A Natural Dilemma - Guest writer Richard Cross

The Inn has few resident neighbors. Of the twenty or so houses scattered through the woods on the fifty acres that once was monastery land, only two are occupied year round. The remainder are holiday homes and rentals. We know more chipmunks by their first names than we do neighbors.
An apple tree grows by the side of the lane on our path to the lake. In the forest we have tried to sharpen our foraging skills gathering flowers, herbs, fungi

and berries and now this little tree is heavy with small, blotch-marked and misshapen apples, the kind that would never be sold in a store, but are so full of promise. For some time the tree has been denuded of fruit, totally clean, to a height of six feet or so, the apple bobbing reach of a standing bear. Now those above the bite line are ripening to lush red.
Will the bear climb the tree to take the rest?
Have the house owners left them for a ritual family apple picking over the Labor Day weekend?
We’re torn. We want to be good neighbors, both to the owners of the tree and to the bear, who surely needs to fatten up for the winter more than we. It would be a crime to let them over-ripen and fall, wasted. We delay (but only for a moment) and then, with stealth, we glean two large bags, twenty pounds, of the little beauties.
Ethical or not and with profuse apologies to neighbors and bear, they cooked up beautifully and seem just right as the evening air begins to gather a little chill bite.