Then he wandered back.
All that morning he hovered about the pond, showing himself openly.
In their big mud-and-stick strongholds the beavers held a council of war.

They were distinctly puzzled.

There were four enemies which they dreaded above all others: the otter, who destroyed their dams in the wintertime and brought death to them from cold and by lowering the water so they could not get to their food supplies; the lynx, who preyed on them all, young and old alike; and the fox and wolf, who would lie in ambush for hours in order to pounce on the very young, like Umisk and his playmates.

If Baree had been any one of these four, wily Beaver Tooth and his people would have known what to do.

But Baree was surely not an otter, and if he was a fox or a wolf or a lynx, his actions were very strange, to say the least.