MISQUAH — The black bear that has worked the Daybreak dumpster all season graduated over the weekend to indoor dining, letting itself through a propped service door at the Northern Tap and into the walk-in cooler, where it spent roughly forty minutes before any of the staff felt it was their particular place to intervene.

By the account of owner Deb Pavek, the door had been propped against the heat of a busy Saturday night, as it has been every summer for years. At about 9:40 a cook went back for a case of buns and found the cooler already occupied. “You don’t argue with that,” Pavek said. “You close the kitchen, you move everybody to the front, you pour a few on the house to keep them there, and you call Tim. Tim is who you call. There’s no second number.”

Tim Brevik arrived, looked the situation over through the kitchen doorway, and recommended the strategy that has served Misquah in nearly all of its dealings with this bear, which is to wait. The bear emerged on its own, unhurried, by the same door at about 10:20, having gone through a full case of summer sausage and, to the lasting confusion of everyone involved, only the imported cheese, leaving the domestic untouched on the shelf beside it. “It has taste,” Brevik said. “I don’t know what else to tell you. It walked past forty pounds of perfectly good cheddar to eat the gouda. That’s not a hungry bear. That’s a bear making choices.”

The cook, who asked not to be named on the grounds that “my mother will hear about it either way,” said the bear paid the staff no mind at all. “It looked at me once. The way you’d look at a coat rack. Then it went back to the cheese.” Cleanup took until close, and a case of sausage and a wheel of gouda were written off to what Pavek’s ledger now lists as “wildlife.”

DNR conservation officer Dan Roux, reached Monday, called the episode textbook and entirely preventable. The agency has recommended self-closing latches on rural commercial service doors for three years, he said, “and most places get to it the summer after a bear gets to them, which is, I’ll admit, an effective curriculum, just an expensive one.” He warned, as he has warned before, that a bear rewarded with food does not forget the address: “Once it learns that door is a vending machine, it’ll keep checking the machine. The latch helps. The habit is the fix — secured doors, secured dumpsters, and a town that stops, however affectionately, treating this animal as a mascot.”

The Northern Tap installed a self-closing latch Monday morning, a job that took the better part of an hour and that Pavek said “I’d have told you was impossible to get done in this town without a bear involved, and look, it took a bear.” Whether the cooler bear is the same animal that swam to Loon Island last month, raided the café, and has been blamed for several things it almost certainly did not do is, per Brevik, “the same answer I always give, which is none.” The imported cheese has been reordered. The domestic, untouched, remains for sale.