Above the moist, ferny floor of a densely shaded mountain slope of almost tropic richness, the cubs had noticed a squirrel barking in an alder thicket.

As they approached to find out what he was barking at, their noses began telling them that here was a whole colony of creatures they had never smelled before. Soon they could see that the ground was a network of their tiny trails, together with an occasional footprint that had been left by the bobcat family.

Not a movement was made above ground, but their sharp ears could detect scufflings and scrapings from underneath their feet. At the end of a fallen log Chinook found a dump of earth where a hole large enough for a woodchuck gave off that same strange scent. Merrily he started digging. Well, he dug and he dug and he dug! He was digging the roof from a branching tunnel, his nose telling him at every turn which way his prey was retreating. But still he dug and he dug. Several times he heard a tiny growling, and a snapping of angry teeth, but for half an hour he dug as fast as he could without once catching up with the fleeing rodent. But that only made the little bear the more determined.

Snookie, too, was digging, and he certainly didn’t mean to let her catch one before he did. The tunnel dwellers smelled a bit like muskrats and a bit like bunnies, but, had they only known it, they were mountain beaver, a species like nothing else at all, but called beavers by the Indians because of their soft fur. They look more like woodchucks than anything else, because naturally all this digging had developed the most powerful shoulder muscles.

Well, that whole oozy slope was fairly honeycombed with branching tunnels, and though the two cubs dug till they were tired, and no end covered with mud, the creatures kept escaping through their connecting runways. Somehow, it never occurred to the little bears to lie in wait at their exit holes as a bobcat might have done. They were too impatient.

Then, two feet underground, Chinook came to a great round hole almost large enough for him to have curled up in himself, and here indeed was a feast for the pair of them; for though the anxious parents had long since carried all the babies out of the nursery and dragged them to safety by the backs of their necks, opening off the nursery chamber were several clean, mud-plastered storerooms filled with fern roots, tender twigs and juicy bits of bark. Snookie remembered that she had seen several trees completely girdled by gnawing teeth. This, then, was the reason why.

After they had fed their fill, for a small sample of such hearty fare went a long way with them, the cubs gave up the chase and climbed into a tree where they could take a nap. When they awoke, the moon had risen. Down on the ground beneath, where before had been no sign of any living thing, now scampered mountain beaver by the dozen. Some of them were sitting up squirrel-like and eating, with a root or stalk held in their handlike paws. Others were carrying great bundles of green stuff in their jaws and dropping it beside their doorways, with stems all laid neatly side by side, as if to dry it out before storing it. Still others were rapidly rebuilding their depleted tunnels. But though the cubs promptly came down and tried to have more fun, again they had the same baffling experience. They caught not one mountain beaver.