were four enemies which they
dreaded above all others: the otter, who destroyed their dams in the
wintertime and brought death to them from cold and by lowering the
water so they could not get to their food supplies; the lynx, who
preyed on them all, young and old alike; and the fox and wolf, who
would lie in ambush for hours in order to pounce on the very young,
like Umisk and his playmates. If Baree had been any one of these four,
wily Beaver Tooth and his people would have known what to do. But Baree
was surely not an otter, and if he was a fox or a wolf or a lynx, his
actions were very strange, to say the least. Half a dozen times he had
had the opportunity to pounce on his prey, if he had been seeking prey.
But at no time had he shown the least desire to harm them.

It may be that the beavers discussed the matter fully among themselves.
It is possible that Umisk and his playmates told their parents of their
adventure, and of how Baree had made no move to harm them when he could
quite easily have caught them. It is also more than likely that the
older beavers who had fled from Baree that morning gave an account of
their adventures, again emphasizing the fact that the stranger, while
frightening them, had shown no disposition to attack them. All this is
quite possible, for if beavers can make a large part of a continent's
history, and can perform engineering feats that nothing less than
dynamite can destroy, it is only reasonable to suppose that they have
some way of making one another understand.

However this may be, courageous old Beaver Tooth took it upon himself
to end the suspense.

It was early in the afternoon that for the third or fourth time Baree
walked out on the dam. This dam was fully two hundred feet in length,
but at no point did the water run over it, the overflow finding its way
through narrow sluices. A week or two ago Baree could have crossed to
the opposite side of the pond on this dam, but now--at the far
end--Beaver Tooth and his engineers were adding a new section of dam,
and in order to accomplish their work more easily, they had flooded
fully fifty yards of the low ground on which they were working.

The main dam held a strange fascination for Baree. It was strong with
the smell of beaver. The top of it was high and dry, and there were
dozens of smoothly worn little hollows in which the beavers had taken
their sun baths. In one of these hollows Baree stretched himself out,
with his eyes