I was impatient to have a close view of a beaver cutting down a tree, and at last one came prospecting near where I was hidden. After a prolonged period of repose and possibly reflection he rose, gazed into the treetop, as though to see if it were entangled, then put his fore paws against the tree, spread his hind legs, sat back on his extended tail, and took a bite from the trunk. Everything in his actions suggested that his only intention was to devour the tree deliberately. He did most of the cutting from one side. Occasionally he pulled out a chip by leaning backward; sometimes he pried it out by tilting his head to the horizontal, forcing his lower front teeth behind it, then splitting it out by using his jaws as a lever. He was a trifle more than an hour in felling a four-inch tree; just before it fell he thudded the ground a few times with his tail and ran away. I became deeply interested in this colony, which was situated within two miles of my cabin, and its nearness enabled me to be a frequent visitor and to follow closely its fortunes and misfortunes. About the hut-filled pond I lingered when it was covered with winter's white, when fringed with the gentian's blue, and while decked with the pond-lily's yellow glory. Ruin befell it before my first visit ended. One morning, while watching from the boulder-pile, I noticed an occasional flake of ash dropping into the pond. Soon smoke scented the air, then came the awful and subdued roar of a forest fire. I fled, and from above the timber-line watched the storm-cloud of black smoke sweep furiously forward, bursting and closing to the terrible leaps of red and tattered flames. Before noon several thousand acres of forest were dead, all leaves and twigs were in ashes, all tree-trunks blistered and blackened. The Moraine Colony was closely embowered in a pitchy forest. For a time the houses in the water must have been wrapped in flames of smelter heat. Could these mud houses stand this? The beavers themselves I knew would escape by sinking under the water. Next morning I went through the hot, smoky area and found every house cracked and crumbling; not one was inhabitable. Most serious of all was the total loss of the uncut food supply, when harvesting for winter had only begun. Would these energetic people starve at home or would they try to find refuge in some other colony? Would they endeavor to find a grove that the fire had missed and there start anew? The intense heat had consumed almost every fibrous thing above the surface. The piles of garnered green aspen were charred to the water-line; all that remained of willow thickets and aspen groves were thousands of blackened pickets and points, acres of coarse charcoal stubble. It was a dreary, starving outlook for my furred friends.