With candy in sight, kids are as crafty as hungry bears

It was the day after Halloween, and a friend of mine had taken extra care to secure certain volatile, highly coveted materials.

Like a prudent outdoorsman sleeping rough in bear country, she had placed the troubling stuff in a plastic bag, twirled the neck of the bag tightly and had hung the resulting parcel on a hook in the kitchen too high for any critters to reach. Oh, they might prowl around hungrily underneath, she reckoned, but they wouldn’t be so brazen as to make a grab at the thing in daylight.