as I
could out of the reach of their stings, and down to the stream to cool
my smarting face. As I lay in the water, I remember looking back with
astonishment to the whole proceeding. Five minutes before I had had no
intention of fighting anybody, and had had no reason whatever for
fighting that particular bear. Had I met him in the ordinary way, we
should have been friendly, and I am not at all sure that, if I had had
to make up my mind to it in cold blood, I should have dared to stand up
to him, unless something very important depended on it. Yet all of a
sudden the thing had happened. I had had my first serious fight with a
bear older than myself, and had beaten him. Moreover, I had learned the
enormous advantage of being the aggressor in a fight, and of throwing
yourself into it with your whole soul. As it was, though I was
astonished at the entire affair and surprised at myself, and although
the bee-stings still hurt horribly, I was pretty well satisfied and
rather proud.

Perhaps it was as well that I had that fight then, for the time was not
far distant when I was to go through the fight of my life. A bear may
have much fighting in the course of his existence, or he may have
comparatively little, depending chiefly on his own disposition; but at
least once he is sure to have one fight on which almost the whole
course of his life depends. And that is when he fights for his wife. Of
course he may be beaten, and then he has to try again. Some bears never
succeed in winning a wife at all. Some may win one and then have her
taken from them, and have to seek another; but I do not believe that any
bear chooses to live alone. Every one will once at least make an effort
to win a companion. The crisis came with me that summer, though many
bears, I believe, prefer to run alone until a year, or even two years,
later.

The summer had passed like the former one, rather uneventfully after the
episode of the bees. I wandered abroad, roaming over a wide tract of
country, fishing, honey-hunting, and finding my share of roots and
beetles and berries, sheltering during the heat of the day, and going
wherever I felt inclined in the cool of the night and morning. I think I
was disposed to be rather surly and quarrelsome, and more than once took
upon myself to dispute the path with other bears; but they always gave
way to me, and I felt that I pretty well had the mountains and the
forests for my own. But I was still lonely, and that