December 2, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Paige Williams’ absorbing “Wild Side.” It’s about the bear crisis in Lake Tahoe. Williams reports, “Between 2017 and 2020, humans in Tahoe reported, on average, six hundred and seventy-four encounters with bears per year. That number more than doubled between 2021 and 2022.” Williams talks with bear advocates, bear deterrent experts, law enforcement officers, and Tahoe residents. She talks with Sierra County Sheriff Michael Fisher:

Fisher, who grew up in Downieville and has worked for the Sierra County Sheriff’s Office for twenty-four years, was contending with a more intense bear situation than he had ever seen. In June, a bear turned up at a wedding and destroyed a car, ran off with somebody’s luggage, and came back for the reception. Between July 18th and August 2nd, his office received thirty-four calls about one or more bears in Downieville, Sierra City, Loyalton, and other communities in his jurisdiction. Bears were trying to get into homes, and into a resort cabin at Sierra Shangri-La. A caller who reported a bear trapped inside his Chevy Equinox got mad when the 911 dispatcher, who had no available deputies to send, suggested opening the door and letting the bear out. A woman found a bear swimming in a neighbor’s pool. A bear walked up to a barbecue and ran off when someone rang a cowbell. At about three o’clock one morning, a woman fired a rifle at her front door after a bear tried to get inside. “She could see the door being pulled,” the dispatcher noted.

To me, the most alarming aspect of the crisis is that bears are breaking into homes. Williams visits the scene of one of the break-ins. She writes,

Greg, a general contractor in his seventies, lived at the house and among other properties that he and his wife, Kathy, were remodelling. Their dog, which reliably scared bears away, had died over the summer. On Friday, a bear had tried to get into the house. On Saturday, Greg had run a bear off by using bear spray and throwing rocks. This morning, he had come home to find that a bear had finally succeeded. “The kitchen is just strewn,” he told me. “It got a forty-pound bag of cat food, a thing of roasted garlic, my package of cookies. It got into the coffee. It got into a five-gallon bucket that Kathy saves butterscotch and chocolate chips and stuff in. Didn’t eat a lot of those, but it spread them all over the floor. It didn’t get into the honey. It got into the olive oil. I’ve come into houses where a bear has torn the range hood off, torn the microwave off. The shelves are all broken and everything’s collapsed, or the doors are gone and the whole cabinet’s off the wall. Turned over refrigerators. A house here burned down because a bear broke in and knocked the stove over. The electric igniters went off. It tore the gas line open—gas started spewing. I heard this snapping and popping. It’s ten-thirty at night, and I’m going, What the hell? I walked out in the street and could see the flames. By then, the whole house was engulfed. The fire department saved the foundation.” 

The heart of Williams’ piece is the shocking death of Patrice Miller. Williams reports,

Miller routinely walked to the grocery, which a friend owned, to buy alcohol. In early November, the grocer called the sheriff to say that she hadn’t seen Miller in days. The Halls were already wondering why Miller’s porch light no longer came on at night. A sheriff’s deputy, Malcolm Fadden, went to the house on the afternoon of November 8th. On the front steps, he found a punctured garden hose, spurting water. He turned off the spigot and went to the door. When he looked through a window and saw blood on the floor, he drew his service weapon and stepped inside.

In the living room, Fadden found bear scat, a foot in diameter. In the kitchen, he found Miller dead. Her naked body was gashed with claw marks; her left arm and most of her right leg had been eaten down to the bone. The security bars on the window hung by a single bolt. The cabinets were destroyed. In the bedroom, Fadden saw paw prints and soil, and, on the bed, feces and urine. Miller’s laptop was still plugged in and open. Fadden wrote in his report that she appeared to have been dragged off her bed after she was already dead.

The medical officer described Miller’s cause of death as “perforating sharp and blunt force crushing injuries consistent with bear mauling and subsequent predation.” 

In other words, Miller was killed by a black bear. Williams reaches the same conclusion: “But the bear did kill Miller, according to the autopsy report, even if it hadn’t come for her.”