The beaver has a rich birthright, though born in a windowless hut of mud. Close to the primitive place of his birth the wild folk of both woods and water meet and often mingle; around it are the ever-changing, never-ending scenes and silences of the water or the shore. He grows up with the many-sided wild, playing amid the enameled flowers, the great boulders,--the Ice King's marbles,--and the fallen logs in the edge of the mysterious forest; learning to swim and slide; listening to the strong, harmonious stir of wind and water; living with the stars in the sky and the stars in the pond; beginning serious life when brilliant clouds of color enrich the hills; helping to harvest the trees that wear the robes of gold, while the birds go by for the southland in the reflective autumn days. If Mother Nature should ever call me to live upon another planet I could wish that I might be born a beaver, to inhabit a house in the water. The autumn of the year when I watched the young beavers I had the pleasure of seeing some immigrants pass me _en route_ for a new home in the Moraine Colony. Of course they may have been only visitors, or have come temporarily to assist in the harvesting; but I like to think of them as immigrants, and a number of things testified that immigrants they were. One evening I had long been lying on a boulder by the stream below the colony, waiting for a gift from the gods. It came. Out of the water within ten feet of me scrambled the most patriarchal, as well as the largest, beaver that I have ever seen. I wanted to take off my hat to him, I wanted to ask him to tell me the story of his life, but from long habit I simply lay still and watched and thought in silence. He was making a portage round a cascade. As he scrambled up over the rocks, I noticed that he had but two fingers on his right hand. He was followed, in single file, by four others; one of these was minus a finger on the left hand. The next morning I read that five immigrants had arrived in the Moraine Colony. They had registered their footprints in the muddy margin of the lower pond. Had an agent been sent to invite these colonists, or had they come out of their own adventurous spirit? The day following their arrival I trailed them backward in the hope of learning whence they came and why they had moved. They had traveled in the water most of the time; but in places they had come out on the bank to go round a waterfall or to avoid an obstruction. Here and there I saw their tracks in the mud and traced them to a beaver settlement in which the houses and dams had been recently wrecked. A near-by rancher told me that he had been "making it hot" for all beavers in his meadow. During the next two years I occasionally saw this patriarchal beaver or his tracks thereabout. [Illustration: A BEAVER HOUSE IN WINTER]