berman. He was acting as
what is called a "timber-cruiser," roaming the remoter and less-known
regions of the wilderness to locate the best growths of spruce and
pine for the winter's lumbering operations, and for the present
his keen faculties were set on the noting of tree growths, and
water-courses, and the lay of the land for the getting out of a
winter's cutting. On this particular cruise the Boy--who, for all
the disparity in their years and the divergence in their views, was
his most valued comrade--had accompanied him with a special object
in view. The region they were cruising was one which had never been
adequately explored, and it was said to be full of little unnamed,
unmapped lakes and streams, where, in former days, the Indians had
had great beaver hunting.

When the sound of the falling tree came to his ears across the
night-silence, the Boy at once said to himself, "Beavers, at work!" He
said it to himself, not aloud, because he knew that Jabe also, as a
trapper, would be interested in beavers; and he had it in his mind to
score a point on Jabe. Noiseless as a lynx in his soft-soled
"larrigans," he ascended the half-empty channel of the brook, which
here strained its shrunken current through rocks and slate-slabs,
between steep banks. The channel curved steadily, rounding the
shoulder of a low ridge. When he felt that he had travelled somewhat
less than half a mile, he came out upon a bit of swampy marsh, beyond
which, over the crest of a low dam, spread the waters of a tranquil
pond shining like a mirror in the moonlight.

The Boy stopped short, his heart thumping with excitement and
anticipation. Here before him was what he had come so far to find.
From his books and from his innumerable talks with hunter and trapper,
he knew that the dam and the shining, lonely pond were the work of
beavers. Presently he distinguished amid the sheen of the water a
tiny, grassy islet, with a low, dome-shaped, stick-covered mound at
one end of it. This, plainly, was a beaver house, the first he had
ever seen. His delighted eyes, observing it at this distance, at once
pronounced it immeasurably superior to the finest and most pretentious
muskrat-house he had ever seen--a very palace, indeed, by comparison.
Then, a little further up the pond, and apparently adjoining the
shore, he made out another dome-shaped structure, broader and less
conspicuous than the first, and more like a mere pile of sticks. The
pond, which wa