It was in the evening, after our dip in the river, when twilight was shading into night, that we used to visit the patch. It was a great open space in a bend of the river, half a mile long and nearly as wide, without a tree on it, and nothing but just the blueberry bushes growing close together all over it, reaching about up to one's chest as one walked through, and every bush loaded with berries. Not only we, but every bear in the neighborhood, used to go there each evening--the two other families of whom I have spoken, and also two other single he-bears who had no families. One of these was the only animal in the neighborhood--except the porcupines, which every bear hates--whom I disliked and feared. He was a bad-tempered beast, bigger than father, with whom at our first meeting he wanted to pick a quarrel, while making friends with mother. She, however, would not have anything to say to him. When he was getting ready to fight my father--walking sideways at him and snarling, while my father, I am bound to confess, backed away--mother did not say a word, but went straight at him as she had rushed at the puma that day when she saved my life. Then father jumped at him also, and between them they bundled him along till he fairly took to his heels and ran. But whenever we met him after that--and we saw him every evening at the patch--he snarled viciously at us, and I, at least, was careful to keep father and mother between him and me. If he had caught any one of us alone, I believe he would have killed us; so we took care that he never should. I can see the berry-patch now, lying white and shining in the moonlight, with here and there round the edges, and even sometimes pretty well out into the middle, if the night was not too light, the black spots showing where the bears were feeding. We enjoyed our feasts in silence, and beyond an occasional snapping of a twig, or the cry of some animal from the forest, or the screech of a passing owl, there was not a sound but that of our own eating. One night, however, there came an interruption.