Tearing at their house and filling the night with awful sounds
A moment later when the wildcat again peeped in at the vent, the house was quite empty. Then after a few more futile efforts to break through the frozen walls he went away, going from bush to bush, alert and watchful. Only the tracks remained to tell that the beavers had had so unwelcome a caller.
CHAPTER VI
HOW THE WINTER WENT
December came and went, and the first of the new year found the beavers snugly caught beneath a barricade of six inches of ice. The water from the little brook that fed their pond was very clear, so that the ice was as transparent as glass. This enabled them to see what was going on outside almost as well as they could before the ice had formed, and besides, it kept out the wind and the cold.
You may wonder at this, and think that no place on earth could be colder than the bottom of an ice-bound pond; but I am sure that a thermometer under water would have registered much higher temperature than one above, for if this were not so, the water would freeze solid to the bottom.
Did you ever have your playmates bury you in the snow just for fun? The snow looks cold, and seems uninviting, but once snugly tucked away in it, it is quite a warm white blanket. People of northern latitudes frequently save their lives, when caught out in a cold storm, by covering themselves in the snow. In the same manner the dog teams in Alaska pass the bitter cold nights of an arctic winter buried in the snow. So the ice made the beavers' pond snug in the same manner.