by CONNIE TABBERT
Editor
FORESTERS FALLS — Noreen Horst was awakened by a rattling noise at 4 o’clock in the morning on July 15.
Donning her housecoat and eyeglasses, she crept downstairs into the bakery, which is in the lower portion of her two-storey home, and quietly opened the door.
She had to take a few steps out from the door, and when she did, she realized what the noise was — or did she?
At first, Ms. Horst thought it was a black garbage bag caught on the window of her door and flapping in the wind.
She believed it was a garbage bag because when it rains, she uses the bag to kneel on while working in her garden, and then hangs it just outside the door.
But, just a second after that thought, she knew she was wrong — it was a bear’s upper body in the window frame.
“The bear was covering the whole window,” Ms. Horst recalled. “I kind of freaked out.”
As soon as the two saw each other, she said the bear pulled back out of the window and took off.
She ran to the window and saw it had something in its mouth, but wasn’t sure what.
Turning on the light, she noticed the torn window screen laying outside on the ground and a spilled bag of flour on the floor.
Looking around, she was able to figure out what the bear had in its mouth — a four kilogram bag of brown sugar. She noted the bear had its choice of chocolate chips, flour and the sugar.
Ms. Horst called her brother, who lives across the road, and he calmed her down, but he didn’t come to the house.
“I’ve been here 34 years and it’s the first time I’ve seen a bear,” she said. “Everyone else has seen a bear but not me.”
Ms. Horst can’t say that anymore.
She’s talking about the event two days after it’s happened, and she’s able to laugh about it.
However, she said, “It wasn’t funny at the time.”
Ms. Horst had been baking the previous day and the smell of fresh bread was still lingering in the air.
With the bakery windows open, the bear also caught a whiff of the deliciousness. And, since the bakery sign said OPEN, he decided to come in, she said with a laugh.
Looking closely at the screen, Ms. Horst points to the tiny rips in the screen that show the half-circle of a bear’s paw. Below the half-cirlce, the screen is ripped in half.
“The screen is destroyed,” she said, adding, “The screens are in extremely tight, so I think it was the noise of the screen being pulled away that woke me up.”
Later that day, Ms. Horst noticed a bear paw print on another window screen and when she went and looked at it from the outside, she noticed the large, muddy paw print on the side of her home.
In the ground, were the paw prints of where it stood looking in.
In her garden, she has five mini greenhouses made out of wood and tough plastic. All but one was not torn apart. She believes the bear was looking for grubs and insects underneath the greenhouses.
However, she noticed nothing else in her gardens were destroyed.
Ms. Horst said she was glad it was a bear and not someone trying to break in. The bear was just as scared of her as she was of it … however, it could have been a totally different outcome, had it been someone breaking in.
“As much as the bear scared me, I’m glad it wasn’t someone breaking in,” she said.
