The momentum that he got from the springs would usually carry him seventy-five or a hundred yards.
Shaggycoat thought it must be great sport, but the coaster should play upon his own pond, if he had one, and leave other people's undisturbed.
Finally a great fall of snow spread a soft, white, impenetrable blanket over the ice, and the beaver saw no more of his enemy until spring.
At last with their golden key the sun-beams unlocked the ice door over the lake and the denizens of beaver city were again free to go and come in the outer world. Then Shaggycoat swam a mile or so up-stream to look for elderberry wood. There was something in the pungent acid sap of the elderberry that he craved after the inactive life of winter. This was his spring medicine, a tonic that the beaver always seeks if he can find it, when the first great thaw opens the ice in the river.
He also was fond of the sweet maple sap and stopped to girdle a small soft maple on the way. He would remember that maple and come again. The sap would run freely during the day and freeze at night and in the morning the ice would be covered with syrup, white, transparent, and sweet as honey. This was a primitive sugar-making in which the beaver indulged.
He had satisfied his spring craving for both sweet and sour with maple and elder sap and was swimming leisurely down-stream toward his lake when he heard a sound on shore. Something was coming through the woods, for he heard the snow crackling. Shaggycoat kept very still and watched and listened. Nearer and nearer the sounds came and presently he saw the otter coming with long jumps, breaking the crust at every spring. They discovered each other almost at the same instant and the otter was all fight in a second. The fur stood up on his neck, his eyes snapped, and his lips parted showing a white, gleaming set of teeth.
He made straight for the beaver, covering the snow with great jumps and Shaggycoat saw that his best course was to meet his enemy in the water. On land he would be no match for so agile a foe. So he swam in mid-stream and clambered upon a low rock and waited for the attack. This was the hour for which he had longed all through the winter months, but now that it was at hand, he almost wished that he was back in his snug house on the lake. The otter was a third larger than he, and he swam so easily and his every motion was so quick and strong that the beaver feared him even before he had found how good a fighter he was.
He began by swimming about the rock several times, snapping at his adversary at every chance. This necessitated Shaggycoat's turning very fast and as he was not as quick as his foe, he got his tail nipped twice almost before he knew it. Then he concluded the rock was no place for him so made a clumsy spring for the otter's back. But when he fell in the water with a great splash, the otter was not where he had been a second before, but was glaring at the beaver from the rock which he had reached in some unaccountable manner.
While Shaggycoat was still wondering what to do next, the otter took matters into his own hands, by jumping squarely upon the beaver's back, and setting his teeth into his neck. It would have been a sorry day for poor Shaggycoat had not a projecting rock been near by, under which he plunged, scraping off his enemy, and thus saving his neck from being badly chewed, if not broken. He was getting decidedly the worst of it, so when the otter went back to the rock, Shaggycoat swam out from his hiding-place, and started for the lake at his best speed with his foe in hot pursuit.
What a swim that was and how they churned up the water in that running fight back to the lake. The beaver with his strong hind legs working desperately, doubling, twisting, and turning, snapping at his enemy whenever that agile fellow gave him a chance, and the otter gliding with swift, strong strokes, swimming over and under the beaver and punishing him at every turn. Foam and blood flecked the water and a line of bubbles marked their progress.