By Geoffrey Norman
My wife once took some houseguests from Manhattan—quintessential New Yorkers—on a walk along a trail behind our house. When they returned to the house, the woman was distressed because she had lost her glasses. “They’re prescription,” she said, “and my spares are back at the apartment.”
How would she possibly survive not being able to read the Sunday Times?
“Where did she lose them?” I said to my wife.
She described the spot on the trail that I passed every day when I went running with my dog.
“I’ll go up and get them,” I said.
“But it’s almost dark,” the woman’s husband said.
“I’ll take a flashlight.”
When I came to the place my wife had described., I didn’t need the light. Almost as soon as I started looking, I found the glasses.
Our guests were grateful. Excessively so, I thought until the husband said, “I really can’t believe you went out in that wilderness when it was dark, like that.”
Later that night, when we were alone, my wife and I had a good laugh over that.
“What do you suppose he thought might happen to me up there in the wilderness?” I said.
“Something awful.”
“Worse than what might happen to me in Central Park?”
“Oh much. You might have been eaten by a bear.”
Well, time passed, as time will, and last year we were talking with the same couple about their more-or-less annual visit.
“We always come in the fall, for the leaves,” the wife said. “We’ve never seen Vermont in the spring. Is it beautiful?”
Sure is, we said. Green. Flowers blooming. All that.
“Then why don’t we come in May? Do you mind?”
“Of course not. We’d love it.”
So we set a date.
Spring came and by mid-April we were outside until last light every day, raking the yard, tilling the garden, dividing the hostas and the irises, cleaning up the downed limbs, and doing all the other usual chores. We were eating late suppers and sleeping exceedingly soundly.
One night, I came up out of that pit you fall into around three in the morning.
“Whaaa,” I said.
“A bear,” my wife said. “It’s a bear.”
I thought, for a second, that she was still asleep and having a nightmare. But she was speaking too plainly.
“Where?” I said.
“Right there,” she said, pointing to the window where we’d hung a bird feeder.
My vision was still blurred with sleep and there wasn’t much in the way of a moon so I couldn’t make out the feeder very clearly.
We have an outside light mounted up on the roof of the house and after fumbling around for a minute or two, I found the switch. When the light came on, I was looking at a bear.
We were about two feet from each other with only a piece of double-pane between us. The bear didn’t seem especially concerned by that. He was intent on getting at a handful of black oiler sunflower seeds in the feeder.
I took a step or two in the bear’s direction. He knocked the birdfeeder off the window, ate some seeds off the ground, then ambled off across the yard in no great hurry.
I got back in bed thinking that I probably didn’t need to go out and check on the bird feeder. That it could wait until morning.
“Well,” I said. “Who says life in the country is dull?”
“You know what,” my wife said.
“What.”
“I’m sure glad our pals from the city weren’t here.”
I was too, at first. But later I thought they probably would have figured that you just had to put up with that sort of thing when you were living on the edge of a wilderness like we do.
But … when they came, we never mentioned the bear.◊
Geoffrey Norman is a Dorset author and the editor of vermonttiger.com.
