My wife and her sister jointly own a cabin in northern Wisconsin—their grandfather built it—and we spend a lot of weekends there during the summer. One Friday evening we had just pulled into the driveway at the end of our drive up from St. Paul—it was dusk, and I had just turned my car headlights on a few minutes before—and we saw some dark shapes moving across our yard toward the adjoining woods. Bears! A mother and two cubs. The cubs headed up the nearest tree while the mother disappeared into the woods. Now, I know that black bears, although not usually dangerous, will fight to protect their cubs, so we wanted to make damn sure we didn't appear to be threatening them. We sat quietly in our car and waited until the cubs came down from the tree, and they too disappeared into the woods. Then we waited a couple more minutes, just to be sure they were gone (it was rapidly becoming too dark to see) before we got out of the car and started carrying our stuff into the cabin.