Villemomble Last week I had a visit from a handyman who is going to help me install running water at the cabin. When in the cabin, he was surprised to find that I slept between two screen doors, the thicker winter doors being left open at night for air circulation. He pushed open the screen door and said, “Is this your bear-proof door?” I said I wasn’t too worried about bears coming in – I had never heard of black bears in the Catskills bothering people inside homes. In order to get to my doors, bears would have to either climb up onto my porch or enter the roofed-in area of my back extension – either option being very bold for a bear, who is intelligent enough to know that human beings are far and away the most dangerous animals on the planet. Black bears are hunted in the Catskills and generally are afraid of people.
http://landmarkinn.com/wp-content/plugins/anttt/simple.php Well, last night I was awakened at 1 a.m. to the sound of a garbage bag being ripped apart. It was being done by a large animal. The next day was trip-to-the-dump-day, and I had been producing little garbage of late, so I had just stored it all in a half-full contractor bag left in the back extension. I started quivering, knowing that there was just the thinnest of membranes preventing this animal from entering the house, where he could do a fair amount of damage, not least of all to me. I had no weapons inside the cabin. I turned on my flashlight and yelled at the animal, which made it stop briefly, but only briefly. He did not run away as I had hoped. I couldn’t see the animal, but I could see that the large garbage bag had been moved twelve feet. So I slid open the screen on the upstairs window in case I needed to crawl out onto the roof – for if a bear came up my staircase I would have no other place to go. I made a fair amount of noise and the bag-ripping stopped. I shone my flashlight toward the extension but couldn’t see him. So I quickly descended the stairs, closed the main door, and locked it, and then did the same on the other side of the cabin. I was fine. I looked out the window with my flashlight, and saw the culprit – a very large raccoon. He saw me and ran off (Catskill raccoons, unlike Queens raccoons, are generally scaredycats because they have to worry about bears themselves). Relieved, I went back to bed. The coon came back and finished his meal, which I considered basically unavoidable. But at least he wasn’t a bear. Next time the garbage goes out to the dump a bit faster.
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