Whenever the members of the Beaver family were not sleeping, or eating, either they were gathering food by cutting down trees, or they were mending their dam.
The dam always had leaks here and there. And sooner or later every one of them had to be stopped, before it grew so big that the water would rush through it and tear a hole so great that the pond would be drained dry.
During his stay among the Beavers[p. 50] Timothy Turtle often crawled on top of the dam and stretched himself out and watched the Beavers at their task. He said that if there was one thing that he liked to see more than another it was "a gang of men working." But he complained that they ought to work in the daytime, when the sun was shining, because then it would have been "much pleasanter for him."
"Don't you want to help us?" asked the brisk fellow who had told Grandaddy Beaver that he thought Timothy Turtle ought to go to work.
That question actually made Timothy snort.
"Me work?" he snapped scornfully, as he glared at the speaker.
Everybody knew what he meant. And everybody knew how Timothy felt, too, when he edged along the dam and made a [p. 51] savage pass at the plump gentleman who had spoken to him.
Timothy began to climb the steep bluff.