cats indoors after some disappeared in the wood, but she didn’t associate that with the bears, not specifically.

Once a year an echo of the last Ice Age blows across the Northeast in the form of a New England winter. For most bears, the thickening layer of snow and the absence of foraging opportunities trigger the energy-conserving magic trick of hibernation. But in Grafton, no seasonal slumber was more tempting than the sugar and fat on offer during Doughnut Lady’s twice-daily bear parties.

She was tenacious, feeding the bears in good weather and bad. Sometimes the snow melted, condensed, and refroze, turning the meadow behind Doughnut Lady’s house into a precariously slick sheet of ice.

Wasn’t she worried, I asked, that her feet might shoot out from under her, leaving her on her back and looking helplessly up at the bears towering above?

In a tone that suggested I was being silly, Doughnut Lady told me this did not worry her. Not because she was so sure-footed, she said. But because it had already happened.

“I was falling all the time,” she said.

Even when Doughnut Lady fell, the bears were content to wait patiently until she regained her feet and dispensed the grain. Their bond was growing. Doughnut Lady’s husband began taking pictures of the bears, and extended family would watch during visits. Over time people from outside the family began to hear about the trusting relationship between Doughnut Lady and her bears. It sounded like something out of a fairy tale.

That’s when, at the top of the sloping meadow outside her home, neighbors, or people visiting neighbors, began gathering in ones or twos or little knots, watching the bears eat from a distance that felt (but wasn’t) safe.

Though she was not a Free Towner herself, Doughnut Lady was friends with some of them, like Bob Hull, and her bear-feeding habit was very much in line with libertarian doctrine.

Libertarians believe that a landowner like Doughnut Lady owns any natural resources on that property—oil deposits, trees, and even wandering wildlife, like bears or endangered species. In Grafton, I was told, four or five families were intentionally feeding the bears, and the libertarian community saw this as their absolute right.

In 2009, when Alaskan authorities fined a man named Charlie Vandergaw $20,000 for illegally feeding game, Grafton’s Free Towners saw it as one more example of a victimless crime being targeted by “control freak government parasites.”

“Fish and Game is not for the protection of animals, it is for prosecuting the people that love animals,” said one. “I hope they never find out that I feed the wild turkeys, gray foxes, deer, and bear here in my own yard.”

MOST AMERICANS, INCLUDING many people in Grafton, like bears.

Bears are burdened with every anthropogenic trope that the collective psyche can heap upon their broad, shaggy backs—one story depicts them as roly-poly, bumbling buffoons, while the next describes fierce and toothsome man-eaters. Perhaps the only area of broad agreement is that bears symbolize the wild places that endure beyond the boundaries of human development.

But in fact, the idea that America’s undeveloped places are a pristine wilderness—a faithful echo of the prehistoric era—is pure myth. We can preserve an individual butterfly by pinning its corpse to a corkboard, but as naturalists like Bernd Heinrich note, we can never pin down anything so complex and dynamic as an ecosystem.

The forest creeping in on Grafton is only superficially similar to the one that was hacked down by the European settlers. Before they came, the Abenaki hunted bear with bows and arrows, pulled silver trout from New Hampshire waterways, and competed with wolves to stalk the mighty half-ton Eastern elk that used to pace the deer trails. They flushed heath hens from the undergrowth, beneath skies that were literally darkened by massive flocks of passenger pigeons.

Today New Hampshire has no silver trout, wolves, Eastern elk, heath hens, or passenger pigeons, and the forest itself has seen many of its tree species wither away. Bur oaks and American chestnut, both of which were once critical food sources for bears, have all but disappeared beneath the onslaught of introduced blights, as have bog birches and black maple. Tree species under attack by invasive bugs include white pine (white pine blister rust), hemlock (hemlock woolly adelgid), ash (emerald ash borer), and balsam (balsam woolly adelgid). In all, people have documented 268 invasive species in Grafton County, a subset of the 525 that have been found in the state.

Rather than evolving in its place over eons, the components of the ecosystem that supports Grafton’s bears were thrown together haphazardly over the past few hundred years.

And if we turn the clock back further, we see that America’s indigenous humans established themselves as the deadliest invasive species by far, as recounted by Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens. Long before they invented the wheel, North America’s first human interlopers waged a two-millennium-long campaign of environmental degradation that resulted in the wholesale destruction of every big, meaty megafauna animal on the continent. The death list includes American mastodons and wooly mammoths, giant ancient bison, Aiolornis incredibilis (a fifty-pound bird of prey with an eighteen-foot wingspan), the woodland musk ox, and a large American camel. (A Camelops fossil was found at the site of a planned Arizona Walmart by a construction foreman named John Babiarz, no relation.) Early humans also eliminated North America’s two-ton armadillos, twenty-foot-tall sloths, six-hundred-pound saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves, and bear-sized rodents.

Not to mention the bear-sized bears. Genetic testing suggests that bears first arrived in North America between 3 and 3.5 million years ago, and evolved into several distinct species that occupied different ecological niches. When human hunters unleashed their spears on the continent, most bears were just as hapless as all the other large mammals. Over the past eleven thousand years, H. sapiens have hounded to extinction the largest bear ever—the short-faced bear, which stood twelve feet tall and weighed more than a ton. We have also killed off the whale-scavenging California grizzly, the seven-hundred-pound Mexican grizzly (which hung on until the 1960s), and the Florida cave bear. But while carnivorous and other specialized-diet bears have failed to survive things like the Ice Age and the arrival of humans, black bears have endured because of their ability to problem-solve, work together, and adapt to almost any food source.

But that very propensity for adaptation has made Grafton’s modern-day black bears very different from the black bears that roamed the woods in ages past. People reject the genetic modification of animals in the laboratory as artificial and unseemly, but in fact there is a much less controlled genetic experiment happening in a continent-sized laboratory: the unintended natural selection of the bears that are trying to survive alongside modern humans.

Today’s New Hampshire bruins are so different from their forebears of just five hundred years ago that they might be mistaken for another species. They are, for better and for worse, civilized. Civilization is a mighty force; it turned fierce paleolithic hunter-gatherers into a flabby technocracy in which the most-retweeted English-language Twitter post is an appeal for chicken nuggets that reads: “HELP ME PLEASE. A MAN NEEDS HIS NUGGS.”

Modern black bears, once placid and undisputed kings of the forest, have been similarly twisted by the topsy-turvy world that humans have created. Unlike their diurnal ancestors, modern bears forage all night, not for the grubs and wild berries of the woods, but for their version of “nuggs”—the kitchen scraps and cornfields that tend to be less well guarded at night. Access to nuggs also explains why all ten of the heaviest bears ever recorded in New Hampshire were spotted (and shot) in 1997 or later. (They each weighed between 493 and 552 pounds.) A 2019 study found that some wild black bears with access to sugary human foods (like doughnuts) are skipping seasonal hibernation; these bears also showed advanced aging at the cellular level.

Because bear ranges are now dictated by roads and human food sources, they are susceptible to being fragmented into isolated islands of habitat, which can have dramatic consequences for their gene pools. A handful of New Hampshire bears were recently diagnosed with gangliosidosis, a genetic disease that affects brain development; in humans its symptoms include exaggerated startle reflexes and dementia. Researchers say that the number of New England bears with the disease indicates that they may be experiencing the “founder effect,” which happens when a population of animals has been genetically isolated from other groups and is thus susceptible to a lack of genetic diversity.

And the attitude of modern bears is also different. Whereas an ancestral bear might have spent the entire day grazing contentedly, secure in the knowledge that it had no natural predators, a modern specimen is always on guard against men and trained dogs, packs of which deplete the bears’ calories and time resources by harrying them for hours at a time.

The overall effect is a bear torn between the unique dangers and caloric payloads that humans provide—they are more sleep-deprived, more anxious, more desperate, and more twitchy than the bear that nature produced.

Though modern-day humans and conservationists pay well-intended lip service to the idea that they are restoring the woodlands’ most magnificent ambassador to its rightful arboreal throne, in truth they are more like Dr. Victor Frankenstein—stitching together the elements of life they have at hand in the hope that the resultant creation will serve the needs of humanity, rather than turn against its maker.

When I heard about Doughnut Lady’s experiences, I was a little envious. As a lifelong animal lover, I could easily imagine the sheer joy of seeing bear cubs tumbling around while their mother watched, relaxing in the sunshine.

But I would eventually learn that Doughnut Lady’s story was less like a Disney movie and more like The Odd Couple. It’s the story of one old woman thoughtlessly leaving bears all over another old woman’s lawn and front porch.