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Fall is coming... the critters are getting restless.

The jays, chipmunks and squirrels are busy fighting over pine nuts and whatever else they can scrounge from the yard. Squawking and squeaking, they are knocking sugar pine cones off tree limbs forty feet in the air. The cones come down like a bomb. If one were unfortunate enough to be standing in the path of one of the cones, death would not be out of the question.

But, the jays and chipmunks and squirrels are staying outdoors. The mice... not so much.

Three or four weeks ago I started hearing them in the bathroom. Then Caren started seeing them in the bathroom. Finally, the traps started catching them in the bathroom. I've become a pretty successful mouse hunter. If they kept a trapping average, I would be trapping at a 750 clip. That's right, 3 out of every 4 traps I have set have been successful.

I set three traps before we left for the valley three weeks ago. When we returned the following weekend two traps were successful. Both were in the bathroom. The bathroom smelled like animal. Caren sprayed air freshener. I figured that I'd caught the mice the night we left and they sat, ripening, for five days until we returned.

I was wrong...

I think I solved our mouse problem. Haven't heard them for awhile. But it wasn't the mice that I smelled. The other night, morning really, the dogs started going crazy at about 3 AM. Barking, scratching, running around the house. Bears are not uncommon in the yard... recall that one lived in our little house two winters ago... so I figured that one was walking through the yard. But the dogs wouldn't settle down.

Pretty soon, we began hearing a low growl from under the floorboards. I dragged myself out of bed and stomped on the floor once or twice. My stomping was returned with huffing... I stomped some more. The bear huffed some more. More stomping, more huffing and growling. The dogs continued to bark, but by this time they were focussed on the furnace register in the bathroom floor... and the bathroom smelled like animal... not dead mouse, more like live bear.

For some reason, don't ask me why, I bent down and pulled the register cover off of the duct work. Instantly the duct work was smashed by a very aggressive bear paw. I literally jumped back about three feet.

Now I had a very angry bear under the house and some smashed duct work. I no longer had barking dogs. The surprise attack sent them both scrambling for whatever cover they could find, Pico onto the bed with Caren, Theo into his kennel.

The dogs were quiet, the bear was huffing-his snout right up next to the duct, the cobwebs moving in and out with his breath. Caren was freaking out in the bedroom. And I was at a complete loss for what to do.

Apparently bears do not like the sound of metal on metal because when I rattled the register cover in the duct he took off lickety-split.

The next morning, I boarded up the entrance to the crawl space and, upon the advice of neighbor Tom, peed all over the ground in front of it... sort of marking my territory, saying that this den is already taken.

The bear has not been back... neither have the mice. But I should wear a hard hat when I'm outside because the squirrels and chipmunks are going crazy with the pine cones.