After hearing a bit of a racket on the deck of his Mary Lake home early last Friday morning, Al Fozard went down the stairs to head outside and investigate.

“I never really got that far,” he told the Star Tuesday.

“When I looked into our kitchen, I could see there was debris all over the place.”

That’s when he realized they had an intruder. Carrying on with the search, he quickly found the culprit.

“I went back into the living room, and there was the bear,” Fozard said. “He was sitting on the back of the couch – straddling the back of the couch.”

A large cinnamon-coloured black bear was making itself at home, feasting on pistachio ice cream and bread.

“He decided he liked store-bought bread better than my wife’s bread,” Fozard said. “She was a bit miffed about that.”

Al’s wife, Jan, was still upstairs listening to the commotion in shock.

“I was stunned,” she said. “It’s hard to wrap your head around you have a giant animal in he house.”

The only thing Al could think to do at that point was to open the doors and get out of the way.

“I thought, ‘I have to get this beast outta here,’” he said. “I didn’t know how else to do this other than by giving a clear path.”

The bear took the opportunity to escape and out it went, leaving behind smears of ice cream and a large deposit of scat in the middle of the living room floor.

This all occurred at about 5:30 a.m. – but the bear wasn’t done with the Fozard home that day.

That afternoon, the territory’s Conservation Officer Service brought a bear trap over after the Fozards reported the incident. The bear, however, went into the trap and back out again without triggering the trap-door mechanism.

Then, it showed up again at about 11:30 p.m.

Jan – following the instruction of a conservation officer – began talking to the animal in a loud, firm voice, telling it to get off the porch.

“That was the last we saw of him,” she told the Star.

The bear was headed right for the door it had gotten through earlier that morning, she added.

The Conservation Officer Service could not be reached for comment.

Typically, a bear that is food-conditioned will continue to try to return to the place where it was last able to get a meal.

Bears can also become habituated, meaning they lose their natural fear of people.

Jan said in an email that conservation officers had looked around their house for attractants, and only found three cleaned-out jars in a bin.

“We try to be good wildlife citizens,” she wrote.

Knowing the fate of the bear if it’s caught, the Fozards expressed that it’s regrettable how it has ended up for this bear.

“It’s kind of sad in a way,” Al Fozard said. “Wildlife has its own life, and this one kinda crossed into our life.”

The bear broke into the Fozard home through a door with handles that conservation officers told the Fozards are easy for bears to break in through.

Jan suggested it would be best to lock those, or to install round knobs in the future that are more difficult for an animal to grab.

“I tell you, I never want to have a bear in my home again; that was too freaky,” Jan said, summing up the situation perfectly.

She also said the bear was very quiet. The couple didn’t even know it was in the house until it was trying to get out.

And this is not the first bear on the property.

Jan told a story about a sow and cub she saw from their deck that she didn’t know were there until she looked up and they were only six metres (20 feet) away.

Now, she plans to be a bit more cautious.

“When you step out of the house now, you look around,” she said. “That’s what I take away.”