Recently, seven minutes down the road from us, a bear tore open a chicken coop and ate nearly everything in it. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, for days.

This wasn’t one of our bears. I’ve told you about our bears. They’re the ones who amble through, and I run them off the property with my arms in the air. They’re the ones who shimmied down a fir already afraid of me. I’ve grown fond of them, honestly. They’re familiar now. They turn up most days, decidedly more interested in the compost than the ducks. We’ve reached an understanding, the bears and I.

But the bear who tore open the chicken coop was a different animal entirely. Much bigger. And aggressive in a way ours have never been. The people whose coop and 40 chickens it destroyed were away for the week. Left inside the house holding down the fort were their frail older mother and her grandson, and this was far more than she’d signed up for. She called her son. And her son, being a friend of ours, called Blake.

And so for three days, Blake went back and forth over there.

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He called the Conservation Officer multiple times. But it’s a bad year for bears on this coast. There are so many, and the CO was drowning in calls, so the help didn’t come, and didn’t come and didn’t come. Which meant that Blake kept going back, trying to manage a situation that was escalating, with a dangerous animal and a vulnerable household and no cavalry on the way.

When the CO finally came, on the third day, they set a trap. The bear wanted nothing to do with it. Instead, it charged at Blake, then turned and ran at the officer. And out of options, they ended the bear’s life.

I want to tell you something about my husband. This was not the first time.

Years ago, a different aggressive bear broke into a different neighbour’s coop. It was a house with cats, dogs, and four small children. They called Blake in the middle of the catastrophe because Blake is an ethical hunter and the person you call. He went. And he ended the situation quickly and cleanly. And he told me afterward that to take a bear’s life, even a dangerous bear, and even when there was no other choice, was the worst feeling he had ever had in his life. 

So he knew. Walking into those three days, he already knew exactly what it felt like, and he spent every one of those days hoping with everything he had that it wouldn’t come to that again.

But it came to that again. Slower this time. Stretched over three days instead of one terrible minute.

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I’d gotten comfortable with bears. You get that way, living out here. They become almost ordinary characters, nearly pets, often the subject of stories I send you. And somewhere in all that fondness I’d stopped seeing them clearly. I’d filed “bear” under known, manageable, mine.

And then one showed up seven minutes away that was none of those things, and it made me read every bear again.

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The familiar can lull you. Something crosses your path enough times with no harm done, and you stop actually looking at it and start seeing your idea of it instead of the thing itself. Which is fine, mostly. Right up until the day it isn’t the thing you decided it was.

There’s a season for going back and reading the familiar again, not with fear, but with fresh eyes. This is that season. 

I’m not telling you to be afraid of your ‘bears’, but to honestly question if this is actually what you’ve decided it is, or if you’ve just stopped looking at it.

It’s rarely the strange and obviously dangerous things that catch us off guard. We’re watching those. No, it’s the familiar ones. The thing we’ve grown so easy with that we quit paying attention. Maybe it’s the relationship we assume is fine because it always has been. Or the habit we’ve decided is harmless. Or the old conclusion we settled years ago and never reopened. 

This is a week that pulls the comfortable surface off things, because underneath there might be something you’ll need to look at harder than you wanted to.

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Sometimes there’s no good outcome. Only the least unbearable one.

I think one of the markers of growing up (real growing up that keeps going well into our later decades) is the day you stop demanding that every hard story resolve into something redemptive. That bear did not need to die for a reason you’ll find comforting. It died because it was fattening for winter, and aggressive, and a frail woman and a child were in its path, and a good man was left holding an impossible choice he’d already made once before and never wanted to make again.

That’s not a lesson. It’s just true.

And the grown-up work, the deep work, the work I do with people every single day, isn’t to force a hard thing into a shape that lets you, or them, off the hook. It’s to stay honest to what actually happened. And let the unbearable be unbearable without rushing to make it mean something tidy. To hold it, as it is, and keep your heart open anyway.

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Blake’s okay. He was definitely quieter than usual for a few days. He’d tell you he’s fine, and he mostly is. But I’ve known him long enough to know that a man who hates killing bears carries each one a long while. As he should. That’s the cost of being the person people call. You answer, and then you carry it.

Jonni

P.S. If there’s something in your life this season asking to be read again, whether that’s a story you settled a long time ago, or a familiar thing or person you suspect you’ve stopped really seeing, that’s the heart of what I do inside UNLIMITED. I won’t hand you a tidy answer. I’ll sit beside you while you look again, with the eyes you have now, at the things that don’t come with easy endings. I’ve stood at a lot of these particular turnings. I’d be honoured to stand at yours. The door’s right here.

P.P.S. Our own bears are, as far as I can tell, exactly who I thought they were. They’re ambling, unbothered, and deeply committed to pretending they don’t see me. But I’m looking a little more closely now. That seems right.