Maybe he crawled in with a hibernating bear in a hollow under a tree. It’d be too sleepy to pay him much attention... and when female bears, sows, hibernate is when they give birth so one may in its sleepy stupor feel nothing is amiss if something snuggled up with them.
Could also have been a stray dog.
You know that black bears are not true hibernators...They do move around quite a bit in the winter....
Also, this area of North Carolina has many bears...There are more bears on the Carolina coast than there are in the Smoky Mtns....