Days followed in which Kazan’s desire to destroy his beaver enemies became the consuming passion of his life.  Each day the dam became more formidable.  Cement work in the water was carried on by the beavers swiftly and safely.  The water in the pond rose higher each twenty-four hours, and the pond grew steadily wider.  The water had now been turned into the depression that encircled the windfall, and in another week or two, if the beavers continued their work, Kazan’s and Gray Wolf’s home would be nothing more than a small island in the center of a wide area of submerged swamp.

Kazan hunted only for food now, and not for pleasure.  Ceaselessly he watched his opportunity to leap upon incautious members of Broken Tooth’s tribe.  The third day after the struggle under the water he killed a big beaver that approached too close to the willow thicket.  The fifth day two of the young beavers wandered into the flooded depression back of the windfall and Kazan caught them in shallow water and tore them into pieces.  After these successful assaults the beavers began to work mostly at night.  This was to Kazan’s advantage, for he was a night-hunter.  On each of two consecutive nights he killed a beaver.  Counting the young, he had killed seven when the otter came.

Never had Broken Tooth been placed between two deadlier or more ferocious enemies than the two that now assailed him.  On shore Kazan was his master because of his swiftness, keener scent, and fighting trickery.  In the water the otter was a still greater menace.  He was swifter than the fish that he caught for food.  His teeth were like steel needles.  He was so sleek and slippery that it would have been impossible for them to hold him with their chisel-like teeth could they have caught him.  The otter, like the beaver, possessed no hunger for blood.  Yet in all the Northland he was the greatest destroyer of their kind—­an even greater destroyer than man.  He came and passed like a plague, and it was in the coldest days of winter that greatest destruction came with him.  In those days he did not assault the beavers in their snug houses.  He did what man could do only with dynamite—­made an embrasure through their dam.  Swiftly the water would fall, the surface ice would crash down, and the beaver houses would be left out of water.  Then followed death for the beavers—­starvation and cold.  With the protecting water gone from about their houses, the drained pond a chaotic mass of broken ice, and the temperature forty or fifty degrees below zero, they would die within a few hours.  For the beaver, with his thick coat of fur, can stand less cold than man.  Through all the long winter the water about his home is as necessary to him as fire to a child.