They dismounted at the first pond, and sure enough, despite the fact that it was turning out to be a fairly warm day, the pond was covered by a thin layer of ice. At one point, near the dam of sticks and mud along the bank, there was a broken, jagged hole about two feet across. In this hole the mountain man placed one trap, set, on a pole that angled down into the water and stuck in the mud on the bottom. The trap was well under water and above the trap he tied several bait sticks to the pole with rawhide.

“But won’t the beaver see the trap?” Francis asked.

“He’ll see it, all right,” came the answer, gruff and short. “But he won’t take notice, Mr. Tucket. At least not till he steps in the trap. Old Daddy Beaver goes more by his nose than his eyes, and if you smoked these traps right, he’ll think that piece of iron is another hunk of wood.”

So it went, pond by pond. It was nearly dark when they finished the fourteenth pond. Francis had done nothing but hand out traps and bait sticks, and yet he was exhausted—and more than ready to head back for the house and a warm fire.

Mr. Grimes headed back to the first pond.

“They’re good enough to let us trap ’em, Mr. Tucket,” he said. “The least we can do is keep up.”

“You mean there’ll be one trapped already?” Francis asked.

“More than one, or I miss my guess.”

And of course, he was right. The first pond yielded one, same with the second, nothing in the third, one in the fourth and so on. By midnight or so, with Francis all but falling off his mare, they had eleven prime beaver.

Mr. Grimes had reset all the traps, and although he didn’t say anything, Francis was living in a quiet horror that they might start all over again, and again, and just keep going until they had two hundred beaver.

But the trapper headed his sorrel back to camp. Once there, after the fire was going and coffee started, he went to work skinning the beaver. And Francis, who could think of nothing but crawling into his big buffalo robe and forgetting everything, was told to stay up and stretch the hides on the hoops.

By eight in the morning—with no sleep—they had finished the twenty-six beaver they had trapped.

“We sleep till noon, Mr. Tucket,” the mountain man announced. “Then we start over. And we’ve got more work now, because after this haul, we’ll have to move the traps.”

Francis didn’t hear the last words about more work. He was asleep.