"Wait awhile," said Ahmeek, looking at him cautiously. "I must ask the other beavers," and he sank beneath the water like a stone.
Pau-Puk-Keewis thought he could hear Hiawatha and the hunters crashing through the forest, and he waded out upon the dam, calling to the beavers until one head after another popped up out of the water, and all the beavers in the pond were looking at him.
"Your dwelling is very pleasant, my friends," said Pau-Puk-Keewis in an entreating voice; "cannot you change me also into a beaver?"
"Yes," said Ahmeek, "let yourself slide down into the water and you shall become as we are."
Pau-Puk-Keewis slid down into the water and his deer-skin shirt and moccasins and leggings became black and shiny. His fringes drew together into a clump, and became a broad black tail; his teeth became sharp, and long whiskers sprouted out from his cheeks. He was changed into a beaver.
"Make me large," he said, as he swam about the pond; "make me ten times larger than the other beavers," and Ahmeek said: "Yes, when you enter our lodge beneath the water you shall be ten times as large as any one of us."
They sank down through the water, and Pau-Puk-Keewis saw great stores of food upon the bottom. They entered the lodge and came up inside of it above the surface of the water, and the lodge was divided into large rooms, with ledges on which the beavers slept. There they made Pau-Puk-Keewis ten times larger than any other beaver, and they said to him: "Thenceforth you shall rule over all the rest of us and be our king."
But Pau-Puk-Keewis had not been sitting long upon the throne of the beavers, when he heard the voice of the beaver watchman call out from among the water-lilies: "Hiawatha, Hiawatha!" There was a shout and a noise of rending branches, and the water sucked out of the beavers' lodge and left it high and dry; their dam was broken. The hunters jumped on the roof of the lodge and broke a great hole in it, through which the sunlight streamed as the beavers scuttled away through their doorway to seek safety in deeper water. But Pau-Puk-Keewis was so big, and so puffed up with heavy feeding and the pride of being a king, that he could not crawl through the doorway with the others, but was helpless before the hunters.
Hiawatha looked through the roof and cried: "Ah, Pau-Puk-Keewis, I know you in spite of your disguise. I said that you could not escape me," and Hiawatha and his hunters beat Pau-Puk-Keewis with their heavy clubs until the beaver's skull was broken into pieces.
Six tall hunters bore the body of the beaver homeward, and it was so heavy that they had to carry it slung from poles and branches that rested on their shoulders. But within the dead body Pau-Puk-Keewis still lived, and thought and felt exactly as a man; and at last, with great effort he gathered himself together, left the beaver's body and, assuming once more his own form, he vanished in the forest.