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Then he made out a small dark spot in the front of the trail, evidently a beaver's head; and at last he detected that the little swimmer was carrying a bushy branch, one end held in his mouth while the rest was slung back diagonally across his shoulders. The Boy crept forward like a cat, his gray eyes shining with expectancy.
He waited his opportunity to slink out of camp to the woods. Here, in the running stream where ice was beginning to form, he hid his trail. Then he crawled into the heart of a dense thicket and waited. The time passed by, and he slept intermittently for hours. Then he was aroused by Grey Beaver's voice calling him by name. There were other voices.
The beaver's house is generally the last thing attended to. He likes to build this when the nights grow cold enough to freeze his mortar soon after it is laid. Two or three tunnels are dug from the bottom of the beaver pond up through the bank, coming to the surface together at the point where the center of the house is to be.
In other places this magnificence gave way to narrow channels between low structures which looked like beaver's huts, and we had to creep along through extremely narrow passages. The heat was perfectly bearable. Involuntarily I began to think of its heat when the lava thrown out by Snæfell was boiling and working through this now silent road.
I know of nothing in all the woods and fields that brings one closer in thought and sympathy to the little wild folk than to come across one of these canals, the water pouring safely through it past the beaver's handiwork, the dam stretching straight and solid across the stream, and the domed houses rising beyond. Once I found where the beavers had utilized man's work.
She cried that she had never been so insulted in all her life. Timothy Turtle merely said that she ought not to object. He explained that he had been giving her a rest for of course she couldn't cut down a tree, nor work upon the dam that held the water in the pond, while he clung fast to her tail. Well, this fat lady happened to be Brownie Beaver's mother.
He lurked in the forest, avoiding discovery and robbing the snares at the rare intervals when game was caught. He even robbed Grey Beaver's snare of a rabbit at a time when Grey Beaver staggered and tottered through the forest, sitting down often to rest, what of weakness and of shortness of breath. One day While Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny, loose- jointed with famine.
If the cutting is done on land, the butt of the long thinner length is seized by the beaver's teeth and with the weight resting upon the animal's back, is dragged along the ground over a specially cleared road and eventually deposited in the water.
And if Flossie did not understand the drift of these remarks at least she seemed to understand the kisses that punctuated them. But before very long he obtained more light on the Beaver's logic, and owned that it was singularly sound. They managed to put in a great many nice walks between that Sunday and Christmas.
Their task was easy, for the Apaches seemed to have forsaken them in spite of the Beaver's prophecy, and several days went by in peace, not a sign being discovered of the enemy.
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