Each spring the freshets brought down mud and deposited it in the bottom of the lake until it was rich with rotting vegetable matter and decaying wood. Then the trapper came and caught the beaver, so that the dam fell into disuse. Finally it was swept away entirely, and a broad fertile meadow was left where there had been a woodland lake. Thus the beaver has made meadowland for us all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and we have shoved him further and further from his native haunts. To-day he has entirely disappeared from New England, with the exception of a few scattered colonies in Maine, where he is protected by his neighbors who have become interested in his ways. There is also a protected colony in Northern New York, and a few scattered beavers in the mountains of Virginia, but this industrious prehistoric American has largely disappeared from the United States, east of the Rocky Mountains. His home, if he now has any in the land he once possessed, is in Montana, where he lives in something of his old abandon. There he still makes new meadow lands for the cattle men and rears his conical house in his forest lake. Like the red man he has been thrust further and further into the wild; retreating before the shriek of the locomotive, and those ever advancing steel rails. But the debt that we owe the beaver will remain as long as we cut grass upon our meadow land, or appropriate the coat of this sleek American for our own. Thus the blazed trail is pushed on and on into the wilderness and the old is succeeded by the new. Animals, birds, and trees disappear, and brick blocks and telephone poles take their places. Though he will ultimately disappear from the continent, we shall always be heavily in debt to the beaver for the important part that he played in the colonial history of America. Like the red man he is a true American, for he was here before Columbus, and his pelt was the prize for which the wilderness was scoured. His only disqualification for citizenship in our great and growing country is that he is a four-footed American, while we, his masters, are bipeds. CHAPTER I FUGITIVES At the time when our story begins, Shaggycoat was a two-year-old beaver, fleeing with his grandfather from he knew not what. They had been so happy in the woodland lake, which was their home before the terrible intrusion, that the whole matter seemed more like a hideous dream than a reality.