Baby-Sitting for Johnny Bear

The following is a true story. Only the names have been withheld to protect the innocent.

My parents were always good neighbors. This was especially true in the summer of 1956 on Vinalhaven. During that summer, however, even their hospitality reached its limits, as illustrated by the following story. One of our neighbors was a summer resident who lived near the entrance to Long Cove, half a mile or so from our cabin on Granite Island. Much to our delight, he arrived for the summer with a pet bear cub named Johnny. He had bought the animal in Canada and was planning to give him as a wedding present to his fiance when they got married later in the summer. (When I asked him about this recently, he assured me that she also loved bears.)

Our neighbor let his pet cub ramble around the woods surrounding his place, eating berries and chasing butterflies. As children, we were naturally intrigued by the idea of a tame bear, especially when all we had for pets were dogs and the occasional goat. Several weeks into the summer our neighbor told my parents he was leaving the island for a few days to get married and that Johnny would be staying on nearby Raspberry Island. Would they be willing to feed him? They agreed, and my two younger brothers worked out a plan to take him his oatmeal twice a day. They were thrilled. What could be more fun than providing bear care for a cub as friendly as Johnny?

The day our neighbor left to get married, my brothers dutifully rowed to Raspberry to feed Johnny. Alas, he was nowhere to be found. At noon, as we were sitting on our porch eating lunch, my 10 year-old-sister suddenly exclaimed, “Why, there’s Johnny!” Sure enough, he was down in a hollow below one of the cabins, happily gorging himself on our raspberries. Clearly he had gotten lonely and swum the quarter-mile to our place from Raspberry Island. The question was, what were we to do? Our efforts to persuade him to swim back to Raspberry were totally ignored. Johnny immediately made it clear that he preferred our raspberries and that he intended to stay with us on Vinalhaven. Besides, one swim per week in that cold water (remember this was before global warming) was enough.

Catching him was difficult. To make a long story short, after an hour or so my brothers and I finally cornered him in our boathouse. As I stood in the narrow confines of the boathouse trying to get a rope around Johnny Bear, I realized he was far from the friendly little cub we saw rambling around the woods eating berries. Being so close to him, I saw he really wasn’t that cute nor was he that little. In fact, he was now a very angry and scared young bear with sharp teeth and nasty-looking claws. None of us got seriously hurt, but it was certainly no fun trying to lasso him.

Eventually my brothers and I got Johnny out of the boathouse and attached to a kind of zip-wire we rigged up between two stout trees. Never was a bear so miserable. It was no fun trying to keep him in such a restricted situation. He spent the next ten days pacing back and forth on his chain, refusing to eat, until one of my brothers discovered he liked Karo syrup with his oatmeal. Then there was the night he nearly strangled himself on his chain when he climbed a tree and couldn’t get down. My father saved his life by climbing the tree he was stuck on and sawing off all the branches, clearing the way for him to get down. All this time my mother held a flashlight so my father could see what he was doing. We were all very relieved when our neighbor returned from his honeymoon and reclaimed Johnny.

Johnny was equally delighted when his master returned. I’ll never forget the sight of them departing from our dock in a rowboat. Johnny was perched happily in the bow, his master was at the oars, while his new mistress sat in the stern. Back home again, Johnny was permitted to roam the woods around the house. He was even allowed indoors on special occasions, though I am told he was pretty hard on the furniture. At one point my mother brought the newlyweds a lemon meringue pie as a welcome-home present. Apparently they were not at home. Without fully considering the consequences, she left the pie on the doorstep. Guess who found it first.

By the end of the summer Johnny had grown into a very large black bear (adult males range from 150 to 300 lbs) that had begun to wander further and further from his home base on Long Cove. In August he disappeared twice for extended periods of time. The first time we heard he had made it as far as the North Haven Thorofare. The second time, our neighbor had to leave the island at the end of the summer and never saw him again. When we returned the following year, there was a rumor going around the island that someone had shot a bear, though it was never confirmed that it was Johnny. I prefer to think that he lived a long, happy life on one of the remote parts of Vinalhaven, stuffing himself with berries and chasing butterflies.

Harry Gratwick is a summer resident of Vinalhaven. Any connection between the publication of this column and Maine’s referendum on bear-baiting is pure coincidence.