A new generation of wild things had been born.

It was a season of Youth, with tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of little children of the wild playing their first play, learning their first lessons, growing up swiftly to face the menace and doom of their first winter.

And the Beneficent Spirit of the forests, anticipating what was to come, had prepared well for them.

Everywhere there was plenty.

The blueberries, the blackberries, the mountain-ash and the saskatoons were ripe; tree and vine were bent low with their burden of fruit.