through the roof of snow and clean blue ice, the
sharp winter sunshine made almost a summer's glow upon the brown bottom
of the pond. Beneath the ice the water was almost as warm now as in
summer, the pond being fed by springs from so deep a source that their
temperature hardly varied with the seasons. Here and there a bit of
water-weed stood up from the bottom, green as in June. But in the upper
world, meanwhile, the wind that drove over the ice and snow was so
intensely cold that the hardy northern trees snapped under it, and few
of the hardy northern creatures of the wilderness, though fierce with
hunger, had the fortitude to face it. They crouched shivering in their
lairs, under fallen trunks or in the heart of dense fir thickets, and
waited anxiously for the rigour of cold and the savagery of wind to
abate. Only down in the pond, in the generous spaces of amber water
beneath the ice-roof, life went on busily and securely. The wind might
rage unbridled, the cold might lay its hand of death heavily on forest
and hill; but the beavers in their unseen retreat knew nothing of it.
All it could do was to add an inch or two of thickness to the icy
shelter above them, making their peaceful security more secure.

The pond was a large one, several acres in extent, with a depth of fully
five feet in the deeper central portions, which were spacious enough to
give the beavers room for play and exercise. Around the shallow edges
the ice, which was fully fifteen inches thick beneath its blanket of
snow, lay solid on the bottom.

The beavers of this pond occupied a lodge on the edge of the deep water,
not far above the dam. This lodge was a broad-based, low-domed house of
mud, turf, and sticks cunningly interwoven, and rising about four feet
above the surface of the ice-roof. The dome, though covered deep with
snow, was conspicuous to every prowler of the woods, who would come at
times to sniff greedily at the warm smell of beaver steaming up from
the minute air-vents in the apex. But however greedy, however ravenous,
the prowling vagrants might be, the little dome-builders and
dam-builders within neither knew nor cared about their greed. The dome
was fully two feet thick, built solidly, and frozen almost to the
hardness of granite. There were no claws among all the ravening forest
kindred strong enough to tear their way through such defences. In the
heart of the lodge, in a dry grass-lined chamber just above high-water
level, the