I must tell you Susie’s last. She is sorely badgered with dreams; and her stock dream is that she is being eaten up by bears. She is a grave and thoughtful child, as you will remember.
… [W]ith the pathos of one who feels he has not been dealt by with even-handed fairness, [she] said “But Mamma, the trouble is, that I am never the bear, but always the person.”
It would not have occurred to me that there might be an advantage, even in a dream, in occasionally being the eater, instead of always the party eaten.
—Mark Twain, letter to friends, 1878
It only took the one bear attack to convince Tracey Colburn to leave the little yellow house in the woods.
When I seek her out, I am led to the small home she rents. It lies among a dozen or so residential structures that flow south from the cluster of buildings that house Grafton’s fire department, town offices, and library. If the wilderness is an unruly mob storming the castle of civilization, this neighborhood is Grafton’s last civic stronghold, one of the few places where front-porch sitters from neighboring houses can see and draw comfort from one another’s presence.
“I’m sorry for the garbage,” Tracey apologizes, standing on her stoop in knee-length denim shorts in the strong summer sunshine. The wounds to her arms have been stitched into pale white scars. “I’m cleaning.”
For a day or two after the attack, she says, a flurry of activity kept her busy—she fielded visits from local reporters, got rabies shots, and listened when a friend suggested, gently, that it was time to clean the crusted blood from her dining room. Kai, it turned out, had not escaped injury. Whenever Tracey walked from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen or any point in between, he crowded her every step, limping, but devoted and cheerful as ever.
After the attack, a state game warden asked her questions and erected a huge box trap in her yard. Once the bear entered, the heavy metal door would fall and lock into place, at which point the entire trap would become a cage for transport. After the warden left, Tracey and her friend peeked inside to see what they’d used for bait—a single little pink doughnut, resting inside.
Tracey didn’t want to be home alone, and so she convinced her friend to sleep over. That night, as Tracey lay in bed, she heard a bear (the bear that got her, she was certain) banging on the side of the trap. She was sure the bear had been caught, but when they woke the next morning, it turned out that the wily bear had assaulted the trap from without, not within. The box lay empty, doughnut untouched. A few days later, the warden removed the trap and never returned.
Tracey often thought about the bear that had attacked her. She wondered how many times it had ventured into her yard, or onto her porch, how often it had watched her through the window. Not like a peeping Tom. Peeping Toms are people, and she had lost the ability to anthropomorphize wild animals. When that bear’s head had eclipsed her night sky, the amiable cabbage-rolling bruins of her recent past had vanished entirely, replaced by something that measured risk and reward, pain and calories. She never wanted to find herself on the wrong side of that cold calculus again.
“If you look at their eyes, you understand,” she says, “that they are completely alien to us.”
In the weeks after the attack, Tracey replayed the scene in her mind, tweaking the script and then watching for different outcomes. In one version, she plays loud music, deterring the bears from investigating her porch. In another, she slides the door curtain aside before she opens the door and sees the bears outside. Or she sees herself running inside instead of screaming, and the bear doesn’t charge her.
She also tweaked the script in the opposite direction. The bear crushes Kai with a single blow and then resumes its attack on her. It drags her out onto the ground, and the cubs circle back from the undergrowth, to learn from their mother how to kill the hairless primates living in their midst.
“I know that’s a bizarre way of thinking, but they have that instinct,” she says. “To teach their cubs.”
In addition to failing to capture the bear, Fish and Game also failed to defend Tracey in the court of public opinion; instead, within hours of the attack, officials told media organizations across New England that the bear was attracted to the pot roast Tracey had been cooking at the time. That narrative shifted the blame away from the bear and also away from the state policies that led to a record-high number of drought-desperate bears in the woods of an increasingly lawless Grafton.
But even assuming that it is reckless to cook a pot roast in one’s kitchen, Tracey wasn’t cooking a pot roast on the night in question. She had simply removed a cold pot roast from her refrigerator and spent a minute or two slicing it on the kitchen counter.
Given that Tracey’s harrowing encounter was the most dramatic example of bear conflict in New Hampshire since the state began nurturing bear populations, I was curious to see Fish and Game’s reaction.
I wrote to Andrew Timmins, the state’s leading bear biologist, with a request for copies of all paperwork related to the attack. But Timmins responded that there was no paperwork—no narrative of events, no analysis of the bear’s actions, no correspondence among officials. The only formal record of the whole incident was a single check mark among many check marks in the tally of bear encounters associated with the presence of human food.
This is the end result—and the ultimate failing—of the quantitative approach: Tracey’s potentially fatal experience was treated on paper no differently than a garbage can raid.
But I don’t fault the department, which can’t always afford to look beyond the data. Timmins, who was as kind and generous with his time as I could hope, responded to my request for information by offering me a summary of the five-year-old recollections of involved staff, including the game warden who set up the box trap.
The summary proved to be inaccurate, and inaccurate in a way that emphasized the blame assigned to Tracey. When I wrote Timmins back to ask about the lack of documentation and question the discrepancies, he acknowledged that the response had suffered under less-than-ideal resource constraints.
“Bottom line is that a handful of us handle hundreds of bear complaints each summer. Given the magnitude of the work, sometimes details slip through the cracks,” he wrote. “I don’t know why [the responding warden] did not fill out a detailed report with every minute detail. I can tell you from experience that there are times when I would not have time to do the same.”
Though she didn’t seek a medical diagnosis, Tracey exhibited symptoms associated with PTSD. Her heart fluttered without warning. She caught herself running her fingers lightly over the new seams that the bear attack had left on her wrists. At first, she sequestered herself inside her house, begging her circle of loyal friends and family not to leave her there alone. She tried to acclimate to the feel of adrenaline flooding her body.
As Tracey tried to hold herself together, a realization slowly dawned on her, one that left a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She had assumed that the Grafton community would sympathize with her. But in reality, many people blamed her.
As the summer wore on, colorful social niceties fell away like autumn leaves, revealing the stark black bark of human nature. Bear apologists came out of the woodwork, twisting facts to make Tracey seem more culpable.
Some accused Tracey of siccing Kai on the bear. They said the dog had torn open the bear’s stomach and mauled the cubs, which grew smaller in each telling until they were helpless infants. Tracey had attracted the bears with birdseed, swatted them with a broom, gotten high, put hot beef stew on her open windowsill. Tracey felt like the victim of a sexual assault asked what she had done to provoke her attacker.
“They think, because it’s an animal, you must have done something. And that’s not true,” Tracey says. “I did nothing but cut a cold roast on my counter.”
She withdrew from the public.
I’m just staying away from people for a while, she told herself. I’ve got to stay here and get healed up.… I don’t care if there’s vicious gossip. Don’t care.
If there is a silver lining to suffering trauma, it is the opportunity to learn about one’s self, to trail mental fingers over a previously unrecognized core of inner strength.
It took weeks before Tracey got comfortable being home alone again. Around mid-July, she started venturing into her yard—not as far as the edges, where the rough maple trunks still looked ominously like scars, but toward the middle, where the sun shone and the grass grew.
The rushes of adrenaline became weaker, and fewer.
One might think that an early step, perhaps the first step, in Tracey’s personal journey would involve a firm resolve to stay away from bears and, above all else, to abstain from bear-screaming.
In fact, she soon found herself within a few feet of another wild black bear, a much larger one. And—this is true—she screamed at it.
This happened at the house of a friend, who invited Tracey to see an old male bear that raided the suet from a bird feeder every two weeks, like clockwork. The friend convinced Tracey that it was an opportunity to confront her emotional trauma, on the same theory that convinces arachnophobes to allow fanged tarantulas to crawl along their naked wrists.
Soon, the bear—humongous, she says, the biggest she’d ever seen—was at the front door, unaware that Tracey was peering at it through the window, absorbing details. He looked calm enough.
We call him Teddy, her friend said. He’s all right.
Tracey opened the window a crack.
“Teddy,” she said, directing her comments at the bear. “You’re not supposed to be there.”
He ambled casually over to the window. She breathed. He was massive. But not threatening.
Until.
Suddenly and without warning, Teddy reared up on his hind legs, towering to his full height over her. Tracey screamed.
“Aaaah! My God!’” She turned and ran deeper into the house while the bear, startled, turned and bolted in the other direction.
Tracey was still screaming, but not in terror, not really. It was more like a roller coaster.
“Okay,” she told her friend, laughing and trying to catch her breath.
“This is enough.”