We're getting to that time of year when black bears start fattening up for the winter. And that means we can expect to start reading about perilous encounters with bears.

There are way too many of them in this, the most densely populated state in the union. Almost two years ago a black bear killed and partially ate a Rutgers student who was strolling in a state park.

It was shortly after that when the tale of the Token Bennie and the three bears began.

It has finally come to a conclusion: A court has concluded that yes, you can shoot a bear that's within a few feet of your wife as she prepares breakfast.

Bob Ehling can live with that.

The 79-year-old Ehling is a reader of mine from Sparta who used to attend my annual Labor Day "Bye-bye-bennies" bash in the role of the Token Bennie.

I called him around Labor Day last year to ask how he was doing.

Not good, he said. It seems that officials of the state Division of Fish and Wildlife were hounding him about three bears he'd shot the prior October.

The first to go was Mama bear, which had climbed a 15-foot pole up to his balcony one morning - with only a sliding glass door between it and Mrs. Ehling.

When she started screaming, Ehling got out of bed and grabbed his shotgun. He went out to the balcony through another door and found himself 15 feet away from a 300-pound bear.

"We had raccoons before, but I really didn't expect anything that big to come up and get on that deck," he recalled yesterday. "It would have ruined a lot of happy hours for me."

Ehling used his gun to preserve his happy hours - and his wife. But soon he saw another bear heading for the deck to check on Mama. Ehling dispatched that one too, as well as a sibling that showed up a little while later.

At this point the state should have given him a trophy for abating a nuisance. The section of Lake Mohawk where he lives has housing densities approaching urban levels. There's no room for giant carnivores.

The state officials who showed up thought otherwise. They charged him with three counts of hunting out of season and one count of discharging a firearm within 450 feet of a house.

A lesser man would have just paid the fines. But Ehling decided to dig in. That meant he had to face off with the state agents in Municipal Court.

Ehling was offered a deal that included a fine of just a few hundred dollars if he'd plead guilty. But he refused to take it.

"I don't want to try and appear like I'm some sort of holy roller, but I do believe in God," he said. "They wanted me to put my hand on the Bible and swear I was hunting and that's why I went out on the deck that day and shot those bears. I didn't want to lie under oath."

Ehling rejected the plea and decided to risk a trial. The odds were against him. As Fox News legal analyst - and New Jersey former Superior Court judge - Andy Napolitano put it at the time, our municipal courts have "a Russian rate of conviction."

Bob Ehling looks down from where a bear climbed up to his balcony in Sparta.

That was borne out when Ehling was convicted on all charges after two days of trial. He was fined $4,500.

At this point Ehling had already run up more than that in legal fees. Nonetheless he appealed the verdict to Superior Court.

Recently he got the results of that appeal. Sussex County Judge William J. McGovern affirmed the charges of shooting the cubs. But when it came to that big Mama Bear on the balcony, the judge rejected the state's argument that self-defense is not a valid argument against the charge of hunting out of season.

The judge said that the bear was "reasonably perceived as posing a risk of harm to his wife" and added that the "concern that perhaps the bear would use its muscle power and force and its weight break through the sliding glass door, I don't think that was fantasy."

No, it's common sense. Ehling still has to pay twice as much in fines as he would have paid if he took the original plea deal. But he said it was worth the money.

"There's a vast majority of people who can't afford a legal defense and they plead guilty because it's the cheap way out," he said. "People are caught in the legal bind and this whole justice system is an industry in itself."

It is indeed. You might call it a cottage industry.

Only this time the three bears didn't get into the cottage.

ADD - WHERE IS CHRIS CHRISTIE? Our governor keeps prancing on the national stage as if he were some sort of conservative. But as the saying involving another animal goes, the fish rots from the head down.

Why did the governor permit the animal activists to dictate policy while a man who's just trying to protect his home gets prosecuted by his administration?

If you have any deep thoughts on that, please share them.

ALSO: LATER GATOR. WE'RE NOT THE ONLY STATE THAT'S NUTS ABOUT WILD ANIMALS: Check this article about an alligator attacking a man swimming in a creek in Florida.

Just as with the bears in New Jersey, the idea of restoring alligators in Florida was to have some swimming around in wild places like the Everglades. But once they worked their way into civilized areas the state officials didn't have the nerve - or the brains - to treat them as the vermin they are.

PLUS - THE ORIGINS OF THIS FIASCO: Attorney Lewis Goldshore sent me an email about how the plan to restore the bear population began in the 1970s. I had recalled seeing black bears in cages at High Point State Park. That led Goldshore to email me the following:

Here is the introductory paragraph from Willis v. Department of Conservation & Economic Development, 55 N.J. 534 (1970) - the NJ Supreme Court's landmark decision that struck a mortal blow to the sovereign immunity doctrine:

"This action was brought on behalf of the infant Tomi Willis and her parents Per quod to recover damages for injuries suffered by the child on a visit to High Point Park, a recreational facility of the State. Apparently an admission charge was made between Memorial Day and Labor Day but not the rest of the year.

It was on November 6, 1966 that the child, age 3, sustained a traumatic amputation of her arm when she fed sugar to a caged bear. Two or three bears had been exhibited there since the 1930s. Plaintiffs asserted the State was absolutely liable for injuries inflicted by a wild animal thus contained and in any event that the State was negligent because it failed to erect and maintain suitable barriers around the cage, left the cage unattended, and permitted holes to remain in the screening