Nothing moved amid the solemn vistas of stupendous trunks, fading away into the darkness which held us in. Once some bandy-legged, lurching creature, an ant-eater or a bear, scuttled clumsily amid the shadows. It was the only sign of earth life which I saw in this great Amazonian forest.
—Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World, 1912
When the Unification Church left Grafton, Jessica Soule stayed behind; she had grown to love driving through Bungtown in her truck, bumping over stones in the road with windows down and sunshine in her hair. The farmhouse she’d purchased had two separate heating systems that covered different zones of the house, and a woodstove to boot, one of several quirky marks of the previous owner. Another was the back porch—it had a kitchen sink, enough space for two picnic tables, and a hole cut into the wall of the main house so that food and plates could be passed directly from the kitchen to the porch.
After the bear snatched her kittens in 1999, that direct access to the back porch became important for Amber and the other cats, because Soule no longer allowed them to go outside. There was a countertop on the porch that could be folded up and locked into place to cover the hole, but Soule left it open during the warmer months, so that the felines could wander in and out at will to enjoy the breeze of the screened-in porch.
For a while, Soule maintained strong ties to the church. In 2000, Reverend Moon helped pay for Soule to meet him in Seoul, South Korea, where he was opening a medical center that blended Eastern and Western medicinal practices. But by then, Moon was getting on in years and his children were exerting their own influence on the church. As the power structures changed, Soule’s daily involvement with church activities waned.
By 2003, she was also experiencing severe medical problems. She’d always suffered from seizures, which had caused nerve damage to her legs when she was younger; she’d been able to maintain her ability to walk after an intense self-prescribed course of physical therapy. Now she felt her legs weakening again. She began relying on a cane to get around, particularly on the uneven footing of the ground outside the house. The bear-on-kitten attack had left her nervous about lingering outdoors on her shaky legs, so Soule now indulged her love of the outdoors by opening her screened windows and doors. Each breeze felt like a spring cleaning as it swept through the traditional New England mudroom at the front of the house, then whisked through her living room and on out the back porch.
When it was warm enough, she ate supper on the back porch, thinking about old friends at the church and the little tasks around the house that might keep her busy. From there, she could see the deer and moose passing through to visit the little brook out back. The cats joined her or not, using the tunnel-shaped hole above the kitchen counter to come in and out repeatedly over the course of a leisurely meal.
One day Soule was sitting in the living room, chatting with a friend, when the conversation was interrupted by the sound of her cats fighting on the back porch. But when Soule opened the door, instead of cats, she found two startled bear cubs staring at her in wide-eyed terror. Soule had just enough time to take in the wreckage—torn screens, the back door partially ripped off its hinges, chairs and potted plants scattered like bowling pins.
“I didn’t take any long-term pictures with my eyeballs,” she said. “I slammed the door. I said oh-my-God-oh-my-God.”
Soule jerked the deadbolt into place and beelined for the kitchen. She didn’t know what would be worse to find there—a glimpse of the tail of one of her beloved cats as it slipped through the hole to investigate or a bright-eyed cub trying to push its way in.
The reality was worse than either possibility. A bear paw—an adult bear paw—poked through the hole in the wall and was now groping blindly around the kitchen counter, thick claws knocking over cups and food containers in the pantry, unable to grab anything.
Soule had no desire to see the body of the bear pressed up against the other side of the wall. On the kitchen side, the hole could be closed by a small sliding door that perched above it; Soule screamed and slammed it down. The wooden frame of the door came down on the bear’s arm like a guillotine but was nowhere near sharp enough to do any real harm. Still, the sudden motion startled the bear, which withdrew its paw long enough for Soule to slide the door into place. As she held it closed, she felt the pressure as the bear tentatively pushed its nose against the thin wooden barrier that had suddenly materialized between them. Then she heard its claws scritching across the wood, in gentle exploration.
Soule shouted at her friend to grab a hammer and nails from a nearby tool drawer. The moment Soule smacked the first nail with her hammer, the bear stopped pushing against the wood. Within minutes, the door had been nailed into place, and the porch had gone silent.
“Go count my cats,” Soule told her friend.
Once she’d confirmed that each cat was accounted for, Soule went out to the porch and flipped the wooden counter up to cover the hole from that side.
“I nailed it shut,” Soule said. “And it stayed shut. I never did fix it.”
Within a week, Soule had also hired someone to board up the back porch. The boards blocked the bears, but they also blocked the sunlight, the breeze, the view of the moose and the deer and the little brook. She tried eating out there once, but there was nothing to look at but the washer and dryer, a depressing reminder of laundry to be done.
It was a trade-off, but Soule felt safer.
Years passed.
Soule’s mobility slowly worsened, and her social circle shrank. She found it more and more difficult to tolerate the cold and spent too much of the winter sitting in her living room, covered in blankets and cats. She called doctors to help her walk, and a propane company to help her stay warm, but there was no getting around the fact that both legs and heating systems were, despite her best efforts, aging beyond use in the old farmhouse.
In the winter of 2011, she hunkered down as a parade of particularly unpleasant weather systems marched through the skies above Grafton—storms and cold snaps and nor’easters scattering sleet and snow into the air like confetti. For Soule, the cold wasn’t just a temperature, but an actual ache, deep in her bones. After being diagnosed with both lupus and osteoporosis, she traded her cane for a walker, then the walker for a wheelchair.
Meanwhile, ongoing fighting with the VA began to wear Soule down. Though she’d won the lawsuit over her benefits, now she felt like the VA was targeting her, intentionally avoiding its responsibility to make her home fully accessible. She couldn’t get up the stairs in her wheelchair and it didn’t clear the edge of the bathroom shower so that she could get to the toilet, but they denied her request for a chairlift and a bathroom reconfiguration. She could still kind of creep around on the first floor, but her increasingly brittle bones left her terrified by the prospect of a fall—she’d stumbled against the wall once and broken her elbow. So she put piles of clothing on the bathroom floor, strategically placed to cushion her if she fell. Every day she moved shakily from wheelchair to toilet, grabbing door knobs and sink counters like an ancient Tarzan, humbled by age.
As she wheeled herself into the mudroom one day, she could feel the scented spring air through the screen door and windows, not enough to tousle her hair, but a light, sweet-smelling caress on her face, reminding her of old times. It was part of an unusually warm and dry spring that drove the ache right out of her bones and promised better days ahead.
Soule no longer trusted herself outside with the walker, so she used the wheelchair for even the briefest of errands. The high point of her day was often going to check the mail, a small but important outing that always let her taste the weather and held the possibility of an envelope bearing some sort of good news.
She opened the mudroom’s front door, and a shaft of bright sunlight hit her, warm and wonderful and blinding, stretching beyond her and into the gloom of her home. As she navigated out of the darkness and over the bump of the door frame, she felt that familiar little rush of freedom and independence. She hooked the door into place and started down her ramp to get the mail, eyes adjusting to the brightness.
By then, the bear was only ten feet away. It had been nosing around the garbage can she kept near the bottom of the ramp, but now it was staring at her, trying to make sense of this human, sitting and gliding along at eye level.
Soule, startled, realized that she was completely in the bear’s power.
There was an eerie silence. In the distance, Soule made out the faint sound of a truck rumbling down Route 4, but she knew it was highly unlikely that anyone would hear her if she screamed. Something told her that, as long as the bear stayed still, she shouldn’t say a word or make any sudden movements.
“He wasn’t huge, but he was big enough,” she said. “He wasn’t sure if he could take me.”
Moving slowly, Soule reversed course, gliding backward inch by inch. The bear watched as she bumped gently against, and then over, the door frame, then slid back into her screened porch. When she unhooked the screen door, it closed with a mild bang, blocking her view of the bear and breaking the strange silence. She locked it. It was only a flimsy hook and eye, but it made her feel better. Realizing she had been holding her breath, she let it out, not in a whoosh, but slowly, quietly. As soon as it lost sight of Soule, the bear came closer. Its head appeared, framed by the top half of the screen door. They stared at each other through the screen, still in silence.
Soule hoped the bear wouldn’t probe the screen and discover how flimsy it was. She maneuvered her chair as close as she could to the interior door and then risked a glance behind her, to get herself lined up properly with the opening to her house. It only took a second, but when she turned forward again, the bear was gone.
Of the dozens of people I spoke to in Grafton, only two had called the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department to report their worrisome bear encounters. One was Soule, and she didn’t waste any time that day; the blood was still surging through her veins while she waited on hold. In a sign of the broader disconnect between the department and Graftonites, she was unhappy with the response she got.
“They said, don’t bother the bears,” Soule remembered later. “If you do anything to them, you’re not allowed to shoot them. I said, if it does it again, it’s going to die. They said, you will get arrested if you shoot a bear.”
So Soule took other measures to protect herself. Her next call was to Grafton’s postmaster, the rough-voiced but aggressively cheerful Debbie Clough. Clough agreed to have the mail delivered directly inside her porch, rather than at the mailbox.
Soule installed glass windows and a heavier door on the front porch to make the mudroom more secure, but now there was no longer even a hint of a breeze, and she didn’t dare leave the door open. She began keeping her garbage inside, only putting it out a few hours before the private trash service she’d hired came to pick it up. From then on, if she had to venture out to her front yard for any reason, she carried her gun.
In September of 2012, despite Soule’s prayers, Reverend Moon died at the age of ninety-two. Soule felt like she’d lost a parent, and as Moon’s family began to squabble over his wealth and authority, she disengaged from the church.
Over the next few years, Soule continued to struggle with the same problems—declining health, the aching cold of winter, failing heating systems, and battles with the VA that never seemed to resolve anything. Her feelings of isolation intensified. After the libertarians stepped up the pressure on the town budget, she said, her road was no longer certain to be plowed, especially during late-winter storms, when the annual winter maintenance budget ran out.
“They would literally stop plowing,” she said.
Soule entered a kind of hazy reality, a suspense film in which the first two acts ran on an endless loop. Tension ebbed and rose without ever achieving a climactic relief. She began to sleep only four or five hours a night. Sometimes she heard or glimpsed a bear moving around outside her house. She held her cats tight. Her seizures began getting worse, and she rarely opened the windows anymore, for fear that the bears would scent her garbage, or her food, or her cats, and try to force their way in.
In 2016, she called her local newspaper to see whether they could shame the VA into making her home accessible. That’s when the phone on my desk rang.
I drove in on Route 4 that fall. It was my first visit to Grafton. The road bisected the forest, which was intact save for a few bogs where dead trees, their feet in stagnant water, jabbed accusingly at the sky above.
Soule’s Bungtown house was covered in white siding, and the metal wheelchair ramp out front creaked beneath my weight. It took her a few minutes to answer the door in her motorized wheelchair. By then, she had been living as a virtual shut-in for four years. She wore a button-up shirt under two sweaters, one shoulder crossed by a neat feminine braid that softened her face, which age, worry, and outrage were slowly pinching into androgyny. She had dropped a lot of weight and was down to something like 100 pounds.
“I was barely maintaining a good front. I was at wit’s end,” she later said. “I probably would have gone back to jumping in front of the bus if I hadn’t been so well educated in the divine principle.”
As my eyes adjusted, I saw dark wooden walls with idiosyncratic angles. The closed windows left the air cloistered and heavy with the smell of the cats that milled around Soule, jockeying for space on her lap as she transferred herself to a chair in the living room. I sat on an unusually lumpy couch with a quilt spread over it. While we chatted, Soule used a phrase that struck me as odd: “before the bears came.”
“I used to let my cats outdoors, but that was before the bears came.”
It was my first sign that something unusual was happening in Grafton, that something fundamental had changed. Soule explained that, for her, the eating of Bungtown’s cats was the moment bear-human relations had irrevocably broken down.
I asked Soule what had ever happened to Amber, the third kitten that survived that 1999 attack by huddling beneath the leaf cover.
“She’s right here,” Soule said, pointing to a cat-colored cat nestled in the center of her lap, like feline royalty. The milky-eyed cat and I assessed each other. Amber was so rough-coated that she looked taxidermied, like a child’s favorite stuffed toy stubbornly patched over into adulthood. She was so decrepit that she could no longer retract her claws, but she was unquestionably, indisputably, alive, making her the oldest survivor of Bungtown’s storied cat-bear war. My follow-up question was interrupted when one of the lumps on the couch I was sitting on moved, startling me. It turned out to be another cat.
“He’s hiding,” said Soule.
I wound up writing multiple stories about Soule for the newspaper; the VA publicly said that it would look into her case, and she got a few offers of help from third parties. But when the dust settled, she was still unable to safely access her bathroom or her upstairs bedroom. Soule had come to Grafton seeking freedom, but somehow she felt more trapped than ever. She began to feel that the town was literally killing her.
“I love my home,” she said, looking about herself helplessly. “But I love living. And I want as much life as possible.”