It shouldn’t, then, have come as any surprise when I saw a fox slinking down the road past the end of our driveway.  Foxes are always around but seldom seen.  When prey is more abundant here, they are more numerous and more active.  That one, a black and rusty brown cross between the red and silver races that live in this region, was bigger and had a longer, bushier brush than the little red fox that ran across the cul de sac ahead of us as we turned the corner on our way home from Wasilla last week.

Are bears drawn into our suburban subarctic subdivisions by the same bioecological dynamics as foxes following a population explosion of hares?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that bear sightings are up this summer, too.  As I unloaded my car Friday night after that town trip, my neighbor Dave stopped by on his ATV to tell me that a big grizzly had been seen around the neighborhood for several nights.  I had heard the distinctive “chuff” of a bear from off across the muskeg last month, and a week or so after that, my dog Koji and I had smelled bear scent on the breeze one day, raising the hackles on both our necks.

I love bears.  Each time I see one, it’s a thrill — especially the big grizzes with their glistening fur.  However, I do not feel comfortable in their presence.  I came right back in the house with my load of groceries and phoned Charley (my son Doug’s dad) and asked him if he’d gotten done with any of my guns yet.  He’s doing some work on them that Doug and I had neglected too long.  He said that he had been too busy, and queried why I was asking.  The guns had been unused for a long time, so what’s the hurry, right?

I related what Dave had told me, explaining that the news made me uneasy about being here with nothing but a couple of .22 rifles.  Charley replied that a sow and two cubs had been on his porch on two separate nights lately.  He puts milk out there in a pan for “his” feral cats, and mamma bear brought her babies up to enjoy the moo juice.  After listening to them thumping and grunting on the porch, he watched from a window as they passed under his bird feeder and off into the woods toward Cliff and Glenda’s place.

I resolved then to bungee my front door shut (still no lock, nor even a latch on it, so the cats can go in and out without bothering me to open the door for them), but I keep forgetting.  I have yet to see any bears around here this summer.  I’ve seen and heard cranes, loons, and other birds, big and small.  There are fewer aphids than last year (maybe due to heavier rainfall?), and more big carpenter ants than I’ve ever seen before.  The neighbors from hell moved out and abandoned three dogs, but that’s another story.

BTW, we had a hardware failure (computer’s power supply) recently, and Doug took the opportunity to upgrade his video and sound cards.  It is now just as if we had a new computer — lost all my old shortcuts, cookies, and such.  We were without the machine for weeks, and got a lot of work done around here.  Seeya later.