About six or seven miles to the north of me is a great ridge, plainly visible from one of the halfway limbs of my lookout spruce, a sort of barrier which rises up between me and the still vaster hinterland beyond it. Sometime in the past, a fire swept over it, so that now it is covered with a gorgeous and splendid growth of young birch and poplars, and virile patches of vines on which, a little later, there will be an abundance of strawberries, raspberries, rose-berries, and black currants. It is also richly sprinkled with mountain-ash trees, which give promise of a yield of hundreds of bushels of fruit this late summer and autumn. Altogether, it is an ideal feeding-range for wild things, hoof, claw, and feathers. Three times I have traveled for miles along the cap of this ridge. To me, in all its richness and promise, it is a glorious manifestation of Life. It breathes under me and about me. I can fairly hear its compelling youth bursting from its growing leaves, its swelling fruits, its flowers, and from the mold that pulses and throbs with the vital forces under my feet. I almost think I could live and die on this ridge, or another ridge like it, and never be at loss for company. On my first visit to the ridge, being overtaken by storm, I built me a brush shelter in a lovely spot close to it, with a tiny creek of spring-cold water not more than a dozen paces away. On my third and last visit, I returned to this spot, and ran face on into my adventure. From the sheltered bower of balsams where I had built my wigwam, I could look up a rolling, meadowy breast of the ridge, so perfect in its adornment of vine and bush and small clumps of young trees that, to one not entirely acquainted with the exquisite art of nature, it would almost seem as though a human landscape-architect had “laid out” the little paradise which was my hillside back yard. On this particular morning, coming up quietly, my eyes were greeted by an amazingly pretty spectacle. The green hillside, soft and velvety in the sunlight and shadow of the morning, was in full possession of two families of black bears. So close were the nearest of them to me that I dropped like a shot behind a big rock, and the breath of air that was stirring being in my favor, I was at a splendid vantage-point to take in the whole scene. Within forty yards of me were a mother and three cubs, and a little higher up--perhaps twice that distance--were a mother and two cubs. At almost the very crest of the ridge were two more bears, which I at first thought were adults. A closer inspection assured me they were last year’s cubs, and possibly not more than a third grown, though to which of the two mothers they belonged, if to either, I could not make up my mind. Frequently, instead of setting out in life for itself, a black bear cub will follow its mother through a second season, and I judged this to be the situation here.