ne old beaver sitting stiffly erect on the crest of the
dam, a wary sentinel, sniffing the still air and scanning the perilous
woods; but he planned to make his final rush so swift that the sentinel
would have no time to give warning.

But the fierce little eyes of the bear, dark and glinting red, were not
the only ones that watched the beavers at their valorous toil. In the
juniper scrub, a short distance up the bank of the pond, crouched two
big gray lynxes, glaring down upon the scene with wide, round, pale
greenish eyes, unspeakably sinister. The lynxes were gaunt with famine.
Fired with the savage hope that some chance might bring a beaver within
reach of their mighty spring, they had crept down, on their great,
furred, stealthy pads, to the patch of juniper scrub. Here they had
halted, biding their time with that long, painful patience which is the
price of feeding--the price of life--among the winter-scourged kindreds.
Now, when the beavers had so considerately come over to the edge of the
woods, and appeared to be engrossed in some incomprehensible pulling and
splashing and mud-piling, the two lynxes felt that their opportunity had
arrived. Their bellies close to the snow, their broad, soft-padded feet
stepping lightly as the fall of feathers, their light gray fur all but
invisible among the confused moon-shadows, their round, bright eyes
unwinking, they seemed almost to drift down through the thickets toward
their expected prey.

Neither the bear creeping up from below the dam, nor the two lynxes
stealing down from above it, had eyes or thought for anything in the
world but the desperately toiling beavers. Their hunger was gnawing at
their lean stomachs, the fever of the hunt was in their veins, and the
kill was all but within reach. A few moments more, and the rush would
come, up from the fir thickets--the long, terrible spring and pounce,
down from the juniper scrub.

The work of repairing the breach was making good progress. Already the
roaring overflow was coming into subjection, its loud voice dwindling to
a shallow clamour. Then, something happened. Perhaps the wary sentinel
on the crest of the dam detected a darker shade stirring among the firs,
or a lighter grayness moving inexplicably between the bushes up the
bank. Perhaps his quick nostrils caught a scent that meant danger.
Perhaps the warning came to him mysteriously, flashed upon that inner
sense, sometimes alert and sometimes densely slumbering,