“Humph! Yes, I think you’ll be big enough to help us gnaw down trees this summer,” said Daddy Beaver, as he looked at Toto’s orange teeth, which were almost as sharp and strong as the chisels the carpenter uses to smooth wood with which to build a house.
“Is it very hard to gnaw trees down?” Toto wanted to know.
“It must be easy,” said Sniffy, who was eating some aspen bark in the stick house. “See how easy I can strip this bark off this piece of log.”
“Gnawing bark is much easier than gnawing through the wood of a big, hard tree,” said Mr. Beaver. “You boys will learn that soon enough. But here, Toto, try some of this bark.”
So Toto and Sniffy gnawed the bark, and Toto told his brother more about the little girl he had seen. He thought she had tried to trap him, but we know Millie had done nothing of the sort. Only her skate had come off.
“And what do you think!” the little girl said, after she had reached home and was telling her mother about it that night at supper. “My skate slid right over the ice, under a bush, and a little beaver that was there pushed it out to me.”
“So the beavers are around here, are they?” asked Millie’s father. “I wondered what made a part of Winding River flow so slowly this fall. The beavers must have dammed it up. Well, the beavers are hard-working animals and do little harm. We won’t disturb them.”
The rest of that winter Toto lived in the stick house with the other beavers. He did not go out very often, for there is not much beavers can do until the ice and snow are gone. Toto went out on the frozen river a few times, however, but he did not again see the little girl on skates. And though Millie went out skating, she did not see Toto until later in the season. I’ll tell you about that after a while.