CHAPTER V
TOTO SEES SOMETHING QUEER
Crouching down behind a green bush, Toto, the bustling beaver, kept very quiet and watched the tramps. He was not at all bustling now, however. He was not doing any work. Instead he was watching to see if the tramps were going to do any work.
But you know better what tramps are than did Toto. Tramps, as a rule, are men who don’t like to work. They are lazy, and wander about like gypsies, living as best they can, putting up an old shack or a bark cabin in the woods, as these tramps had done, boiling soup or stewing something in a tomato can over a fire in the woods. Those are tramps.
“I wish I could find Don to tell him,” thought Toto. “These must be the very tramps for whom he was looking.”
But though the beaver boy peered around among the trees he could not see Don. The dog was not in that part of the woods just then.
The tramps, however, were in plain sight. Some were stretched out on the soft moss beneath the trees. Others sat in the doorway of the rough, bark house they had built, and still others were cooking something over a fire.
“What a lot of hard work they have to do to get something to eat,” thought Toto. “They have to make a fire, and fires are dangerous. I don’t like them!”
Well might Toto say that, for he had heard his father and Cuppy tell of fires in the forest that, in dry seasons, burned beaver dams and beaver houses.
“We never have to make a fire when we are hungry,” thought Toto. “And we don’t have to hunt for tin cans, to put in them our things to eat. When I’m hungry all I have to do is to gnaw a little bark from a tree, or eat some grass or some lily roots from the pond. I wouldn’t like to be a tramp. That would be dreadful. I’d rather be a beaver.”
So Toto watched the tramps. He saw them make the fire bigger, and noticed many of the ragged men holding over it tin cans which, later, they ate from.