He saw the flight of Wakayoo over the little meadow--he saw him die
again. He saw the glow of the Willow's eyes close to his own, heard her
voice--so sweet and low that it seemed like strange music to him--and
again he heard her terrible screams.

Baree was glad when the dawn came. He did not seek for food, but went
down to the pond. There was little hope and anticipation in his manner
now. He remembered that, as plainly as animal ways could talk, Umisk
and his playmates had told him they wanted nothing to do with him. And
yet the fact that they were there took away some of his loneliness. It
was more than loneliness. The wolf in him was submerged. The dog was
master. And in these passing moments, when the blood of the wild was
almost dormant in him, he was depressed by the instinctive and growing
feeling that he was not of that wild, but a fugitive in it, menaced on
all sides by strange dangers.

Deep in the northern forests the beaver does not work and play in
darkness only, but uses day even more than night, and many of Beaver
Tooth's people were awake when Baree began disconsolately to
investigate the shores of the pond. The little beavers were still with
their mothers in the big houses that looked like great domes of sticks
and mud out in the middle of the lake. There were three of these
houses, one of them at least twenty feet in diameter. Baree had some
difficulty in following his side of the pond. When he got back among
the willows and alders and birch, dozens of little canals crossed and
crisscrossed in his path. Some of these canals were a foot wide, and
others three or four feet, and all were filled with water. No country
in the world ever had a better system of traffic than this domain of
the beavers, down which they brought their working materials and food
into the main reservoir--the pond.