"I wonder if I can ever find a trap?" thought Noodle, as he was playing ball with Sammie Littletail, Bully, the frog, and others of his friends. "I guess I'll go look, when this game is finished," he said.
So, when the ball game was over, Noodle started off to find a trap. He asked his brother Toodle to come with him, but Toodle said he wanted to play tag with Billie and Johnnie Bushytail, the squirrel boys. So Noodle went off by himself.
As he was walking through the woods, looking on all sides for a trap, the way Grandpa Whackum had taught him to do, the little beaver boy saw the kind old bear who had helped Toodle pull the log into the water.
"Hello, Toodle," said the bear.
"If you please," said Noodle, "I'm not Toodle; I'm his brother."
"Oh, excuse me," said the bear, and he was just going back in the forest to sleep some more, when Noodle saw that the kind bear was about to step into a big bear trap that was right behind him. The bear hadn't seen it.
"Look out!" cried the beaver boy. "A trap! A trap!"
"Mercy me!" exclaimed the bear, and he stepped to one side just in time. "Say, that certainly is a trap," he went on. "Some hunter is after me. But I'll fool him." So the bear sprung the trap shut with a piece of wood, and left it there to show the hunter that some bears were smart. "And I'm glad you told me of the trap," said the bear to the beaver boy. "Otherwise, I might have been caught."
Then Noodle went on a little farther, looking for beaver traps, and all of a sudden he heard a snap, and something caught him by the paw, and there he was, held fast. He had found another trap, but before he had seen it he was caught in it!
"Oh, dear!" he cried, and he pulled and tugged, trying to get loose, but he couldn't. Oh, how badly he felt. After all his Grandpa's lessons to be caught this way. Wasn't it too bad?