His scent preceded him, earthy, musky, like some huge lover, sated.

I was awakened at 4:30 that morning by sounds I took, at first, to be a clumsy mouse in the kitchen. Not wanting a rodent for a roommate, I shut the bedroom door, then went back to bed.

This was my first night, of three, alone in our summer bungalow. My husband was shepherding our children to summer school and camp programs in New York City, allowing me precious time away from familial duties. The ensuing quiet had lulled me to sleep early.

Soon, I heard more noises and began to fear I had a raccoon on my hands. Then I felt something move onto the deck. Our little bungalow shudders gently with the weight of an adult on the attached deck. You don’t notice it so much during the day, but at night, when all else is still, it is as good as any fancy motion detector. I thought maybe it was a dog, or a coyote. Earlier that evening I had opened my bedroom window for some fresh air, and now I smelled something. It was foreign, strange, almost enticing.

I looked out my window and there he was, a large dark bear, lumbering gracefully across my view, only a few feet away. His aroma filled my senses and quickened my pulse. I could see his outline clearly against the early dawn light. His form filled the space of the squarish deck. He moved past the potted petunias with his head down, snout ahead of him, swaying from side to side. I was struck by the grace of his movement and his quiet footfalls. Later, when I looked for traces of his presence, the three-legged planter he passed was untouched. The bird feeders did not fare so well.

In an exercise class I take, one of the routines involves walking across the studio floor with the rolling, round gait of a bear. It is one I have struggled with for years. My teacher looks at me and rolls her eyes upward as I swing my arms, looking more like a monkey than a bear. “I don’t know what you’re doing wrong,” she says, “but that’s no bear.” In demonstrating my experience to friends the morning after my encounter, I felt my body roll into the cave-dwelling walk of my new friend. Finally, I thought, I get it. This is the bear.

I had waited 20 summers to see this sight. Others have seen them. Bears have been sighted down the road, in the meadow near the blueberry bushes, in the pine forest on the western edge of our property. Our neighbor, Bobby Somers, has video footage of black bears romping in his garbage. Bobby, a bow-hunter, loves the bears and would sooner shoot them with a camera than net a skin, even in season. My husband has cleaned up after them, bags of garbage strewn over an acre of field. We warn the children not to play with cubs if they encounter them while berry picking. One spring, we returned to our bungalow to find the cabin door pushed in by a bear. Finding nothing edible, it left, doing no other harm.

I have seen them in zoos, sleeping lazily on a rock waiting for their scheduled feeding. But nothing compares with the sight of an animal, grown so great on a foraged diet, moving bravely into the dawn, alone in the wild world, skirting the petunias.