Umisk, for instance, was fond of playing in the mud at the edge of the pond.

He was like a very small boy.

Where his elders floated timbers from three inches to a foot in diameter to the big dam, Umisk brought small sticks and twigs no larger around than a lead pencil to his playground, and built a make-believe dam of his own.
Umisk would work an hour at a time on this play dam as industriously as his father and mother were working on the big dam, and Baree would lie flat on his belly a few feet away, watching him and wondering mightily.
And through this half-dry mud Umisk would also dig his miniature canals, just as a small boy might have dug his Mississippi River and pirate-infested oceans in the outflow of some back-lot spring.

With his sharp little teeth he cut down his big timber--willow sprouts never more than an inch in diameter; and when one of these four or five-foot sprouts toppled down, he undoubtedly felt as great a satisfaction as Beaver Tooth felt when he sent a seventy-foot birch crashing into the edge of the pond.

Baree could not understand the fun of all this.