ent
down to the pond. There was little hope and anticipation in his manner
now. He remembered that, as plainly as animal ways could talk, Umisk
and his playmates had told him they wanted nothing to do with him. And
yet the fact that they were there took away some of his loneliness. It
was more than loneliness. The wolf in him was submerged. The dog was
master. And in these passing moments, when the blood of the wild was
almost dormant in him, he was depressed by the instinctive and growing
feeling that he was not of that wild, but a fugitive in it, menaced on
all sides by strange dangers.

Deep in the northern forests the beaver does not work and play in
darkness only, but uses day even more than night, and many of Beaver
Tooth's people were awake when Baree began disconsolately to
investigate the shores of the pond. The little beavers were still with
their mothers in the big houses that looked like great domes of sticks
and mud out in the middle of the lake. There were three of these
houses, one of them at least twenty feet in diameter. Baree had some
difficulty in following his side of the pond. When he got back among
the willows and alders and birch, dozens of little canals crossed and
crisscrossed in his path. Some of these canals were a foot wide, and
others three or four feet, and all were filled with water. No country
in the world ever had a better system of traffic than this domain of
the beavers, down which they brought their working materials and food
into the main reservoir--the pond.

In one of the larger canals Baree surprised a big beaver towing a
four-foot cutting of birch as thick through as a man's leg--half a
dozen breakfasts and dinners and suppers in that one cargo. The four or
five inner barks of the birch are what might be called the bread and
butter and potatoes of the beaver menu, while the more highly prized
barks of the willow and young alder take the place of meat and pie.
Baree smelled curiously of the birch cutting after the old beaver had
abandoned it in flight, and then went on. He did not try to conceal
himself now, and at least half a dozen beavers had a good look at him
before he came to the point where the pond narrowed down to the width
of the stream, almost half a mile from the dam. Then he wandered back.
All that morning he hovered about the pond, showing himself openly.

In their big mud-and-stick strongholds the beavers held a council of
war. They were distinctly puzzled. There