Betty Bluebird, like most of the other feathered folk, was beginning to think of starting south. For the wild ducks honking overhead told her it was going to be a cold winter and advised her to start without delay.

Twinkly Eyes also heard the warning. And it set him restlessly searching about for a snug den in which to pass the winter. For Twinkly Eyes was going to hi-ber-nate. With the first snow-fall he would cuddle up in the depth of some cave and pull the dead leaves after him, and tuck himself in bed for a sleep that would last until spring.

Every day now he rose with the dawn to begin his search. And every night he kept up till black darkness made it im-pos-sible to see.

But with all his searching, Twinkly Eyes never once ceased to eat everything good he came to.

No, indeed, Twinkly Eyes was not the bear to stop eating just because he was busy house-hunting.

Not a bit of it! In fact, if anything he ate more. Though he cut himself down to one meal, that one meal lasted from the moment he awoke in the morning to the moment he dropped to sleep in the chill of the autumn night.

One effect of so much eating was, of course, to make him as fat as a ball of butter. Another was to make his fur as thick and warm and glossy as the finest sleeping bag that ever was invented.

But search as he would, Twinkly Eyes could not find just the right place in which to den up for the winter. Of course, the first place he had visited was the den where he had been born. But his mother was there with this year’s cubs, and she had made it quite plain that there would not be room for him too.

Then he thought of the pine woods on the slope of Mount Olaf, on the side toward the Valley Farm. And one chill October morning, when a fine drizzle reminded him that up north here winter was not far away, he decided to explore these woods.

The dried pine needles lay like a velvet carpet over the forest floor, and everywhere was the fragrance of wet pine. Through the thick gloom he could make out countless mushrooms growing at his feet, and each one he had sniffed, eating such as he knew would not poison him.

For his mother had taught him as a cub to know mushrooms.

The ground here slanted up a rocky knoll, and here and there were boulders, and here and there a fallen tree trunk.

But nowhere could Twinkly find a cave. And besides, he smelled lynx tracks everywhere, and it would never do to go to sleep for the winter in a place where Old Man Lynx could find him.

No, decidedly, the pine woods would not do.—Where, then, should he search?

Cutting down through a mixed wood that led to a tiny lake, Twinkly soon found himself neck-high in blueberry shrub. Only now the berries were all gone. He had been here many times before, only never with a den in mind. So now he went over the ground again and through the brush around the lake, and back up the slippery hillside.

Suddenly a strange, sweet odor smote his nostrils. He was approaching an old deserted shack, with roof tumbling in and door hanging on one hinge. It had once been a sugar camp, had Twinkly Eyes but known. And the knowledge would have hastened his clumsy foot-steps. For that new smell was the fragrance of maple sugar, the one thing in the world that bears consider even better than honey.

There was no thought of danger as Twinkly Eyes approached the shack. Though had he not been too sleepy to reason it out, he might have known that anything so delicious as maple sugar would never be left like that. Not if the bees could get at it! And then how was it that his mother had never taken a chance on anything so tempting?