Well, actually not in town, at least not that I’ve heard, but they’re out and about in the mountains. My pretend children and their dad were up in Suce Creek last weekend where people were coming out of the trail saying there was a sow grizzly with a yearling back up in there, and on Wednesday, the Mighty Hunter’s darling son spooked one up when he was hiking Livingston Peak (which is the back side of the Suce Creek drainage. “My knees were shaking,” he said. “It was big.”

The weather’s been so weird this year that the whole season is about a month behind, and indeed, when I went and looked up past spring bear encounters, like the time we got woofed at, or when those local girls were pinned down by the mama bear, or even when the bear bashed in the Mighty Hunter’s front door, they were all about mid-June. Looks like we are about a month off this year … at any rate, Raymond and I have backed off and are taking our early-morning hikes way down on the flat part of the Suce Creek road. It’s lovely — hay fields and birdsong and we can still walk a mile or so uphill, then down … because let me tell you, one bear encounter was plenty for this girl.