Baree trembled as he listened.  In his throat he whined softly.  He edged to the sheer face of the rock.  He wanted to go; nature was urging him to go.  But the call of the wild was struggling against odds.  For in him was the dog, with its generations of subdued and sleeping instincts—­and all that night the dog in him kept Baree to the top of his rock.

Next morning Baree found many crayfish along the creek, and he feasted on their succulent flesh until he felt that he would never be hungry again.  Nothing had tasted quite so good since he had eaten the partridge of which he had robbed Sekoosew the ermine.

In the middle of the afternoon Baree came into a part of the forest that was very quiet and very peaceful.  The creek had deepened.  In places its banks swept out until they formed small ponds.  Twice he made considerable detours to get around these ponds.  He traveled very quietly, listening and watching.  Not since the ill-fated day he had left the old windfall had he felt quite so much at home as now.  It seemed to him that at last he was treading country which he knew, and where he would find friends.  Perhaps this was another miracle mystery of instinct—­of nature.  For he was in old Beaver Tooth’s domain.  It was here that his father and mother had hunted in the days before he was born.  It was not far from here that Kazan and Beaver Tooth had fought that mighty duel under water, from which Kazan had escaped with his life without another breath to lose.

Baree would never know these things.  He would never know that he was traveling over old trails.  But something deep in him gripped him strangely.  He sniffed the air, as if in it he found the scent of familiar things.  It was only a faint breath—­an indefinable promise that brought him to the point of a mysterious anticipation.

The forest grew deeper.  It was wonderful virgin forest.  There was no undergrowth, and traveling under the trees was like being in a vast, mystery-filled cavern through the roof of which the light of day broke softly, brightened here and there by golden splashes of the sun.  For a mile Baree made his way quietly through this forest.  He saw nothing but a few winged flirtings of birds; there was almost no sound.  Then he came to a still larger pond.  Around this pond there was a thick growth of alders and willows where the larger trees had thinned out.  He saw the glimmer of afternoon sunlight on the water—­and then, all at once, he heard life.

There had been few changes in Beaver Tooth’s colony since the days of his feud with Kazan and the otters.  Old Beaver Tooth was somewhat older.  He was fatter.  He slept a great deal, and perhaps he was less cautious.  He was dozing on the great mud-and-brushwood dam of which he had been engineer-in-chief, when Baree came out softly on a high bank thirty or forty feet away.  So noiseless had Baree been that none of the beavers had seen or heard him.  He squatted himself flat on his belly, hidden behind a tuft of grass, and with eager interest watched every movement.  Beaver Tooth was rousing himself.  He stood on his short legs for a moment; then he tilted himself up on his broad, flat tail like a soldier at attention, and with a sudden whistle dived into the pond with a great splash.