Late one afternoon a few months ago, I was walking near Sweet Sue's Confections Cafe in Woodside, Maine, when a middle-aged man suddenly surfaced from the gooey depths of the establishment's full-to-the-brim Dumpster. I stopped. What I could see of his upper clothing was splashed with what looked to me to be the sticky remnants of several chocolate eclairs. A crustless gob of lemon meringue hung from his chin. Two jelly-donut remnants balanced on the brim of his UMaine "Go Bears" cap. His hands, gloved in orange marmalade, held a large plastic bucket overflowing with half-eaten delicacies thrown out by Sweet Sue's. The saccharine smell was overwhelming.

When his eyes had blinked away most of their custard covering, the man climbed out of the Dumpster with his bucket and, seeing me, immediately dropped to his goo-cushioned knees.

"Please! Please! Don't eat me." he whimpered. "I have a wife and kids who depend on me."

He pushed the bucket toward me. "Here, take this instead. It's full of the same sweet human food you bears find under platformed trees in the woods near my parked pick-up."

[Sorry. I should have disclosed at the outset here that I was on my way to perform in a skit at the Woodside Animal Respect League, an essentially underground organization, and was daringly wearing a realistic, pillow-enhanced head-to-toe black bear costume featuring fake fur and facial features. Since I was ahead of schedule, I decided to play along and have a little fun.]

"Well, that's very generous of you. But I'm afraid I'm sucrose intolerant." His vacant look suggested that I ought to simplify that reply, so I did. "I can't eat sweets."

"You gotta be kidding," he said, no longer whimpering and now getting to his feet. "There isn't a bear alive who wouldn't die for a few dozen forest-found jelly donuts. In fact, their gluttony explains why, over the years, my out-of-state clients have come to look down on bears. I make it possible for them to do so comfortably. There are no splinters in my platforms. Clients arrive Saturday mornings and are due back Sunday, so they don't have a lot of time to kill, or, as my wildlife biologist friends prefer to say, to harvest."

"You say you have clients? May I ask what business you're in?"

"Sure. It's a seasonal business," he answered. "For all of my clients, it's been a lifelong dream to see Maine black bears before they die. I make those dreams come true. That's my pick-up truck over there, the one with the BAG-A-BEAR lettering and the logo of a grinning bear holding a donut while wavy smell-lines waft up around him. Colorful, don't you think? I designed it myself. It's on both doors, along with my email address: bagabear@undertree.com."

"What you're saying, I think, is that your clients can count on having a blast somewhere up here in the Maine woods. Ten or 12 feet up."

"Absolutely. I guarantee it. You're a bear. I'm sure you've seen the statistics. Ask any wildlife biologist. My clients make it possible for other bears to have a fair chance at jelly donuts and other sweet stuff by ensuring that there are plenty of treats left over after the first wave of gluttons depart a dining site in the back of my pick-up. This sequence keeps the bear population manageable, so we're told, but you'll have to ask a wildlife biologist just how that works."

By then, I'd had more than enough of his ambivalence and his euphemisms. "Look. Let's cut to the chase," I shouted. But that's as far as I got.

He shouted even more loudly. "I knew it! I knew it! Once a bear, always a bear. What you mean is let's cut to the so-called fair chase. You bears are all the same. You don't show us humans any respect. We feed you, don't forget. You ought to look up to us."

"Listen. You should be glad we don't look up to you, especially in your business. We bears are pretty good tree-climbers." At that point, my costume, heated by my emotions, was getting too warm, especially within the head, so I lifted it off for immediate cooling relief.

"Hey! Wait a minute, buddy!" the man cried. "You're not a real bear!"

"That's right, I'm not," I admitted. "And you're not a real hunter. So we're even."

Charles Packard lives in Camden.