architects paused for
breath, than there came an ominous crackling from far over to the
extreme left of the dam, where a subsidiary channel had offered a new
vantage to the baffled torrent. The crackling was mingled with a loud
rushing noise. Another section of the crest of the dam had been swept
away. A white curtain of foam sprang into the moonlight, against the
darkness of the trees.

II

While the brave little dam-builders had been battling with the flood,
out there in the wide-washing moonlight, hungry eyes had been watching
them from the heart of a dense spruce thicket, a little below the left
end of the dam. The watching had been hopeless enough, as the owner of
those fierce, narrow eyes knew it was no use trying to surprise a
beaver in the open, when the whole pond was right there for him to dive
into. But now when the new break brought the whole colony swimming madly
to the left-hand shore, and close to the darkness of the woods, those
watching eyes glowed with a savage expectancy, and began slowly,
noiselessly, steadily, floating nearer through the undisturbed
underbrush.

The tremendous thaw, loosing the springs and streams on the high flanks
of Bald Mountain, had washed out the snow from the mouth of a shallow
cave and rudely aroused a young bear from his winter sleep. As soon as
he had shaken off his heaviness the bear found himself hungry. But his
hunting thus far had not been successful. His training had not been in
the winter woods. He hardly knew what to look for, and the soft slumping
snow hampered him. One panic-stricken white rabbit, and a few ants from
a rotten stump, were all that he had found to eat in three days. His
white fangs in his red jaws had slavered with craving as he watched the
plump beavers at their work, far out on the brightly moonlit dam. When,
at last, they came hurrying toward him, and fell to work on the new
break within thirty or forty yards of his hiding-place, he could hardly
contain himself. He did contain himself, however; for he had hunted
beaver before, and not with a success to make him overconfident. Right
by the termination of the dam, where the beavers were working, the woods
came down thick and dark to within eight or ten feet of the water.
Toward this point he made his way patiently, and with such control of
every muscle that, for all his apparent clumsiness, not a twig snapped,
not a branch rustled, any more than if a shadow were gliding through
them. He saw o