MISQUAH — A black bear swam the roughly four hundred yards from the mainland to Loon Island on Big Pelican on Saturday night, walked directly through a bonfire gathering of about a dozen Lakeside teenagers, ate everything edible on the island, and swam home — an itinerary that has unsettled nearly everyone in town except the teenagers who lived it.

The group had paddled out near dusk for what one described as “a fire and some music, nothing we weren’t supposed to be doing, mostly.” The bear arrived around eleven, climbing out on the island’s north point, shaking off “like a dog the size of a refrigerator,” and proceeding without hesitation to the cooler.

“We did what they tell you,” said Cody Brevik, 16, who was there. “We got big, we got loud, we backed up slow. Mostly we just watched it eat the hot dogs. It ate all of the hot dogs.” The bear showed no interest in the teenagers and considerable interest in a bag of marshmallows, which the group agreed it opened “more neatly than you’d think.” It stayed perhaps twenty minutes, then ambled back to the water and swam off toward the mainland, leaving a flattened cooler and what several described as “a real feeling.”

The detail their parents have not recovered from came next: before paddling in to call home, the teenagers put the fire all the way out. “I want that on the record,” said one mother, who asked not to be named. “A bear walks through their party and they remember to drown the fire. I have been asking them to do that for years.”

Tim Brevik, who fields most of the town’s bear questions whether he wants them or not, called the swim unremarkable. “Bears swim. They swim better than half the people on this lake. It smelled hot dogs and it went and got hot dogs. That’s not a mystery, that’s a Saturday.” The lesson, he said, is the same as always and the same as nobody acts on: “The bear isn’t the problem. The cooler left open on an island is the problem. The bear’s just doing math.”

DNR conservation officer Dan Roux, reached Monday, agreed, and added a warning the town has heard before and not yet acted on: a bear rewarded with food comes back. “Once it learns an island cooler is a vending machine, it will check the machine again,” Roux said, recommending bear-resistant coolers for island fires and, not for the first time, secured dumpsters in town. Whether the swimmer is the same bear that has worked the Daybreak dumpster since spring, Brevik would not say, “because I don’t interview bears.”