The bear left.
Not dramatically. Not on camera. There was no official announcement timed to the moment the crawlspace went quiet. At some point after the new year, the homeowner noticed what had been promised all along: the bear was no longer under the house.
That was always the ending everyone pointed toward. Back on December 31, when the situation first attracted attention, wildlife officials were clear that nothing needed to be done. The bear was healthy. The bear had shelter. The bear wasn’t posing an immediate threat. The homeowner, meanwhile, was living with the low, persistent fact of a large animal beneath his floorboards.
The word used then was “fine.”
Fine is a useful word when you want to stop a conversation without resolving it. Fine means no action is required. Fine means patience is the solution. Fine means the clock is now responsible for whatever happens next.
And eventually, the clock delivered.
The follow-up reporting frames the bear’s departure as confirmation. Bears move on. This one did. The system worked. No relocation. No tranquilizers. No escalation. Just time and a quiet exit.
From the outside, it looks neat. From a distance, it even looks wise. Human intervention often creates more problems than it solves. Nature has its own rhythms. The bear found somewhere else to go.
But that tidy arc only works if you skip over the part where a homeowner spent weeks being told to coexist with a wild animal beneath his house while waiting for inevitability to arrive.
That waiting is the story’s center of gravity. Not the bear, exactly, and not even the house. The wait.
On December 31, the state’s position was not that the situation was ideal, only that it fell within acceptable boundaries. The bear wasn’t breaking a rule. The house hadn’t crossed a threshold that would trigger action. The homeowner was left inside a gap between policy and comfort, where the official advice was to trust the process and keep living normally.
Normal is a flexible concept when you don’t live there.
When the bear finally left, the coverage shifted tone. The tension dissolved. The story became one of quiet resolution. The earlier discomfort receded into context, reframed as a temporary inconvenience that proved the system’s patience was justified.
And maybe it was. The bear left without incident. No one was hurt. The house returned to being just a house.
Still, the ending doesn’t rewrite what preceded it. The fact that things turned out fine doesn’t mean the waiting was nothing. It doesn’t mean the homeowner’s unease was imaginary or excessive. It only means that time aligned with policy in the end.
This is how many small governance stories conclude. Officials advise restraint. Residents endure uncertainty. Eventually, circumstances change on their own, and the original advice gets retroactively validated.
The lesson becomes harder to argue with once it works.
The bear under the house is gone now, but the structure that produced the standoff remains intact. The thresholds are the same. The definitions of “fine” haven’t shifted. The next homeowner, in a similar situation, will likely be told the same thing.
Wait. It will resolve itself.
Sometimes it does.
When it does, the resolution feels quiet enough to forget how long the floor creaked overhead while everyone waited for it.
(Note: This is a follow-up to our December 31, 2025, story.)