Any groceries brought into the property need to be canoed around Point Comfort if tide and winds serve, or packed in on our backs. While we try to bring everything in as soon as feasible to prevent the possibility of hauling loads around in the car on other errands, the car may become a staging area for a week or so until everything’s packed in.
On our recent return from picking up Aly in Canada, we had reason to be a bit more prompt about hauling in the foodstuffs we had with us.
When we parked at the roadside on the bay, we found a patch of broken safety glass on the ground, and shreds of what appeared to be car upholstery stuffing. We speculated on whether it might be an indication of bear activity in the area. A few days later, we learned that a bear had in fact broken into a neighbor’s vehicle. It had eaten a loaf of fresh bakery bread, but ignored some salmon and a bag of garbage (two common bear delicacies). Then it trashed her interior. Word is that it went from there to our peninsula, where it inspected some of the neighborhood compost piles.
We weren’t too concerned for our cargo. We had a couple of bags of flour, the scent of which it might associate with the bread it ate, and a couple of bags of sugar, one of which had been holed, and spilled around the car. It’s hard to say if a bear would pick up on that, if it remained in the area. The general feeling was that the bear had just been passing through, but we wanted to make sure. A common characteristic of bears is that once they find a food source, they exploit it repeatedly. If the bear got a good meal from those gassy, rubbery, oily smelling things with the easy access windows once, it might try it again.