We came up to a patch of pickerel-weed and frightened a brood of half-grown sheldrakes that went rushing off across the water, kicking up a streak of suds and making a noise like the launching of a fleet of tiny ships. Heading into a little cove, we met a muskrat coming straight across our bows. A dip of the paddle sent us almost into her. A quicker dive she never made nor a more startling one, for the smack as she struck the water jumped me half out of the canoe. Her head broke the surface a dozen yards beyond us, and we followed her into the mouth of a stream and on to a hummock into which she swam as a boat swims under a bridge, or more as a train runs into a tunnel, for an arching hole opened into the mound, just above the level of the stream, through which she had glided out of sight. Hardly had she disappeared before she popped up again from deep under the mound, at the other side, and close to the canoe, starting back once more down-stream. She had dodged us. Her nose and eyes and ears were just above the water and a portion of her back; her bladelike tail was arched, its middle point, only, above the surface, its sheering, perpendicular edges doing duty as propeller, keel, and rudder all at once. As she made off the guide squeaked shrilly with his lips. Instantly she turned and came back, swimming round and round the canoe, trying to interpret the sounds, puzzled to know how they could come from the canoe, and fearing that something might be wrong inside the house. She dived to find out. By this time two young ones had floated into the mouth of the tunnel, thinking their mother was calling them, blinking there in the soft light so close that I might have reached them with my hand. Satisfied that the family was in order, the old rat reappeared, and no amount of false squeaking would turn her back. A few bends up the stream and we heard the sound of falling water at the beaver dam. Fresh work had been done on the dam; but we waited in vain for a sight of the workers. They would not go on with their building. One of the colony (there were not more than two families of them, I think) swam across the stream, and came swiftly down to within a few feet of us, when, scenting us, perhaps, he warped short about and vanished among the thick bushes that trailed from the bank of the stream.