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. I left the scene to explore the entire burned area. After wandering for hours amid ashes and charcoal, seeing here and there the seared carcass of a deer or some other wild animal, I came upon a beaver colony that had escaped the fire. It was in the midst of several acres of swampy ground that was covered with fire-resisting willows and aspens. The surrounding pine forest was not dense, and the heat it produced in burning did no damage to the scattered beaver houses. From the top of a granite crag I surveyed the green scene of life and the surrounding sweep of desolation. Here and there a sodden log smouldered in the ashen distance and supported a tower of smoke in the still air. A few miles to the east, among the scattered trees of a rocky summit, the fire was burning itself out; to the west the sun was sinking behind crags and snow; near by, on a blackened limb, a south-bound robin chattered volubly but hopelessly. While I was listening, thinking, and watching, a mountain lion appeared and leaped lightly upon a block of granite. He was on my right, about one hundred feet away and about an equal distance from the shore of the nearest pond. He was interested in the approach of something. With a nervous switching of his tail he peered eagerly forward over the crown of the ridge just before him, and then crouched tensely and expectantly upon his rock. A pine tree that had escaped the fire screened the place toward which the lion looked and where something evidently was approaching. While I was trying to discover what it could be, a coyote trotted into view. Without catching sight of the near-by lion, he suddenly stopped and fixed his gaze upon the point that so interested the crouching beast. The mystery was solved when thirty or forty beavers came hurrying into view. They had come from the ruined Moraine Colony.