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Page 17
It was then that Umisk saw him, and his fat little body became suddenly
as motionless as a stone.
"Hello!" said Baree, wiggling his whole body and talking as plainly as
a human tongue could talk. "Do you care if I play with you?"
Umisk made no response. His three playmates now had their eyes on
Baree. They didn't make a move. They looked stunned. Four pairs of
staring, wondering eyes were fixed on the stranger.
Baree made another effort. He groveled on his forelegs, while his tail
and hind legs continued to wiggle, and with a sniff he grabbed a bit of
stick between his teeth.
"Come on--let me in," he urged. "I know how to play!"
He tossed the stick in the air as if to prove what he was saying, and
gave a little yap.
Umisk and his brothers were like dummies.
And then, of a sudden, someone saw Baree. It was a big beaver swimming
down the pond with a sapling timber for the new dam that was under way.
Instantly he loosed his hold and faced the shore. And then, like the
report of a rifle, there came the crack of his big flat tail on the
water--the beaver's signal of danger that on a quiet night can be heard
half a mile away.
"DANGER," it warned. "DANGER--DANGER-- DANGER!"
Scarcely had the signal gone forth when tails were cracking in all
directions--in the pond, in the hidden canals, in the thick willows and
alders. To Umisk and his companions they said:
"RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!"
Baree stood rigid and motionless now. In amazement he watched the four
little beavers plunge into the pond and disappear. He heard the sounds
of other and heavier bodies striking the water. And then there followed
a strange and disquieting silence. Softly Baree whined, and his whine
was almost a sobbing cry. Why had Umisk and his little mates run away
from him? What had he done that they didn't want to make friends with
him? A great loneliness swept over him--a loneliness greater even than
that of his first night away from his mother. The last of the sun faded
out of the sky as he stood there. Darker shadows crept over the pond.
He looked into the forest, where night was gathering--and with another
whining cry he slunk back into it. He had not found friendship. He had
not found comradeship. And his heart was very sad.
CHAPTER 7
For two or three days Baree's excursions after food took him farther
and farther away from the pond. But each afternoon he returned to
it--until the third day, when he discovered a new creek, and Wakayoo.
The creek was fully two miles back in the forest. This was a different
sort of stream. It sang merrily over a gravelly bed and between chasm
walls of split rock. It formed deep pools and foaming eddies, and where
Baree first struck it, the air trembled with the distant thunder of a
waterfall. It was much pleasanter than the dark and silent beaver
stream. It seemed possessed of life, and the rush and tumult of it--the
song and thunder of the water--gave to Baree entirely new sensations.
He made his way along it slowly and cautiously, and it was because of
this slowness and caution that he came suddenly and unobserved upon
Wakayoo, the big black bear, hard at work fishing.
Wakayoo stood knee-deep in a pool that had formed behind a sand bar,
and he was having tremendously good luck. Even as Baree shrank back,
his eyes popping at sight of this monster he had seen but once before,
in the gloom of night, one of Wakayoo's big paws sent a great splash of
water high in the air, and a fish landed on the pebbly shore. A little
while before, the suckers had run up the creek in thousands to spawn,
and the rapid lowering of the water had caught many of them in these
prison pools. Wakayoo's fat, sleek body was evidence of the prosperity
this circumstance had brought him. Although it was a little past the
"prime" season for bearskins, Wakayoo's coat was splendidly thick and
black.
For a quarter of an hour Baree watched him while he knocked fish out of
the pool. When at last he stopped, there were twenty or thirty fish
among the stones, some of them dead and others still flopping. From
where he lay flattened out between two rocks, Baree could hear the
crunching of flesh and bone as the bear devoured his dinner. It sounded
good, and the fresh smell of fish filled him with a craving that had
never been roused by crayfish or even partridge.
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