The colonists gave up the hopeless task and that night fled down the mountain. Two were killed before they had gone a quarter of a mile. Along the trail were three other red smears upon the crusted snow; each told of a death and a feast upon the wintry mountainside among the solemn pines. Flat-top with five others finally gained the Wind River Colony, from which he had led his emigrants two years before. One day the following June, while examining the lilies in the lake, I came upon a low, freshly cut stump;--Flat-top had returned. A number of colonists were with him and all had come to stay. All sizable aspen that were within a few yards of the water had been cut away, but at the southwest corner of the lake, about sixty feet from the shore, was an aspen thicket. Flat-top and his fellow workers cut a canal from the lake through a low, sedgy flat into this aspen thicket. The canal was straight, about fourteen inches deep and twenty-six inches wide. Its walls were smoothly cut and most of the excavated material was piled evenly on one side of the canal and about eight inches from it. It had an angular, mechanical appearance, and suggested the work not of a beaver, but of man, and that of a very careful man too. Down this canal the colonists floated the timbers used in building their two houses. On the completion of the houses, the home-builders returned to the grove and procured winter supplies. In most cases the small aspen were floated to the pile between the houses with an adept skill, without severing the trunk or cutting off a single limb. The colonists had a few years of ideal beaver life. One summer I came upon Flat-top and a few other beaver by the brook that drains the lake, and at a point about half a mile below its outlet. It was along this brook that Flat-top's intrepid ancestors had painfully climbed to establish the first settlement in the lake. Commonly each summer several beaver descended the mountain and spent a few weeks of vacation along Wind River. Invariably they returned before the end of August; and autumn harvest-gathering usually began shortly after their return. Year after year the regularly equipped trappers passed the lake without stopping. The houses did not show distinctly from the trail, and the trappers did not know that there were beaver in this place. But this peaceful, populous lake was not forever to remain immune from the wiles of man, and one day it was planted with that barbaric, cruel torture-machine, the steel trap. A cultured consumptive, who had returned temporarily to nature, was boarding at a ranch house several miles away. While out riding he discovered the colony and at once resolved to depopulate it. The beaver ignored his array of traps until he enlisted the services of an old trapper, whose skill sent most of the beaver to their death before the sepia-colored catkins appeared upon the aspens. Flat-top escaped.