They
are built of plants--rushes, sedges, mosses, etc.--and ornamented
around the base with mussel-shells. It was always pleasant and
interesting to see them in the fall as soon as the nights began to be
frosty, hard at work cutting sedges on the edge of the meadow or
swimming out through the rushes, making long glittering ripples as
they sculled themselves along, diving where the water is perhaps six
or eight feet deep and reappearing in a minute or so with large
mouthfuls of the weedy tangled plants gathered from the bottom,
returning to their big wigwams, climbing up and depositing their loads
where most needed to make them yet larger and firmer and warmer,
foreseeing the freezing weather just like ourselves when we banked up
our house to keep out the frost.
They lie snug and invisible all winter but do not hibernate. Through a
channel carefully kept open they swim out under the ice for mussels,
and the roots and stems of water-lilies, etc., on which they feed just
as they do in summer. Sometimes the oldest and most enterprising of
them venture to orchards near the water in search of fallen apples;
very seldom, however, do they interfere with anything belonging to
their mortal enemy man.
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