bs who did not know any better than to walk about among
his fish.

Here, too, my father and mother taught us to fish; but it was a long
time before I managed to catch a trout for myself. It takes such a
dreadful lot of sitting still. Having found where a fish is lying,
probably under an overhanging branch or beneath the grass jutting out
from the bank, you lie down silently as close to the edge of the water
as you can get, and slip one paw in, ever so gradually, behind the fish,
and move it towards him gently--gently. If he takes fright and darts
away, you leave your paw where it is, or move it as close to the spot
where he was lying as you can reach, and wait. Sooner or later he will
come back, swimming downstream and then swinging round to take his
station almost exactly in the same spot as before. If you leave your
paw absolutely still, he does not mind it, and may even, on his return,
come and lie right up against it. If so, you strike at once. More
probably he will stop a few inches or a foot away. If you have already
reached as far as you can towards him, then is the time that you need
all your patience. Again and again he darts out to take a fly from the
surface of the water or swallow something that is floated down to him by
the current, and each time that he comes back he may shift his position
an inch or two. At last he comes to where you can actually crook your
claws under his tail. Ever so cautiously you move your paw gently half
way up towards his head, and then, when your claws are almost touching
him, you strike--strike, once and hard, with a hooking blow that sends
him whirling like a bar of silver far out on the bank behind you. And
trout is good--the plump, dark, pink-banded trout of the mountain
streams. But you must not strike one fraction of a second too soon, for
if your paw has more than an inch to travel before the claws touch him
he is gone, and all you feel is the flip of a tail upon the inner side
of the paw, and all your time is wasted.

It is hard to learn to wait long enough, and I know that at first I
used to strike at fish that were a foot away, with no more chance of
catching them than of making supper off a waterfall. But father and
mother used to catch a fish apiece for us almost every evening, and
gradually Kahwa and I began to take them for ourselves.

Then, as the daylight faded, the beavers came out upon their dam and
played about in the pool, swimming and diving and slapping the