It is hard to learn to wait long enough, and I know that at first I used to strike at fish that were a foot away, with no more chance of catching them than of making supper off a waterfall. But father and mother used to catch a fish apiece for us almost every evening, and gradually Kahwa and I began to take them for ourselves.
Then, as the daylight faded, the beavers came out upon their dam and played about in the pool, swimming and diving and slapping the surface with their tails with a noise like that of an osprey when he strikes the water in diving for a fish. But though they had time for play, they were busy folk, the beavers. Some of them were constantly patching and tinkering at the dam, and some always at work, except when the sun was up, one relieving another, gnawing their way with little tiny bites steadily through one of the great trees that stood by the water's edge, and always gnawing it so that when, after weeks of labor, it fell, it never failed to fall across the stream precisely where they wanted it. If an enemy appeared—at the least sign or smell of wolf or puma—there would be a loud ringing slap from one of the tails upon the water, and in an instant every beaver had vanished under water and was safe inside the house among the logs of the dam, the door of which was down below the surface.
Us bears they were used to and did not mind; but they never let us come too near. Sitting safely on the top of their piled logs, or twenty feet away in the water, they would talk to us pleasantly enough; but—well, my father told me that young, very young, beaver was good eating and I imagine that the beavers knew that we thought so, and were afraid, perhaps, that we might not be too particular about the age.
As the dusk changed to darkness we would leave the water and roam over the hillsides, sometimes sleeping through the middle hours of the night, but in summer more often roaming on, to come back to the stream for a while just before the sun was up, and then turning in to sleep till he went down again.
Those long rambles in the summer moonlight, or in the early dawn when everything reeked with dew, how good they were! And when the afternoon of a broiling day brought a thunderstorm, the delight of the smell of the moist earth and the almost overpowering scent of the pines! And when the berries were ripe—blueberries, cranberries, wild-raspberries, and, later in the year, elderberries—no fruit, nor anything else to eat, has ever tasted as they did then in that first summer when I was a cub.
CHAPTER III.
THE COMING OF MAN.
Summer was far advanced. We had had a week or two of hot, dry weather, during which we had wandered abroad, spending the heat of the days asleep in the shadow of cool brushwood down by the streams, and in the nights and early mornings roaming where we would. Ultimately we worked round to the neighborhood of our home, and went to see if all was right there, and to spend one day in the familiar place.
It was in the very middle of the day—a sultry day, when the sun was blazing hot—that we were awakened by the sound of somebody coming through the bushes. The wind was blowing towards us, so that long before he came in sight we knew that it was a bear like ourselves. But what was a bear doing abroad at high noon of such a day, and crashing through the bushes in that headlong fashion? Something extraordinary must have happened to him, and we soon learned that indeed something had.