of the dam in a hundred places and was already carrying off mud and
sticks, eating the dam away before his very eyes.

"I'll save the dam!" he cried. "You?" Grandaddy Beaver exclaimed.
"Why, what do you think you can do?" Being so old, he couldn't help
believing that other people were too young to do difficult things.

"Watch me and I'll show you!" Brownie Beaver told him. And without
saying another word he swam to the nearest spillway and began making
it bigger.

Sometimes he had to fight the freshet madly, to keep from being swept
over the dam himself. Sometimes, too, as he stood on the dam it
crumbled beneath him and he found himself swimming again.

How many narrow escapes he had that day Brownie Beaver could never
remember. When they happened, he didn't have time to count them, he
was working so busily. And if old Grandaddy Beaver hadn't told
everyone afterward, how Brownie saved the great dam from being swept
away, and how hard he had worked, and how he had swum fearlessly into
the torrent, people wouldn't have known anything about it.

To be sure, they had noticed that the water went down almost as
suddenly as it rose. But they hadn't stopped to think that there must
have been some reason for that. And when they learned that Brownie
Beaver was the reason, the whole village gave him a vote of thanks.

They wanted to give him a gold-headed cane, too. But they were unable
to find one anywhere.