Whitefish man comes home to horseradish-eating bruins

WHITEFISH When you can't find any huckleberries, just substitute horseradish and hot sauce. Three bears broke into a Whitefish area home Monday, tearing out a screen door and crawling on the couch before munching their way through the kitchen.

"There was just stuff strewn throughout the entire kitchen," said Sasha Montagu, who surprised the black bear family when he came home at about 5 p.m.

While Montagu was out running errands, the three bears peeled back the screen door and lumbered through his living room and into his kitchen.

"It caught my eye as soon as I pulled in my driveway," Montagu said. "There was something big and black on my porch."

The mama bear bolted as be approached, and Montagu thought the run in was over.

"Then I saw the screen was punched in and realized there was something in my house," he said. "I walked in just in time to see two cubs crawling out the window over the kitchen sink."

Below the window was a scattered pile of food, torn from shelves, cupboards and even the refrigerator. Not knowing how many bears might be lurking in other rooms, Montagu ran to borrow a gun from a neighbor before searching the rest of the house.

"I mean, I didn't feel like cornering a bear in my bedroom or anything," he said.

Once convinced the last of the bruins was out of his house, Montagu returned to the mess in the kitchen.

"Probably this morning they're wishing they hadn't got into that hot sauce and horseradish," he said. The three bears also ate flour, beans, vegetables and "just about everything else."

"All they left were claw marks on the windowsill and hair on the couch," he said. Montagu, seemingly calm a day after the unannounced guests, took a philosophical approach to feeding his four-legged neighbors.

"It's part of what's to be expected as we encroach on the wildlife and continue to build in wild areas," he said. "It's just a part of living in the environment we choose to live in, especially this year when there aren't any huckleberries."

The continued lack of berries and the increasingly cooler nights have resulted in a rash of bear encounters, as the bruins scrounge to put on enough fat before winter. Over the Labor Day weekend, dozens of people called authorities to report bear troubles, and three black bears and four grizzlies were captured in the Flathead.

Two black bears were caught in Columbia Falls, and another was trapped west of Essex. The Essex bear ran into trouble when it tried popping open a camper to get at a cantaloupe.

A female grizzly and two cubs were relocated out of a neighborhood south of Bigfork, where they had been nibbling on a deer carcass, an apple orchard and some beehives. Another grizzly was captured near Olney, where it had killed and eaten three tethered goats. The bear had been caught before, after raiding chicken and duck pens. The male grizzly had also eaten a sandwich it stole by reaching through an open window in a parked car.

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