One night last spring, two moms—one a human, the other a bear—came face to face.
Becca Russell of Preston was a new mom, up late tending to her newborn, when she heard a noise in the night.
“Oh, shoot, it’s the bears,” she thought. But it wasn’t one roving, garage-browsing bear, but three: A sow and two cubs. Russell’s annoyance that now more of the hungry creatures were making a haven of her home turned to fear, when she tried to shoo them away, hollering from the safety of her home. Outside her office window, the mama bear rose to her hind legs and huffed in defiance.