A soft wind blowing from the south and east brought the scent of the
invaders to Gray Wolf's nose when they were still half a mile away. She
gave the warning to Kazan and he, too, found the strange scent in the
air. It grew stronger as they advanced. When two hundred yards from the
windfall they heard the sudden crash of a falling tree, and stopped. For
a full minute they stood tense and listening. Then the silence was
broken by a squeaking cry, followed by a splash. Gray Wolf's alert ears
fell back and she turned her blind face understandingly toward Kazan.
They trotted ahead slowly, approaching the windfall from behind. Not
until they had reached the top of the knoll on which it was situated did
Kazan begin to see the wonderful change that had taken place during
their absence. Astounded, they stood while he stared. There was no
longer a little creek below them. Where it had been was a pond that
reached almost to the foot of the knoll. It was fully a hundred feet in
width and the backwater had flooded the trees and bush for five or six
times that distance toward the burn. They had come up quietly and Broken
Tooth's dull-scented workers were unaware of their presence. Not fifty
feet away Broken Tooth himself was gnawing at the butt of a tree. An
equal distance to the right of him four or five of the baby beavers were
at play building a miniature dam of mud and tiny twigs. On the opposite
side of the pond was a steep bank six or seven feet high, and here a few
of the older children--two years old, but still not workmen--were having
great fun climbing the bank and using it as a toboggan-slide. It was
their splashing that Kazan and Gray Wolf had heard. In a dozen different
places the older beavers were at work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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