A Krispy Kreme driver left his van open. Bears stole his doughnuts.

A mama black bear and one of her three cubs made their regular foraging rounds last week, rooting in the trash cans of a gas station on a military base in Anchorage. But it was early morning, so they didn’t find much.

“But then, they smelled it,” said Shelly Deano, manager of the Army & Air Force Exchange Service gas station on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in north Anchorage.

The unmistakable and inviting aroma of freshly fried fat and sugar had wafted out of the back of a Krispy Kreme delivery van, an invisible trail to a honey pot of sorts.

The bears went toward the van.

Moments earlier, around 6 a.m. on Sept. 12, a Krispy Kreme driver had pulled into the station, his second of three regular stops on the base. He opened the back of the van, grabbed his goods and hauled them into the store, where he delivers doughnuts and doughnut holes twice a week. What he didn’t do was close the back of the van.

While the driver was inside and his doughnut stash unguarded, mama and her cub saw their chance. And they took it.

Deano was watching. A few minutes earlier, one of her two employees working that morning got her attention while she was in the office, alerting her to a rare appearance during business hours by the black bear family — regular visitors who usually wait until the dead of night to scavenge.

Deano went outside and banged on the side of the van to try to scare the bears and drive them out. But they were unfazed. So she hailed base security and waited. The delivery driver called his boss from inside the store and came outside five to 10 minutes after Deano did.

All the while, the bears kept feasting.

“They just sat in there and ate doughnuts for at least 20 minutes,” Deano said.

Mama and her cub scarfed down about 100 doughnut holes and three dozen doughnuts during that time, Candice Sargeant, general manager of the only Krispy Kreme in Anchorage, told The Washington Post.

Base security arrived about 10 minutes after Deano called and used sirens to force the bears from the van. The bears lingered outside the van for a few more minutes until the blare of the sirens drove them back into the woods.

But not on an empty stomach.