STRANGERS AT THE LAKE
After his return to the shimmering Mountain Lake, Shaggycoat allowed himself a few days leisure in which to enjoy the company of Brighteyes and get acquainted with the frolicsome young beavers. They were very shy of him at first, but finally came to know that he was the head of the lodge.
One crisp autumn morning when he went for a swim he discovered that the frost had painted all the trees on the hilltops, and seared the grasses and fronds along the bank of the lake. Then he knew that this idling must cease and hard work upon the dam begin.
The same day just at twilight he went far up-stream to see where he could get material for the dam. It had been badly washed by the spring freshet, and his lake had shrunk to about half its original size. He now planned to rebuild the whole structure, using the two old pines as foundation.
He had slipped out upon the bank, and was busily girdling a poplar, when a strange rhythmic splashing in the stream above fell upon his ear. His first impression was that he had heard something like it before, and somehow the sound filled him with a strange dread. He scrambled quickly to the water and slipped under a friendly screen of pickerel weed where he lay watching and waiting. He could hear the steady splashing plainer now. Then in an instant he remembered the terrifying scene of the drinking buck and the roaring "thunderstick," and his own precipitate flight. This splashing was like that the great duck had made when it came round the bend in the stream. He had hoped to leave that dread thing far behind, and here it was coming to his own home to seek him out, and perhaps destroy them all as it had the buck.
Then it came in sight and he saw that it was larger than many ducks with its two wings rising and falling making a bright splash in the water at each stroke.
Shaggycoat waited to see no more but fled swiftly and noiselessly toward his dilapidated lodge, but he occasionally stopped in a well screened spot to watch and listen for the coming of this monster.
It was not many minutes before he saw it enter the lake, and then he knew that his retreat had been discovered by the most subtle and destructive of all his foes, man.
Shaggycoat fled to the lodge and told Brighteyes all that he had seen and heard, and they counseled together as to what course to pursue.
Brighteyes was for fleeing at once, but Shaggycoat could not tear himself away from this spot that he had selected so carefully and the dam that had cost him so much labor, so he counseled waiting another day. They could be very wary and never show themselves except by night and if they kept to the burrows that he had dug along the bank, he felt quite sure that the stranger could not get at them, so he went back to watch these invaders of his stronghold, while Brighteyes hid the young beavers in the largest of the burrows near the dam. Although the water was low in the lake, it was deep here, and she felt quite secure.