ure. Ceaselessly he
watched his opportunity to leap upon incautious members of Broken
Tooth's tribe. The third day after the struggle under the water he
killed a big beaver that approached too close to the willow thicket. The
fifth day two of the young beavers wandered into the flooded depression
back of the windfall and Kazan caught them in shallow water and tore
them into pieces. After these successful assaults the beavers began to
work mostly at night. This was to Kazan's advantage, for he was a
night-hunter. On each of two consecutive nights he killed a beaver.
Counting the young, he had killed seven when the otter came.

Never had Broken Tooth been placed between two deadlier or more
ferocious enemies than the two that now assailed him. On shore Kazan
was his master because of his swiftness, keener scent, and fighting
trickery. In the water the otter was a still greater menace. He was
swifter than the fish that he caught for food. His teeth were like steel
needles. He was so sleek and slippery that it would have been impossible
for them to hold him with their chisel-like teeth could they have caught
him. The otter, like the beaver, possessed no hunger for blood. Yet in
all the Northland he was the greatest destroyer of their kind--an even
greater destroyer than man. He came and passed like a plague, and it was
in the coldest days of winter that greatest destruction came with him.
In those days he did not assault the beavers in their snug houses. He
did what man could do only with dynamite--made an embrasure through
their dam. Swiftly the water would fall, the surface ice would crash
down, and the beaver houses would be left out of water. Then followed
death for the beavers--starvation and cold. With the protecting water
gone from about their houses, the drained pond a chaotic mass of broken
ice, and the temperature forty or fifty degrees below zero, they would
die within a few hours. For the beaver, with his thick coat of fur, can
stand less cold than man. Through all the long winter the water about
his home is as necessary to him as fire to a child.

But it was summer now and Broken Tooth and his colony had no very great
fear of the otter. It would cost them some labor to repair the damage he
did, but there was plenty of food and it was warm. For two days the
otter frisked about the dam and the deep water of the pond. Kazan took
him for a beaver, and tried vainly to stalk him. The otter regarded
Kazan suspiciousl