d the submarine entrance of the
lodge he noticed some stakes driven into the mud--stakes that had never
been there before. They seemed to form two rows, one on each side of his
course, but as there was room enough for him to pass between them he
swam straight ahead without stopping. His hands had no webs between the
fingers, and were of little use in swimming, so he had folded them back
against his body; but his big feet were working like the wheels of a
twin-screw steamer, and he was forging along at a great rate. Suddenly,
half-way down the lines of stakes, his breast touched the pan of a steel
trap, and the jaws flew up quick as a wink and strong as a vise.
Fortunately there was nothing that they could take hold of. They struck
him so hard that they lifted him bodily upward, but they caught only a
few hairs.

Even a scientific trapper may sometimes make mistakes, and when this one
came around to visit his trap, and found it sprung but empty, he thought
that the beavers must have learned its secret and sprung it on purpose.
There was no use, he decided, in trying to catch such intelligent
animals in their own doorway, and he took the trap up and set it in a
more out-of-the-way place. And so one source of danger was removed, just
because the Beaver was lucky enough to touch the pan with his breast
instead of with a foot.

A week later he was really caught by his right hand, and met with one of
the most thrilling adventures of his life. Oh, but that was a glorious
night! Dark as a pocket, no wind, thick black clouds overhead, and the
rain coming down in a steady, steady drizzles--just the kind of a night
that the beavers love, when the friendly darkness shuts their little
city in from all the rest of the world, and when they feel safe and
secure. Then, how the long yellow teeth gouge and tear at the tough
wood, how the trees come tumbling down, and how the branches and the
little logs come hurrying in to augment the winter food-piles! Often of
late the Beaver had noticed an unpleasant odor along the shores, an odor
that frightened him and made him very uneasy, but to-night the rain had
washed it all away, and the woods smelled as sweet and clean as if God
had just made them over new. And on this night, of all others, the
Beaver put his hand squarely into a steel trap.

He was in a shallow portion of the pond, and the chain was too short for
him to reach water deep enough to drown him; but now a new danger
appeared, f