Half a dozen times he had had the opportunity to pounce on his prey, if he had been seeking prey.
But at no time had he shown the least desire to harm them.
It may be that the beavers discussed the matter fully among themselves.
It is possible that Umisk and his playmates told their parents of their adventure, and of how Baree had made no move to harm them when he could quite easily have caught them.

It is also more than likely that the older beavers who had fled from Baree that morning gave an account of their adventures, again emphasizing the fact that the stranger, while frightening them, had shown no disposition to attack them.

All this is quite possible, for if beavers can make a large part of a continent's history, and can perform engineering feats that nothing less than dynamite can destroy, it is only reasonable to suppose that they have some way of making one another understand.
However this may be, courageous old Beaver Tooth took it upon himself to end the suspense.
It was early in the afternoon that for the third or fourth time Baree walked out on the dam.

This dam was fully two hundred feet in length, but at no point did the water run over it, the overflow finding its way through narrow sluices.

A week or two ago Baree could have crossed to the opposite side of the pond on this dam, but now--at the far end--Beaver Tooth and his engineers were adding a new section of dam, and in order to accomplish their work more easily, they had flooded fully fifty yards of the low ground on which they were working.
The main dam held a strange fascination for Baree.