One spring when the ice had gone out of the streams and ponds and the forest had put on new green leaves, the Eagle came down for a sudden visit. He stopped at the edge of a small lake, and there he saw an old Beaver woman digging in the mud. She bent low over her work. With her large, wrinkled hands she was making the clay into bricks for building a new wall for a Beaver house. The Eagle looked at her with scorn.
“I am hungry,” he said.
The Beaver woman raised her brown head out of the water, and looked up at the Eagle.
“The Beaver family would be hungry, too, sir,” she said, “if we did not work, all of us, to get a living.”
“But think of the kind of work you do,” screamed the Eagle, going up to the branch of a tree to sit so that he need not step in the mud.
“Look at your hands,” he went on. “They are not the hands of a person of rank, like myself, but are stained with earth. You live in houses that are made of mud. You cut down trees with your teeth, and eat weeds and bark. You were made only to wait on others such as myself.”
The Beaver woman went on with her work. When the Eagle had finished, she said:
“What do you want to eat?” she asked.
“We Beavers are humble, but there are no other workers in the forest like us. We deepen and dam the streams and make them more useful. Our work takes us into the mud. In the mud we must live, but we are honest, thrifty people, sir. What do you want to eat?” she asked.