Water was still pouring and gurgling down a steep beaver slide. This was ice-and-snow-covered except at two points where the swift splashing water dashed intermittently from a deep icy vent. While I was examining the beauty of the upbuilding icy buttresses by one of the vents, a water-ouzel came forth and alighted almost within reach. I stood still. After giving a few of his nodding bows, he reëntered the vent. Presently he emerged from the lower vent and, alighting upon an ice-coated boulder, indifferent to the gray sky from which scattered flakes were slowly falling and despite a temperature of five below zero, he sang low and sweetly for several seconds. Beaver do not surrender themselves to the confines of a house and pond until cold solidly covers the pond with a roof of ice. The time of this is commonly about the first of December, but the date is of course, in a measure, dependent upon latitude, altitude, and the peculiar weather conditions of each year. Most beaver return to the old colony, or start a new one by the first of September. They have had a merry rambling summer and energetically take hold to have the house and dam ready and a harvest stored by the time winter begins. But they are not always ready. Enemies may harass them, low water delay them, or an unusually early winter or even a heavy snow may so hamper them that, despite greatest effort, the ice puts a time lock upon the pond and closes them in for the winter without sufficient supplies. Early one October an early snowfall worked hardship in several colonies near my home. Fortunately the ponds were not deeply frozen, and those colonies which had aspen groves close to the water succeeded in felling and dragging in sufficient food-supplies for the winter. As snow drifted into the groves, many of the trees harvested were cut from the tops of snowdrifts, and thus left high stumps. The following summer a number of these stood four feet above the earth and presented a striking appearance alongside the sixteen-inch stumps of normal height. One of these storm-caught colonies fared badly. The inhabitants were obliged to go a long distance from the water for trees, and their all too scanty harvest was gathered with some loss of life. Apparently both wolves and lions discovered the unfortunate predicament of the harvesters, and lay in wait to catch them as they floundered slowly through the snow. The following winter these colonists tunneled through the bottom--perhaps the least frozen part of the dam--and came forth for food long before the break-up of the ice. The water drained from the pond, and after the ice had melted, the bottom of the pond revealed a torn-up condition as though the starving winter inmates had dug out for food every root and rootstock to be found in the bottom.