And the wolf went on, and soon he came to the village of the Beavers. The village of the Beavers was in a pond; but the pond was frozen over, because it was the cold-time; and the wolf walked on the ice and came to the hut where the grandfather beaver lived. The grandfather beaver was at home with his family, all sitting snug in the house; and the wolf knew that all the beavers were at home because he could smell them. So he came up close outside, and he called out to the grandfather beaver and said: “Let me in! Let me in!” The grandfather beaver knew the wolf’s voice, and he answered: “Where are thy manners, friend? Come to the door!” Now the door of a beaver’s hut is under the water; and the water was frozen over with thick ice; and the grandfather beaver knew that the wolf could not dig through the ice, so he laughed, and the other beavers laughed too. When the wolf heard the beavers laugh, he was very angry, and he snapped out and said: “I am coming in through the roof!” So he began to scratch and dig with his paws at the roof of the beavers’ hut. But the roof of the beavers’ hut was made of boughs well laid in and plastered with mud and gravel, and it was all frozen as hard as the ice on the pond. So when the wolf scratched, he only hurt his claws and made his pads very sore; so after a while he had to leave off and go home, limping on his sore pads. And when the beavers heard him leave off and go away, they laughed again, down in their snug house. So the wolf went home to his den, and he got no supper that night. [Illustration: The Wolf at the Beaver’s Hut] The next night he went out again and hunted by himself. And he was so hungry that he sat on his tail and howled at the moon. Gearrag, the young hare, heard him, and she peeped at him from behind a tuft of grass; but she was not afraid of a wolf that hunted alone, and she ran off to feed. And Mulcha the owl heard him; she perched in the fir tree overhead and cried out: “_Whoo-whoo-whoo!_ Who heeds a wolf that runs by himself? _Whoo-whoo-oo!_” And Broc the badger heard him. He came up out of his burrow at the roots of a big oak tree to go on his midnight prowl; he went on his way, grunting to himself: “I always go out without a mate, for that is the way of us badger-folk, but it is not the way for him; it is not the way of his folk. No, no!” By and by the wolf went on again; and he hunted all the night and found no trail. But towards morning he smelt the scent of dead game. And he nosed about and presently he found in a thicket the body of a hind that had been caught in a trap by its foot. A man had set the trap, but he was at home lame with frost-bite in his feet, and he could not go to his trap. The hind was dead, and Bran the raven had found it; Bran was sitting aloft on a bare branch, calling out “_Kroagh, kroagh, kroagh!_”