5

A NEIGHBOR ANNOYED

Bear and tiger skins covered the polished floor. There were lounging chairs and sofas, window seats covered with soft cushions of fantastic designs; there was one corner fitted in Persian fashion, with a huge canopy and a jeweled lamp beneath. Beyond, a door opened upon a bedroom, and beyond that was a swimming pool of the purest marble, that had cost about forty thousand dollars.

—Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906

“Please. Do not! Write a story glorifying it.”

The “it” that the older woman doesn’t want me to glorify is the bear-feeding of her neighbor, who I know by now is Doughnut Lady. With a strained contempt that speaks of a more cosmopolitan upbringing, she has a way of referring to Doughnut Lady as if Doughnut Lady is an anonymous crowd.

“I think a lot of people,” she says. “Have these illusions. That it’s all fun and games. That it’s entertainment for their guests.”

I’ll call her Beretta, because she gives me the by now standard Friendly Advice that if I ever break into her house, I could be shot, blah blah blah.

The years that Doughnut Lady has spent joyously bonding with the bears have been, from Beretta’s perspective, fraught with peril. Whenever the bears came (which was every day, more than once), Beretta peered through the curtains and watched them loitering in the grass. When the bears broke the branches of Doughnut Lady’s apple trees, no one cared, but when they did the same to Beretta’s apple trees, she was furious.

A lot of Beretta’s objections to the bears seemed to be based on their physique, which she describes in ways that make me uncomfortably aware of my own pudge-covered bulk.

They’re “great big huge things,” she tells me. “They look like sumo wrestlers. Big. Fat. All that.”

Rather than foraging for berries and fish, the bears were eating doughnuts and other human foods, she says, which was very bad for them. Also, she says, looking at me archly, “if you read the labels. It’s very bad for people.”

“Very bad,” I agree, meekly.

Though she likes animals, she is not in favor of the unnatural beasts in the woods of Grafton, the abnormally large coyotes and the invasive wild boars. In the 1970s, she says, Dartmouth researchers posted game cameras in the area, seeking evidence of Bigfoot. It was silly, she knows. She doesn’t think Bigfoot is real. But she always remembered.

While Doughnut Lady was immersing herself in a Disney-tinged world of semi-tame bears, Beretta was trapped in a suspense film in which she was forever forestalling the final bloody scene (as heroines so often are).

“I don’t want to get mauled by a bear,” Beretta insists. “I really, truly don’t.”

Once, when she was preparing to leave the house to get to her volunteer shift at the hospital, she saw the bears outside. She called the police and asked for help to get to her car. The police dispatcher offered to stay on the phone until she got to her car safely. Beretta, correctly deducing that this was unlikely to lead to anything more helpful than an audio recording of her own dismemberment, instead hung up and dialed another number. She could not make it on time, she told the hospital, due to unforeseen bear.

THOUGH BEARS ARE perhaps the most immediate danger on Beretta’s mind, they are not the only one. She has also been set on edge by the Free Town Project. She saw a crowd of them on election day.

“Somebody had a Doctor Seuss hat. And they were acting like crazy lunatics,” she says. Though she’s an independent voter, Beretta is an advocate for law and order.

“If all else failed, vigilante justice is okay. But I’m not for chaos,” she says. “Who gave them the right? It’s going to be the Hatfields or McCoys, maybe.”

Ever since the Free Town Project got rolling, the sound of gunfire—AK-47s, she thinks—has filtered through the arboreal gloom surrounding her property. She doesn’t like the idea of people spraying gunfire in the woods, or the growing lawlessness, in Grafton and elsewhere. She wonders sometimes what would happen if a mob formed here in town.

“I’m not suicidal. But I would sit in the bathtub. And slit my wrists. If they were coming up the hill,” she says. “I always said we should put in a drawbridge at the bottom of the hill.”

The bears began to take up an increasing amount of Beretta’s time and attention. Every time she left the house for her car or garden, before she exited the safety of her doorway, she performed a brief bear check, just to make sure. After cooking a steak on her indoor grill (she name-drops it as a Jenn-Air brand, very chic), Beretta would quarantine herself for hours, worried that to go outside with the smell of steak clinging to her would lead to disaster.

That’s not to say that Beretta is a shrinking violet in the face of danger. A woman of action, she has girded herself against the large and slovenly bears with a collection of firearms that are, like Beretta herself, small, neat, and orderly.

She has her “little Glock” and another “little pocket pistol.”

“But!” she says, pausing to make sure I am listening. Her favorite is her “handy-dandy Beretta. Sixteen gauge.”

I’m unclear on whether owning three guns makes one feel thrice as safe as one gun, or if gun ownership is, like potato chips and birthdays, subject to diminishing returns.

Over the course of years, Beretta began to think seriously about pulling out a gun (I am delighted to learn that, in the model of an Agatha Christie character, she keeps one stored in her umbrella stand) and shooting one of Doughnut Lady’s bears. As we talk, it becomes clear that something other than fear is also motivating her thoughts of human-on-bear violence. In the spirit of making lemonade from lemons, Beretta has given thought to making a bearskin rug from the bears cavorting outside her door.

Like, serious thought.

Fresh bear corpses, she tells me, cost much less than a Jenn-Air grill.

“Getting the bear is nothing. It’s one slug, if you’re a good shot,” she says.

No, the hard part would be transforming the bear pelt into the kind of rug with the lifeless head still attached to the skin, the look often associated with fancy ski chalets and parodies of fancy ski chalets.

Beretta relates these rugs to pictures of a luxurious lifestyle. She made some inquiries of taxidermists and learned that the price used to be $800.

“But now,” she says, with a note of outrage. “It’s over. A thousand dollars!”

The exorbitant price placed her dreams firmly out of reach. Beretta is, she explains, a woman of limited means.

“I would have to go without food for a couple of months,” says Beretta. “Just to have a bearskin rug.”

Beretta’s next idea was to find a compromise between desire and means—perhaps a less lavish home decoration could be devised, one that would still include the all-important element of a partial bear carcass. Though a rug without a head was a nonstarter, she might settle for a head without a rug, positioned to greet visitors from a small display table in her breezeway.

But these hopes were short-lived. A bear head, she was told, would cost about the same as a bearskin rug, which seemed unfair.

And so she watched through her window as bear heads and bearskins lumbered through her yard, unpleasantly encumbered by all that bone, sinew, and doughnut-bolstered fat.