MISQUAH — A black bear that has developed a settled interest in the dumpster behind the Daybreak Café returned for a third consecutive night Sunday, prompting the café to secure the lid with a bungee cord, a length of chain, and what owner Pat Reinholt described as “a stern note the bear has not, so far, acknowledged, or appeared to read.”

The bear, estimated by witnesses at “good-sized” and by the Daybreak’s dishwasher at “honestly kind of polite,” has not been aggressive and has shown interest only in the dumpster, which the café concedes has lately held “a lot of pie that didn’t sell, which is rare for us, and which the bear apparently heard about before we did.” Each visit has come between two and three in the morning, and each has ended with the lot in a state the opening baker has learned to budget time for.

The Department of Natural Resources advised the café to secure all attractants and not to approach, feed, or, in the words of conservation officer Dan Roux, “strike up a relationship” with the animal. “Once they associate a place with food, they keep coming back, and they bring an appetite and a memory,” the officer said. “He’s not a bad bear. He’s a bear who found pie, and a bear who found pie is a problem of bookkeeping, not character.”

Roux’s best guess, from tracks and a notched left ear, is a young male pushed off his mother’s territory this spring and now eating his way through his first unsupervised June — a demographic, he noted, responsible for most of the county’s nuisance calls and nearly all of its charm. Down the block, the Northern Tap has taken the hint preemptively: Deb Pavek reports her own dumpster now latched, chained, “and under review,” though she concedes the walk-in cooler behind the kitchen “locks from habit more than conviction, which I suppose I should look into.”

The bungee held Sunday night, barely. The café has since ordered a proper locking dumpster and, in the meantime, begun donating its unsold pie to the food shelf — a practice a new sign in the window now advertises, pointedly, “before the you-know-what gets it.” Eunice Dahlquist, reached at her usual table, said she had “no comment on the bear, except that he has shown better taste than some of the customers, and better manners than a few I could name.”