surface
with their tails with a noise like that of an osprey when he strikes the
water in diving for a fish. But though they had time for play, they were
busy folk, the beavers. Some of them were constantly patching and
tinkering at the dam, and some always at work, except when the sun was
up, one relieving another, gnawing their way with little tiny bites
steadily through one of the great trees that stood by the water's edge,
and always gnawing it so that when, after weeks of labor, it fell, it
never failed to fall across the stream precisely where they wanted it.
If an enemy appeared--at the least sign or smell of wolf or puma--there
would be a loud ringing slap from one of the tails upon the water, and
in an instant every beaver had vanished under water and was safe inside
the house among the logs of the dam, the door of which was down below
the surface.

Us bears they were used to and did not mind; but they never let us come
too near. Sitting safely on the top of their piled logs, or twenty feet
away in the water, they would talk to us pleasantly enough; but--well,
my father told me that young, very young, beaver was good eating and I
imagine that the beavers knew that we thought so, and were afraid,
perhaps, that we might not be too particular about the age.

As the dusk changed to darkness we would leave the water and roam over
the hillsides, sometimes sleeping through the middle hours of the night,
but in summer more often roaming on, to come back to the stream for a
while just before the sun was up, and then turning in to sleep till he
went down again.

Those long rambles in the summer moonlight, or in the early dawn when
everything reeked with dew, how good they were! And when the afternoon
of a broiling day brought a thunderstorm, the delight of the smell of
the moist earth and the almost overpowering scent of the pines! And when
the berries were ripe--blueberries, cranberries, wild-raspberries, and,
later in the year, elderberries--no fruit, nor anything else to eat,
has ever tasted as they did then in that first summer when I was a cub.

CHAPTER III.

THE COMING OF MAN.

Summer was far advanced. We had had a week or two of hot, dry weather,
during which we had wandered abroad, spending the heat of the days
asleep in the shadow of cool brushwood down by the streams, and in the
nights and early mornings roaming where we would. Ultimately we worked
round to the neighborhood of our home, and went