"Away back in the ancient days, when our first fathers were able to talk with the animals, a beaver chief named White Fur, with his family and his relatives, built a big dam on this river. You can still see the remains of it, willow-grown, and it still backs up some water, a pond as large in extent as the camp of our tribe. But in the old days that dam extended from one side to the other of the valley, and the water it backed up was more than a pond: it was a small lake. Above here, there is a swift stream of white water rushing down the north side of the valley from great ice banks in the mountains. Well, just below its junction with the river is where White Fur built the dam. "Time passed. The sons of other beaver clans came and married the daughters of White Fur's clan, and took them off, and the sons of his clan went out and found wives and brought them home. The clan increased; the pond became full of lodges; the trees were cut in greater number each succeeding summer. So it was that, when the ice went out one spring, White Fur went around and around the pond, examining the remaining food trees, and saw that there remained only a few more than enough for the coming winter. It was no more than he expected; his last hurried look around, just before the freeze-up in the fall, had warned him that the food supply was getting small. [Illustration: THE BEAVER DAM] "He went home, and called a council, told what he had learned on his round, and then said:-- "'We must move out from here as soon as the ice breaks up next spring, and when we go we must know just where we are going; we cannot afford to lose time hunting for a good place to make a new home. Now, who will start out on discovery?' "'I will!' his eldest son, Loud Slap, first answered. He was so named because he could tail-slap the water louder than any one else in the whole gens. "Now, Loud Slap was White Fur's favorite son, and next to himself the best, the wisest dam-builder in the gens. The chief wanted to keep him at home, for going on discovery was very dangerous. But for very shame he could not order him to remain and let some other take the risk. So, with sinking heart, he said: 'You spoke up first, my son, so you shall be the first one to look for a new home for us. I have had a dream, and I want you to find out if it told me truth: Go down this river a little way beyond the edge of the pines, look north, and you will see a big ridge with a low gap in it. Go up through that gap, and down the other side, and you will soon come to a small branch of a good-sized stream; look at all the branches of that stream for a good home for us, and come back and tell us all about it. Make that crossing through the gap in the daytime, for then the most of our enemies, the mountain lion, the fisher and the wolverine, the wolf and the coyote, are generally asleep. Night is the time that they do their murdering work.' "'As you say, so I will do,' Loud Slap answered.