“The bears wanted to fish with my gear,” Child said.

Child was brushing his teeth about 10 a.m. Monday when he heard a crash outside his house. Peering through his bathroom window, he spotted a mother bear and her cub digging his subsistence nets out of a garbage can by his storage shed.

With the can tipped over, the mother bear yanked on the net, slowly pulling it from the can. Meanwhile, her cub nibbled on the floaters.

The mother bear had the nets about halfway out when Child decided he’d had enough.

“So what am I going to have to do, shoot you guys?” he yelled from his second-story bathroom window.

Startled, the bears dropped the net and darted off into the weeds.

“So she brings her cub up here to mess around and tear up everything,” Child said. “Then they go home.”

This was not the first time the bears had tried to take his fishing gear, performing the same stunt the day before, Child said. His neighbors got a visit too, he said, but their dogs barked them off.

With the repeat visit, Child made sure to grab his video camera to catch the bears on tape.

Asked what he’ll do if the bears return, Child said he’ll “let them come around.”

“I mean, I don’t want to kill them,” he said. “They’re just pesky, that’s all.”

Child, 82, has subsistence fished every year since he could. The father of eight children, Child used to commercial fish for a living, but now mostly shoots photos and video.

Child has caught on tape worse incidents than a couple of bears trying to steal his gear. A resident of Homer for more than 55 years, Child filmed the 1964 earthquake. He also won an award for a documentary about the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Too busy making phone calls to authorities and others, Child hadn’t checked to see if the bears had damaged his nets. He had already fished with the nets earlier this summer catching 23 fish.

In fact, the nets, still stinking of silvers, might have been what attracted the bears in the first place, Child said.

Thomas McDonough, a biologist at the Department of Fish and Game, said the department gets calls all the time from people complaining about bears getting into their garbage. While the department doesn’t keep count, McDonough said it’s not all that uncommon for bears to get into garbage if they smell fish.

“Fish are a huge attractant for bears,” McDonough said.

Black bears have a great sense of smell, with a nasal musoca area about 100 times larger than humans. Their ability to sniff out food is so strong that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service advises campers to burn their garbage completely.

That’s not entirely useful advice for a man living up West Hill who’d presumably like to use his nets again.

If food were present, McDonough said, bears could become food conditioned, returning to the same spot for more. But in Child’s case, McDonough said the bears would presumably go away unless there was food available nearby, for instance, at a neighbor’s.

For Child, though, that might be reading too much into it.