. He slept a great deal, and perhaps he was less
cautious. He was dozing on the great mud-and-brushwood dam of which he
had been engineer-in-chief, when Baree came out softly on a high bank
thirty or forty feet away. So noiseless had Baree been that none of the
beavers had seen or heard him. He squatted himself flat on his belly,
hidden behind a tuft of grass, and with eager interest watched every
movement. Beaver Tooth was rousing himself. He stood on his short legs
for a moment; then he tilted himself up on his broad, flat tail like a
soldier at attention, and with a sudden whistle dived into the pond
with a great splash.

In another moment it seemed to Baree that the pond was alive with
beavers. Heads and bodies appeared and disappeared, rushing this way
and that through the water in a manner that amazed and puzzled him. It
was the colony's evening frolic. Tails hit the water like flat boards.
Odd whistlings rose above the splashing--and then as suddenly as it had
begun, the play came to an end. There were probably twenty beavers, not
counting the young, and as if guided by a common signal--something
which Baree had not heard--they became so quiet that hardly a sound
could be heard in the pond. A few of them sank under the water and
disappeared entirely, but most of them Baree could watch as they drew
themselves out on shore.

The beavers lost no time in getting at their labor, and Baree watched
and listened without so much as rustling a blade of the grass in which
he was concealed. He was trying to understand. He was striving to place
these curious and comfortable-looking creatures in his knowledge of
things. They did not alarm him; he felt no uneasiness at their number
or size. His stillness was not the quiet of discretion, but rather of a
strange and growing desire to get better acquainted with this curious
four-legged brotherhood of the pond. Already they had begun to make the
big forest less lonely for him. And then, close under him--not more
than ten feet from where he lay--he saw something that almost gave
voice to the puppyish longing for companionship that was in him.

Down there, on a clean strip of the shore that rose out of the soft mud
of the pond, waddled fat little Umisk and three of his playmates. Umisk
was just about Baree's age, perhaps a week or two younger. But he was
fully as heavy, and almost as wide as he was long. Nature can produce
no four-footed creature that is more lovable than a baby be