The Wishing-Stone Stories

by Thornton W. Burgess

When the house was finished, Tommy thought that their labors would be at an end; and he was almost sorry, for he had learned to love work. But no sooner was the house completed than all the beavers went lumbering. Yes, sir, that is just what they did. They went lumbering just as men do, only they cut the trees for food instead of for boards.

They began at the edge of a little grove of aspens to which the pond now nearly extended. Sitting on his haunches with his broad tail for a seat or a prop, as his fancy pleased, each little woodsman grasped the tree with his hands and bit into the trunk, a bite above and a bite below, and then with his teeth pried out the chip between the two bites, exactly as a man with an ax would cut. It was slow hard work cutting out a chip at a time in this way, but sooner or later the tree would begin to sway. A bite or two more, and it would begin to topple over.

Then the little workman would thud the ground sharply with his tail to warn his neighbors to get out of the way, and he himself would scamper to a place of safety while the tree came crashing down. Tommy dearly loved to see and hear those trees come crashing to the ground.

No sooner was a tree down than they trimmed off the branches and cut the trunk into short lengths. These logs they rolled into the water, where, with the larger branches, they were floated out to deep water close by the house and there sunk to the bottom. What for? Tommy didn’t have to be told. This was the beginning of their food-pile for the winter.

So the days slipped away and the great food-pile grew in the pond. With such busy workers it did not take long to cut all the trees close by the pond. The farther away from the water they got, the greater the labor of dragging and rolling the logs, and also the greater danger from lurking enemies. In the water they felt wholly safe, but on land they had to be always on the watch for wolves, and bears, and lynxes.

When they had reached the limit of safety, the wise old leader called a halt to tree cutting and set them all to digging. And what do you think it was they were digging? Why, a canal! It was easier and safer to lead the water from the pond to the place where the trees grew than to get the logs over land to the pond. So they dug a ditch, or canal, about two and a half feet wide and a foot and a half deep, piling the mud up on the banks, until at last it reached the place where they could cut the trees, and roll the logs into the canal, and so float them out to the pond. Then the cutting began again.

Tommy was happy. Never had he been more happy. There was something wonderfully satisfying in just looking at the results of their labor and in feeling that he had had a part in it all. Yet his life was not all labor without excitement. Indeed, it was far from it. Had Tommy the Beaver been able to remember what as Tommy the Boy he had read, he would have felt that he was just like those hardy pioneers who built their homes in the wilderness.

Always, in that great still wilderness, death with padded feet and cruel teeth and hungry eyes sought to steal upon the beavers. So always as they worked, especially when on the land, they were prepared to rush for safety at the first warning. Never for a minute did they cease to keep guard, testing every breath of air with wonderfully sensitive noses, and listening with hardly less wonderful ears. On nose and ears the safety of a beaver almost wholly depends, his eyes being rather weak.

Once Tommy stopped in his labor of cutting a big tree so that he might rest for a minute or two. On the very edge of the little clearing they had made, the moonlight fell on an old weather-gray log. Tommy stared at it a moment, then resumed his work. A few minutes later he chanced to look at it again. Somehow it seemed nearer than before. He stared long and hard, but it lay as motionless as a log should. Once more he resumed his work, but hardly had he done so when there was the warning thud of a neighbor’s tail. Instantly Tommy scrambled for the water; and even as he did so, he caught a glimpse of that gray old log coming to life and leaping toward him. The instant he reached the water, he dived.

“What was it?” he whispered tremulously when, in the safety of the house, he touched noses with one of his neighbors.