Fur Magic by Andre Norton

Author:Andre Norton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 1965-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Raven’s Sing

Yellow shell looked over the terrain when the eagle warrior dropped him at the outlet of the lake. There was a stream that fed through a narrow gap and the beaver could see how a fall of rocks from above would dam it. But this was not a trouble his people had had to face before, for their task was usually the making, not the clearing, of dams.

He swam along the river outlet, nosing at both banks, trying to find some way to deepen the flow of water. But he could not see any method of tunnelling through the stone of the cliffs.

Since the present outlet was so banked with rock, he returned to the lake and began to explore its banks at this end. The eagle who had brought him grew bored and flew away, and Yellow Shell was left alone to face what seemed a hopeless task. But the beaver stubbornly refused to admit defeat.

In the end his forelegs and head suddenly broke through a screen of brush into a hole in the mountain cup. If all the basin had been formed by a volcano in action, then this crack had come at that time, with a later spread of molten rock to roof above it. When Yellow Shell padded into it, he found not the crevice he had first expected but a channel, which brought him, by a very dark way, out on the open mountain side on the other side of the basin wall.

He went back to the valley of the lake and squatted down at the edge of the water, eating a hearty meal of freshly stripped bark while he studied the bank by that fissure. It was a big job for one beaver working alone, but he could see no other possible way to provide the eagles’ lake with an emergency overflow exit. By mid-afternoon he was at work.

The bank of the lake must be undermined, cut through so that there was an open spillway into that crack. He dug with his forepaws until they were as sore as they had been from travel over stone. Rocks had to be loosened and pushed from side to side, then firmly embedded again to make a kind of funnel into the spillway.

He worked through the last of the daylight, keeping on into the night, stopping only now and then for a much needed rest or to eat again from the food about him. Now he had a raw gash in the earth, partly walled in with stones and such pieces of hard saplings as he could pound and wedge in for security. Mud mixed with broken brush was then plastered over that foundation, all to form a channel. The whole thing was the height of his body above the present level of the lake, and at that end he built another wall of small stones, to be easily shifted by the strong claws of the eagles when the need arose.

He was lying with his sore

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