“We are enjoying a descent of bears upon this region. If we survive it there should be much to tell. They are as thick as caterpillars in a pest year…A mother and two cubs went up the road by our house the other evening tearing down the small cherry trees along the wall. You could see where one of the cubs had wiped his bottom on a large stone and left traces of a diet of choke cherries and blueberries. I almost got one cornered in our pasture last night, but he lifted the wire and went under the fence. It is terrible.”

—letter from Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer from Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, dated August 31, 1925, in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 176.