THE BEST BUILDER
Out in the woods rain was pouring down steadily from the black sky. It beat against the leaves and trickled over the trunks of the trees and spattered into the pond. Now and then a flash of lightning glimmered over the water and twinkled in through the hole at the top of the little round house where the beavers lived.
From the outside this house looked like a heap of old brush-wood on a tiny island in the middle of the pond. But inside of it there was a little room, like a cave, with a smooth floor and an arched roof. Along the sides of this room there were five beds of leaves and grass. On one of these beds lay three baby beavers fast asleep in the dark.
The other beds were all empty. The big one at the end belonged to the father beaver. Before the babies were born in May he had gone away for the summer. He had started off with all the other old fathers in the beaver village to have a good time in the woods up the brook. They played and feasted on roots and plants, while the mother beavers stayed home to take care of the babies.
The other three beds belonged to the mother and to her two older children. On this rainy summer night they had gone out to eat their supper under the trees by the pond.
Suddenly the three baby beavers opened their eyes with a start, and rolled off their bed. They had been awakened by the sound of a loud whack on the water outside. It was a noise made by the mother’s flat tail as she dived down toward the door of her house. Her front hall was a tunnel that led from the bottom of the pond to the floor of the dark little room. Through this she went swimming, while the waves bubbled and splashed around her.
When the babies saw her round head poke up through the door in the floor they squeaked and ran to meet her. She was carrying a bundle of small sticks between her chin and her fore-paw. Each little beaver sat up on his hind-legs, with his tail propping him steady from behind. Then he took one of the sticks in his hands and began to nibble the bark with his new yellow teeth.