"As long as I stay here I must act like one of the community family and do my share. I wonder if they have any partnership rules about bears? What harm can she do?
"She might trample the garden. She might steal the corn."
Another chill shook the small visitor.
"She has sneaked round the bear-traps. She has chosen the farthest-away field." He began to hope, "P'r'aps she won't go in the corn."
There were sounds outside which told him that she was doing the very thing he feared.
Doby silently crept up the ladder to the loft. He peered from its gable window.
The bear was walking along in the moonlight, standing up straight on her hind legs like a person in a fur overcoat.
Over the rail fence, which almost touched the corner of the cabin, she climbed exactly as his mother might have done.
She went down one corn row and up the next, pulling open the husks with her forepaws and examining each ear of the green corn. If it were well filled out and milky, she picked it and piled it, one ear after another, on her arm as his mother might have held firewood. When she had a dozen she walked to the fence and started to climb out of the field. She was not forty feet from Doby.