One night in Bungtown, a Vietnam veteran named Dave Thurber, feeling uneasy, tweaked his living room curtain and saw a bear lumbering across his front yard, leaving deep claw marks in the snow. Right off the bat, this was a bit unnatural. During a New England winter, a bear—or to be more precise, a normal bear—is in the middle of a season-long slumber. For five or more months, the bear lies in a den, its heart rate lowered to a somnambulant eight beats per minute; it does not eat, drink, defecate, or urinate until the warmth of spring signals the promise of new vegetation to eat.
