During the winter of 1958-59, Dr. Burt Covert of Kingfield set out to hunt bobcats in the Big Chicken Country in Western Maine. Dr. Covert brought a young dog with him in hopes of finding a cat track. While hunting he spotted something move about 15 feet in front of him. Cautiously parting the brush and young trees, he found a hole in the snow with two tiny bear cubs.
He quickly took stock of the situation as he realized he was between a mother bear and her cubs. He looked around for the mother bear and saw a blur through the trees. She made no attempt to come any closer and eventually laid down to sleep. She never made any effort to return to her cubs which was quite unusual. Concerned for the condition of the cubs, he stuffed them into his knapsack and took them home. The male, Amos, weighed six pounds, and the female, Andrea weighed five pounds. His intentions were to raise the cubs and give them to a zoo. As good as his intentions were, he soon found that a half-tame, half-wild animal is a very dangerous animal if returned to the wild. By this time, it was too late.
By August the bear cubs stood two feet high and weighed 70-80 pounds. They were still friendly toward humans, but were becoming increasingly vicious toward each other. Something had to be done with the bears, and he found no zoo that would take them. He could not continue to raise the bear at his residence and was faced with a major dilemma. He realized that a bear that had been raised this way would have difficulty foraging for food in the wild.
Floyd Cobb, the owner of Pierce Pond Camps, reluctantly agreed to let Dr. Covert release the cubs near Pierce Pond. It was the height of the raspberry season, so they had plenty of food for survival. It was not long after their release that they realized civilization was the preferred food source. Guests arriving at the sporting camp gate would open their car door, and the bear would pile in looking for food. Kids loved them, but the adults regarded them with much reservation. They would then chase the cars hoping for a final handout before being transported by boat to the camps.
Although the cubs became a real novelty to most of the visitors, they were a nuisance in the camp yard always looking for handouts and raiding the garbage cans. Andrea unfortunately met her demise when she advanced upon a bulldozer operator in search of his lunch. He was not aware of the bear's history, and protected himself by means of destroying the animal.
Amos was transported to an island in the middle of the lake that provided him with a food resource and kept him out of harm's way. That didn't last long, as he swam to shore to resume his quest for civilization. As shown in the picture, Amos was transported from area to area when he became a nuisance to the sports. Eventually, Amos became overly aggressive in his quest for food and threatened the safety of one of the guests. That was his final curtain call. What remained was a lesson well learned by all, to never interfere with wild animals even when you are convinced you are doing a good deed.