CHAPTER X
TOTO ON A BOAT
True enough, Toto, the bustling beaver, was caught in a trap. Some one had set the trap in the woods, covering it over with dried leaves so it could not be seen. And an apple had been put near the trap, so that it would attract, or call by its smell, some animal. And Toto was that animal.
“Snap!” had gone the jaws of the trap, closing together on Toto’s leg, and the beaver boy was in great pain.
“Oh, dear! Ouch! Oh, let me go!” cried Toto, in beaver talk. But the trap did not let him go, and, pull as he did, Toto could not get loose.
After struggling for a while, pulling this way and that, and still feeling himself held fast, Toto grew quiet and lay down on the dried leaves.
He had pulled the trap out into plain view now, and he could see where the steel jaws were shut fast on his leg. Toto was glad of one thing, and this was that the jaws of the trap were not sharp and jagged like a barbed wire fence. Some traps, Toto knew, were made with iron teeth in them, and when they fastened on an animal’s leg they cut into it. This trap was an easier kind.
“If the trap wasn’t fast to a chain, and the chain fast to a stump, I could pull the trap along with me, and maybe Cuppy and my father could get it loose from my leg,” thought Toto. But the boy who had set the trap had known that any animal which got caught in it would try to pull it away, so he had made it fast to a stump. All the pulling Toto did would not loosen the trap.
“Well, I’m caught, and that’s all there is to it,” thought poor Toto. “I can’t get loose, but maybe if I could call some of the other beavers they could help me,” he went on. He knew that to call the other beavers, or to warn them of danger, he must flap his tail on the ground. If he had been near water he would have flapped it on the water, and it would have made a louder sound. But he was away from the water and had to do the best he could.