With Baree it was different. He was still
uskahis, as Nepeese would have said. He still wanted mothering; he was
still moved by the puppyish yearnings which he had not yet had the time
to outgrow; and when night came--to speak that yearning quite
plainly--he had the desire to go into the big beaver house with Umisk
and his chums and sleep.

During this fortnight that followed Beaver Tooth's exploit on the dam
Baree ate his meals a mile up the creek, where there were plenty of
crayfish. But the pond was home. Night always found him there, and a
large part of his day. He slept at the end of the dam, or on top of it
on particularly clear nights, and the beavers accepted him as a
permanent guest. They worked in his presence as if he did not exist.

Baree was fascinated by this work, and he never grew tired of watching
it. It puzzled and bewildered him. Day after day he saw them float
timber and brush through the water for the new dam. He saw this dam
growing steadily under their efforts. One day he lay within a dozen
feet of an old beaver who was cutting down a tree six inches through.
When the tree fell, and the old beaver scurried away, Baree scurried,
too. Then he came back and smelled of the cutting, wondering what it
was all about, and why Umisk's uncle or grandfather or aunt had gone to
all that trouble.

He still could not induce Umisk and the other young beavers to join him
in play, and after the first week or so he gave up his efforts. In
fact, their play puzzled him almost as much as the dam-building
operations of the older beavers. Umisk, for instance, was fond of
playing in the mud at the edge of the pond. He was like a very small
boy. Where his elders floated timbers from three inches to a foot in
diameter to the big dam, Umisk brought small sticks and twigs no larger
around than a lead pencil to his playground, and built a make-believe
dam of his own.

Umisk would work an hour at a time on this play dam as industriously as
his father and mother were working on the big dam, and Baree would lie
flat on his belly a few feet away, watching him and wondering mightily.
And through this half-dry mud Umisk would also dig his miniature
canals, just as a small boy might have dug his Mississippi River and
pirate-infested oceans in the outflow of some back-lot spring. With his
sharp little teeth he cut down his big timber--willow sprouts never
more than an inch in diameter; and when one of these four or five-foot
sp