MISQUAH — The Daybreak Café’s bungee-cord solution to its bear problem, installed to modest fanfare two weeks ago, failed Sunday night when the bear it was meant to thwart removed the cord, the lid, and most of a bag of coffee grounds in what owner Pat Reinholt described as “under four minutes, and he looked bored doing it.”

The bungee had held for nine days, which Reinholt noted was “longer than I’d have bet, and shorter than the forty dollars of bungee cord deserved.” Sunday’s defeat was total: the cord was found stretched across the lot, the lid twelve feet from the dumpster, and the grounds distributed across the alley with what one early-morning witness called “a certain thoroughness, like he was making a point.” Reinholt, who opens at five and so was the one to find it, said the scene had “the quality of a message. I just couldn’t tell you what it said, except maybe ‘nice try.’”

The café has since bought a bear-resistant locking dumpster lid — the $310 kind the DNR has recommended for years, and the kind Misquah has declined to buy for exactly as many years, on the grounds that it was expensive and the bear was, surely, somebody else’s problem. “Turns out the cheap fix was expensive,” Reinholt said. “Write that down. I bought the bungee twice and the lid once and I should’ve bought the lid first. That’s the whole story of this town in one dumpster, if you want it.”

DNR conservation officer Dan Roux, who has made the locking-lid recommendation to half the businesses on Main, said he was “glad one of them finally listened, and sorry it took a bear with a sense of humor to do it.” He repeated his standing warning that the fix is the habit, not the hardware: a bear that has learned an address keeps the address. “The lid on the Daybreak helps the Daybreak,” he said. “It doesn’t help the next open dumpster down the block. He’s not going to retire because one stop closed.” Whether this is the same animal now swimming to islands and through bonfires (see front page) is, per Tim Brevik, “not a question I’m going to answer, because the answer is yes, and then everybody wants a meeting, and I’ve been to that meeting.”