11

A BEAR’S BELLIGERENCE

While he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys.

—2 Kings 2:23–24

In early 2012, the snow stopped falling, but the rains never began. The spring was among the driest ever recorded in New Hampshire, and after a century of relentlessly marching upon the people of Grafton, the dark forest that ringed the town paused. Deeply buried roots of oak and beech were denied in their ceaseless quest for water, and the trees, lacking nutrients and fluids, entered a sort of drowsy senescence, declining to put out their usual energy-intensive offerings of beechnut and acorn.

The bears that relied on the mast as a dietary staple must have looked longingly at the bare branches and all the other signs of thirst in what is normally a lush forest landscape of food. Without water, there were fewer grubs, fewer berries, fewer grasses and succulent shoots. But there was one natural resource in ample abundance: hunger.

The drought was widespread. Across the state, phones on the desks of wildlife officials began to ring insistently. Populations of bears were at an all-time high, and now they were descending from the forest, all seeking to offset a dearth of natural foods with a human-related smorgasbord. More than a thousand people called with bear complaints that year, sometimes describing the bears around their homes as bolder, more desperate, and less responsive to scare tactics.

These were the conditions that led to Soule staring down the black bear she found on her wheelchair ramp. A little farther up Wild Meadow Road, a neighbor’s dog chained to a steel stake in the middle of the yard disappeared in the night, leaving behind only a bit of blood. Elsewhere in Grafton, bears threatened a small dog on a leash and pushed into vacant homes through screen windows. No one was hurt, but everywhere, there was a sense of mounting unease.

Even Dianne Burrington, Hurricane the llama’s commanding owner, grew worried. By 2012, she had been blackberrying along Grafton’s decommissioned dirt roads hundreds of times; when she saw a bear, her usual response was to simply give it space by moving to another nearby patch. But that year she ran up against a bear that didn’t seem to want the space.

“She wasn’t afraid of me at all. That’s what did bother me,” Burrington said. “I hollered at her when she was far enough away from me, but she kept kind of circling back down to where I was.”

Burrington, spooked, backed up toward her truck, and left.

It was only a matter of time, it seemed, before someone got hurt.

TRACEY COLBURN HAD always lived in relative harmony with the bears around her little yellow house, a mobile home standing isolated in the middle of the woods. She got a little thrill when she saw them on the trail near the edge of her yard or climbing her trees, and she laughed when they raided her compost pile, chucking aside the cabbage in a humorous show of contempt.

Tracey, who quit her job as administrative assistant to the selectmen when things got weird in the Free Town era, looks a little like Anna Kendrick, if Anna Kendrick were over forty, had taken a shot at college that was cut short by breast cancer, and found herself struggling through a long string of clerical and municipal jobs in the backwoods of New Hampshire. Tracey was a little confused and wounded by most people’s failure to return the kindness and trust that she tried to put out into the world.

By June 2012, Tracey was out of work, and money was tight. But she found a few dollars to buy a print at a thrift store in Meredith to give to her father on Father’s Day. It was a print of a painting by a Canadian artist, R. A. Fox, of a mother bear with two cubs.

She also scraped together a few dollars for a small pot roast to feed Kai, the Husky-Lab mix she’d gotten from the shelter. Kai had developed an allergy to wheat and corn, and she was trying to get him off the cheap dog food. On Friday, she cooked the pot roast.

The skies had finally let loose enough water to end the drought, but it was too late to alleviate the natural food shortage, so the practical effect was mostly to add so much moisture to the heat that the air itself seemed to sweat.

Saturday was Tracey’s first day on a new job, a greenhouse at a hardware store down in Bristol. By the time she left work, she was exhausted, drained by the heat. When she got home, she opened her windows and decided she’d better go ahead and slice up Kai’s pot roast before she collapsed into bed. Afterward, she opened the glass French door to let Kai outside to pee.

The porch was small, just eight feet by ten. And it was, she says, “just full of bear.”

TWO BEARS, YOUNG ones she estimates were two hundred pounds each, crouched to her left on all fours, noses to the wood of the deck, sniffing, while another, much larger, three-hundred-pound bear was right in front of her. Had a hidden parasite emboldened them to creep onto the porch? There was no way to tell.

Before Tracey could react, Kai rocketed onto the porch and, as the two smaller bears scrambled off the sides of the deck, launched his sixty-five pounds at the big bear. Dog and bear tumbled down the porch steps, biting at one another furiously. At the bottom of the stairs, the bear tried to catch Kai with her claws, but Kai kept finding her rear, turning in tight little circles as he snapped at the backs of her legs.

Shouting at a bear is often the best way to drive it away, and so Tracey let out a wordless, primal wail. But in this case, the sow’s exit was blocked by Kai, and Tracey’s screams seemed like a war cry.

Tracey didn’t see the bear charge until it was upon her.

“They can move so fast that you can’t—they are not slow,” Tracey said later. “They move like lightning. That bear was on me about, I think it was one second literally, and they run like a deer. They are so fast.”

The bear lashed out at Tracey, raking at her face and torso with the five heavy claws of its left front paw. Tracey turned her face away and threw up her hands in a defensive gesture, palms in. The bear’s claws ripped the skin of her right forearm and the back of Tracey’s right hand, badly, continued across the width of her body, and stripped more skin from her left forearm, with such force that Tracey was knocked off her feet and thrown backwards onto the ground.

Twisting onto her back, Tracey tried to use her feet to propel herself backwards into the house, but somehow she’d shut the door behind her, and her head thumped against the glass.

She reached up toward the doorknob with her right hand, but the bear charged again. Tracey was close enough to smell and hear the bear’s breath, but she remembers no smell, no sound, just that silent-movie image of the bear’s enormous shaggy head, dark eyes, and pointed teeth eclipsing her world.

“She was going to frickin’ kill me, and I knew she was going to, I just knew it. Because her face was right here,” Tracey said, holding her hand about eight inches in front of her. “I was looking right into her eyes.”

Kai must have bit the bear’s rear legs then, because it jerked away from Tracey and threw itself at the dog again. There was another explosive round of teeth and claws, and then the bear dashed into the woods, Kai snarling right behind.

Tracey gained her feet and scrambled inside, already shaking from the flood of adrenaline.

Shit. I’m hurt, she thought. And I don’t know how hurt I am, and my dog is missing.

She opened the door a crack to see Kai beelining toward her from the woods.

“Huskies prance,” Tracey said. “He come prancing out of the shadows, big grin on his face. Like it was the most wonderful thing he’s ever done. For him, it was like his, his one big, you know, showdown with bear.”

Tracey looked at her right hand for the first time. There was not much pain—not yet—but her stomach turned. The bear had unwrapped the skin from the back of her hand like it was a Christmas present. The gaping hole showed ligaments, muscles, and gore.

Tracey looked around her kitchen helplessly before picking up a clean dishcloth and wrapping it firmly around the wound. Instantly, red roses began to bloom on its surface.

Tracey didn’t know if the bear was waiting in the pitch-black night on the other side of the flimsy door, but she had no cell reception at her home and she couldn’t afford a landline.

Nor could she wait for the relative safety that would come when daylight filtered through the heavy foliage to illuminate the dirt road on Sargent Hill. Dawn was seven hours away, and Tracey was losing too much blood—already it soaked her T-shirt and shorts, streaked the white skin of her bare legs, pooled like spilled wine across the small dining room floor, stained the buffet red.

Her car, an old white Subaru, was all the way on the other side of her yard, where the trees blotted out the starlight, and the dark shadows hid who-knew-what. She wished she’d parked closer. But there was nothing to be done about it now. Getting to the car was her only chance.

She prepared to step out onto her blood-spattered deck. The night air was still hot, but she couldn’t stop shivering. The shudders radiated outward to her left hand, which now gripped a trembling lead pipe, and her right hand, which was cradled against her chest, the dish towel tied pathetically around the gaping wound.

Not until later, after the news had broken, did anyone ask how it had come to this: Tracey Colburn, a 120-pound woman and the forty-six-year-old former administrative assistant to the Grafton town clerk, having to open her door, step into blackness, and run toward where she had last seen three black bears.

Moments later, she locked the car door and turned the key in the ignition. When the car roared to life, she revved the motor, honked the horn triumphantly, and flooded the area in front of her with a white blaze of headlights, seeking to frighten the bears.

That was when Tracey realized she couldn’t drive the car. It had a manual transmission, and her mangled right hand, which was beginning to throb, couldn’t grasp the gearshift. She sat in the car, honking, and thinking, and bleeding.

THE IMPASSE DIDN’T last long. Tracey got the old Subaru into first gear by reaching awkwardly across her body with her less-badly-injured left hand. She puttered out of her driveway and onto the pitch-black, rutted dirt road, pain levels rising and blood levels dropping.

Worried that she couldn’t make it all the way to town, she pulled into the driveway of Bob, a guy she knew who lived down the road.

When she rang the doorbell, his head popped out of the window.

“I’ve just been attacked by the bear,” she called up to him. “I need to go to the hospital. I want you to drive me.”

He squinted at her shivering form in the darkness.

“Hold on.”

His head disappeared. Tracey stood awkwardly, bleeding and wondering if she should get back into her car.

Bob’s head popped back out.

“Uh. Ah.” His voice was thick with sleep. He didn’t seem to understand what was happening. “Well, you’re kidding, right?”

Tracey began to shout.

“No, I’m not kidding, and now I’m in a lot of pain and I’m going to frickin’ pass out if you don’t get down here and get in the car right now!”

It was unclear whether Bob was absorbing anything.

“Hold on,” he said.

He disappeared from view again.

ONCE BOB’S HEAD had cleared, he drove Tracey to the fire station, a little oasis of light. There, Fire Chief John Babiarz was on duty. No fan of bears, he was showing the excitement of a man who’d finally been called to respond to the crisis he’d long been anticipating.

“Those goddamn bears!”

He repeated himself, louder.

“Those GODDAMN bears!”

Within minutes, emergency responders flooded the fire station while Babiarz called the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. For an awful, awkward moment, two worldviews of bear management collided. The man who answered the phone sounded doubtful.

“It’s been a century since we’ve had a bear attack on a person,” he said.

But the quantitative statistics the man was citing did not match the qualitative experience unfolding in Grafton. So Babiarz shouted at him too.

“I’m HERE!” he said. “I see the BLOOD!”

In the ambulance, an EMT named Kathy cooed sympathetically at Tracey as she poured saline and tugged at the dishcloth, now deeply embedded in the mass of clotted blood forming between Tracey’s ligaments and muscles.

“I’m so sorry I have to do this,” she said, “but I have to get this off.”

Each centimeter caused Tracey’s by now agonizing pain to flare. It was torture.

“Oh God!”

She finally began to cry, talking through tears.

“You know,” she wailed, “I’ve already been through a lot.”

She didn’t mean the events of the night. She meant the events of her life in Grafton. The breast cancer, the sweltering greenhouse, the pay-by-the-minute cell phone that wouldn’t work in her house, the coyotes dogging her steps when she went for a walk.

“And now I’ve had a fuckin’ bear attack!”

Tracey sobbed.

“I can’t believe it.”

IN THE WEEKS and months that followed, Grafton was awash in a sweaty, boiling anger that was stupid in its willingness to cast blame indiscriminately and pardon no one for their faults. Everyone, it seemed, wrestled endless demons of fur and heat: John Connell, still waiting to hear whether God wanted him to sell his church for zero dollars, got into an argument with the police chief over whether enforcement of victimless crimes was harassment; Jessica Soule rolled down her wheelchair ramp, a garbage bag in one hand and a gun in the other; Tracey Colburn lay awake on sweat-soaked sheets, listening to the bear outside her house. Burglary rates were up, drug crimes were up, and two different groups of people began talking seriously about how to address the area’s bear surplus: state officials discussed a ten-year population reduction plan, while a group of Graftonites discussed blowing the heads off of every bear in town.

Throughout it all, Doughnut Lady and a handful of libertarians continued to feed the bears, which needed the food more than ever—after all, it was a drought year.