er beavers," and he sank beneath the water like a stone.

Pau-Puk-Keewis thought he could hear Hiawatha and the hunters crashing
through the forest, and he waded out upon the dam, calling to the
beavers until one head after another popped up out of the water, and all
the beavers in the pond were looking at him.

"Your dwelling is very pleasant, my friends," said Pau-Puk-Keewis in an
entreating voice; "cannot you change me also into a beaver?"

"Yes," said Ahmeek, "let yourself slide down into the water and you
shall become as we are."

Pau-Puk-Keewis slid down into the water and his deer-skin shirt and
moccasins and leggings became black and shiny. His fringes drew
together into a clump, and became a broad black tail; his teeth became
sharp, and long whiskers sprouted out from his cheeks. He was changed
into a beaver.

"Make me large," he said, as he swam about the pond; "make me ten times
larger than the other beavers," and Ahmeek said: "Yes, when you enter
our lodge beneath the water you shall be ten times as large as any one
of us."

They sank down through the water, and Pau-Puk-Keewis saw great stores of
food upon the bottom. They entered the lodge and came up inside of it
above the surface of the water, and the lodge was divided into large
rooms, with ledges on which the beavers slept. There they made
Pau-Puk-Keewis ten times larger than any other beaver, and they said to
him: "Thenceforth you shall rule over all the rest of us and be our
king."

But Pau-Puk-Keewis had not been sitting long upon the throne of the
beavers, when he heard the voice of the beaver watchman call out from
among the water-lilies: "Hiawatha, Hiawatha!" There was a shout and a
noise of rending branches, and the water sucked out of the beavers'
lodge and left it high and dry; their dam was broken. The hunters jumped
on the roof of the lodge and broke a great hole in it, through which the
sunlight streamed as the beavers scuttled away through their doorway to
seek safety in deeper water. But Pau-Puk-Keewis was so big, and so
puffed up with heavy feeding and the pride of being a king, that he
could not crawl through the doorway with the others, but was helpless
before the hunters.

Hiawatha looked through the roof and cried: "Ah, Pau-Puk-Keewis, I know
you in spite of your disguise. I said that you could not escape me," and
Hiawatha and his hunters beat Pau-Puk-Keewis with their heavy clubs
until the beaver's skull was broken into pie