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 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.