“But I guess I can easily find my way back,” thought Toto to himself. “It’s pretty slippery walking, and I’d a good deal rather swim, but if I walk slowly I won’t slip.”
So he had walked along the ice until he was out of sight of his home, around one of the many curves in Winding River. That was the reason Mrs. Beaver could not see her little boy, and also why Toto could not hear his mother calling to him. He did not really mean to stay out when his mother did not want him to.
“Ah, that looks like something good to eat!” said Toto to himself, as he saw some straggly bushes growing on the bank of the river. The bushes had no leaves on, of course, for this was March, and winter was still king of the land. But Toto thought there might be bark on some of the twigs of the bushes, and bark was what the beavers mostly ate in winter. He was not hungry, but Toto, like other boys, was always ready to eat.
Toto walked slowly over the ice, and, standing up on his hind legs and partly sitting on his broad, flat tail, which was almost like the mortar trowel a mason uses, the little beaver boy began to gnaw the bark.
But he had not taken more than a bite or two before he stopped suddenly.
He looked about――there were no bees or wasps flying, which might have stung him. Still something had pricked him on his tongue. Then he looked more closely at the twig he had been gnawing.
“Oh, ho!” exclaimed Toto. “No wonder! This is a blackberry bush, and the thorns pricked me. I won’t gnaw any more of this bark.”
Toto backed away and started over the ice again, but he had not moved more than a few feet from the thick clump of blackberry bushes, growing on the edge of the river, when, all of a sudden, the little beaver boy heard a queer noise――several noises, in fact.
One was a tinkly sound, a sound Toto remembered to have heard when in summer a farmer was hoeing corn in a field near the river, and his hoe struck on a stone in the dirt. Then came the noise of a thud, as if something heavy had fallen on the ice. And after that sounded the voice of a little girl saying:
Of course Toto did not understand man, girl, or boy talk. But he knew what it was, for in the summer, as he played around his stick-home in the river, he had often heard the farmer and his hired men talking in the fields not far away. So, though Toto did not know what the little girl said, he knew it was the same sound the farmer and his men had made when they talked to one another. And Toto was afraid of men, and boys and girls, too, though I don’t believe any girl would have tried to hurt or catch the beaver, nice as is their fur.