Part 4

One of the children was killed by an otter before the summer was over, but I am glad to say that the other four grew up and were a credit to their parents.

The babies were not the only addition to the new city during that year, for about mid-summer another pair of beavers came and built a lodge near the upper end of the pond. It was a busy season for everybody--for our old friends as well as for the new-comers. The food-sticks which had been peeled off their bark during the winter furnished a good supply of construction material, and the dam was built up several inches higher, and was lengthened to the buttress-tree on one side, and for a distance of two or three rods on the other, so as to keep the water from flowing around the ends. As the water-level rose it became necessary to build up the floor of the lodge in order to keep it from being flooded; and that, in turn, necessitated raising the roof by the simple process of hollowing it out from within and adding more material on the outside. In the same way the lodge was made both longer and broader, to accommodate the growing family and the still further increase that was to be expected the following spring. More burrows were dug in the shore of the pond--you can't have too many of them--and a much larger stock of food wood was gathered, for there were six mouths, instead of two, to be fed through the coming winter. The father and mother worked very hard, and even the babies helped with the lighter tasks, such as carrying home small branches, and mending little leaks in the dam. The second pair of beavers was also busy with lodge and burrow and storehouse, and so the days slipped by very rapidly.

Only once that year did a man come to town, and then he did not do anything very dreadful. He was not a trapper, he was only an amateur naturalist who wanted to see the beavers at their work, and who thought he was smart enough to catch them at it. His plan was simple enough; he made a breach in the dam one night, and then climbed a tree and waited for them to come and mend it. It was bright moonlight, and he thought he would see the whole thing and learn some wonderful secrets.

The Beaver was at work in the woods not very far away, and presently he came down to the edge of the pond, rolling a heavy birch cutting before him. He noticed at once that the water was falling, and he started straight for the dam to see what was the matter. The amateur naturalist saw him coming, a dark speck moving swiftly down the pond, with a long V-shaped ripple spreading out behind him like the flanks of a flock of wild geese. But the beaver was doing some thinking while he swam. He had never before known the water to fall so suddenly and rapidly; there must be a very bad break in the dam. How could it have happened? It looked suspicious. It looked very suspicious indeed; and just before he reached the dam he stopped to reconnoitre, and at once caught sight of the naturalist up in the tree. His tail rose in the air and came down with the loudest whack that had ever echoed across the pond, a stroke that sent the spray flying in every direction, and that might have been heard three-quarters of a mile away. His wife heard it, and paused in her work of felling a tree; the children heard it, and the neighbors heard it; and they all knew it meant business. The Beaver dived like a loon and swam for dear life, and he did not come to the surface again till he had reached the farther end of the pond and was out of sight behind a grassy point. There he stayed, now and then striking the water with his tail as a signal that the danger was not yet over. It isn't every animal that can use his caudal appendage as a stool, as a rudder, as a third hind leg, as a trowel for smoothing the floor of his house, and as a tocsin for alarming his fellow-citizens.

The naturalist roosted in the tree till his teeth were chattering and he was fairly blue with cold, and then he scrambled down and went back to his camp, where he had a violent chill. The next night it rained, and as he did not want to get wet there was nothing to do but stay in his tent. When he visited the pond again the dam had been repaired and the water was up to its usual level. He decided that watching beavers wasn't very interesting, hardly worth the trouble it cost; and he guessed he knew enough about them, anyhow. So the next day he packed up his camping outfit and went home.

In the following year the population was increased to eighteen, for six more babies arrived in our Beaver's lodge, and four in his neighbors'. In another twelvemonth the first four were old enough to build lodges and found homes of their own; and so the city grew, and our Beaver and his wife were the original inhabitants, the first settlers, the most looked-up-to of all the citizens. You are not to suppose, however, that the Beaver was mayor of the town. There was no city government. The family was the unit, and each household was a law unto itself. But that did not keep him from being the oldest, the wisest, the most knowing of all the beavers in the community, just as his father had been before him in another town.

I don't believe you care to hear all about the years that followed. They were years of peace and growth, of marriages and homebuilding, of many births and a few deaths, of winter rest and summer labor, and of quiet domestic happiness. There was little excitement, and, best of all, there were no trappers. The time came when the Beaver might well say, as he looked around on the community which he and his wife had founded, that he was a citizen of no mean city.

But this could not last. A great calamity was coming--a calamity beside which the slow destruction of the former town would seem tame and uninteresting.

One bright February day the Beaver and his wife left their lodge to look for lily-roots. They had found a big fat one and were just about to begin their feast, when they heard foot-steps on the ice over their heads, and the voices of several men talking eagerly. They made for the nearest burrow as fast as they could go, and stayed there the rest of the day, and when they returned to their lodge they found--but I'm going too fast.

The men were Indians and half-breeds, and they were in high feather over their discovery. Around this pond there must be enough beaver-skins to keep them in groceries and tobacco and whiskey for a long time to come. But to find a city is one thing, and to get hold of its inhabitants is another and a very different one. One of the Indians was an elderly man who in the old days had trapped beaver in Canada for the Hudson Bay Company, and he assumed the direction of the work. First of all they chopped holes in the ice and drove a line of stakes across the stream just above the pond, so that no one might escape in that direction. Then, by pounding on the ice, and cutting more holes in it here and there, they found the entrances to all the lodges and most of the burrows, and closed them also with stakes driven into the bottom. Fortunately they did not find the burrow where our Beaver and his wife had taken refuge. They were about to break open the roofs of the lodges when the old man proposed that they should play a trick on one of the beaver families--a trick which his father had taught him when he was a boy, and when the beavers were many in the woods around Lake Superior. He described it with enthusiasm, and his companions agreed that it would be great fun. For a time there was much chopping of ice and driving of stakes, and then all was quiet again.

By and by one of our Beaver's children began to feel hungry, and as his father and mother had not come home he decided to go out to the wood-pile and get something to eat. So he took a header from his bed into the water, and swam down the angle. The door had been unbarred again, and he passed out without difficulty, but when he reached the pile he found it surrounded by a fence made of stakes set so close together that he could not pass between them. He swam clear around it, and at last found one gap just wide enough to admit his body. He passed in, and as he did so his back grazed a small twig which had been thrust down through a hole in the ice, and the watching Indians saw it move, and knew that a beaver had entered the trap. He picked out a nice stick of convenient size, and started to return to the lodge. But where was that gap in the fence? This was the place, he was sure. Here were two stakes between which he had certainly passed as he came in, but now another stood squarely between them, and the gate was barred. He swam all round the wood-pile, looking for a way out, and poking his little brown nose between the stakes, but there was no escape, and when he came back to the entrance and found it still closed his last hope died, and he gave up in despair. His heart and lungs and all his circulatory apparatus had been so designed by the Great Architect that he might live for many minutes under water, but they could not keep him alive indefinitely. Overhead was the ice, and all around was that cruel fence. Only a rod away was home, where his brothers and sisters were waiting for him, and where there was air to breathe and life to live--but he could not reach it. You have all read or heard how a drowning man feels, and I suppose it is much the same with a drowning beaver. They say it is an easy death.

By and by a hooked stick came down through a hole in the ice and drew him out, the gate was unbarred, the twig was replaced, and the Indians waited for another hungry little beaver to come for his dinner. That's enough. You know now what the parents found when they came home--or rather what they didn't find.

It would have taken too long to dispose of the whole city in this way, so the Indians finally broke the dam and let the water out of the pond, and then they tore open the lodges and all the burrows they could find, and the inhabitants were put to the--not the sword, but the axe and the club. Of all those who had been so happy and prosperous, the old Beaver and his wife were the only ones who escaped; and their lives were spared only because the Indians failed to find their hiding-place.

That was the end of the second city, but it was not quite the end of the beavers. A few miles up-stream they dug a short burrow in the bank and tried to make a new home. In May another baby came, but only one, and it was dead before it was born. Next day the mother died too, and the Beaver left the burrow and went out into the world alone. I really think his heart was broken, though it continued to beat for several months longer.

Just northeast of the Glimmerglass there lies a long, narrow pond, whose shores are very low and swampy, and whose waters drain into the larger lake through a short stream only a few rods in length. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years ago the narrow strip of land that separates them may possibly have been a beaver-dam, but to-day it is hard to tell it from one of Nature's own formations. In the course of his lonely wanderings the Beaver reached this pond, and here he established himself to spend his last few weeks. He was aging rapidly. Such a little while ago he had seemed in the very prime of life, and had been one of the handsomest beavers in the woods, with fur of the thickest and softest and silkiest, and a weight of probably sixty pounds. Now he was thin and lean, his hair was falling out, his teeth were losing their sharp edges and becoming blunt and almost useless, and even his flat tail was growing thicker and more rounded, and its whack was not as startling as of old when he brought it down with all his might on the surface of the water.

Yet even now the old instinct flamed up and burned feebly for a little while. Or shall we say the old love of work, and of using the powers and faculties that God had given him? Why should the thing that is called genius in a man be set down as instinct when we see it on a somewhat smaller scale in an animal? Whatever it was, the ruling passion was still strong. All his life he had been a civil engineer; and now, one dark, rainy autumn night, he left his shallow burrow, swam down the pond to its outlet, and began to build a dam. The next day, pushing up the shallow stream in my dug-out canoe, I saw the alder-cuttings lying in its bed, with the marks of his dull teeth on their butts. God knows why he did it, or what he was thinking about as he cut those bushes and dragged them into the water. I don't; but sometimes I wonder if a wild dream of a new lodge, a new mate, a new home, and a new city was flitting through his poor, befogged old brain.

It was only a few nights later that he put his foot into Charlie Roop's beaver-trap, jumped for deep water, and was drowned like his father before him. Charlie afterward showed me the pelt, which he had stretched on a hoop made of a little birch sapling. It was not a very good pelt, for, as I said, the Beaver had been losing his hair, but Charlie thought he might get a dollar or two for it. Whether he needed the dollar more than the Beaver needed his skin was a question which it seemed quite useless to discuss.

As we left the shack I noticed the tail lying on the ground just outside the door.

"Why don't you eat it?" I asked. "Don't you know that a beaver's tail is supposed to be one of the finest delicacies in the woods?"

"Huh!" said Charlie. "I'd rather have salt pork."

THE KING OF THE TROUT STREAM

IT was winter, and the trout stream ran low in its banks, hidden from the sky by a thick shell of ice and snow, and not seeing the sun for a season. But the trout stream was used to that, and it slipped along in the darkness, undismayed and not one whit disheartened; talking to itself in low, murmuring tones, and dreaming of the time when spring would come back and all the rivers would be full.

Mingled with its waters, and borne onward and downward by the ceaseless flow of its current, went multitudes of the tiniest air-bubbles, most of them too small ever to be seen by a human eye, yet large enough to be the very breath of life to thousands and thousands of creatures. Some of them found their way to the gills of the brook trout, and some to the minnows, and the herrings, and the suckers, and the star-gazers; some fed the little crustacea, and the insect larvæ, and the other tiny water animals that make up the lower classes of society; and some passed undetained down the river and out into Lake Superior. But there were others that worked down into the gravel of the riverbed; and there, in the nooks and crannies between the pebbles, they found a vast number of little balls of yellow-brown jelly, about as large as small peas, which seemed to be in need of their kindly ministrations. And the air-bubbles touched the trout eggs gently and lovingly, and in some mysterious and wonderful way their oxygen passed in through the pores of the shells, and the embryos within were quickened and stirred to a new vigor and a more rapid growth.

Not all of the eggs were alive. Some had been crushed between the stones; some were buried in sediment, which had choked the pores and kept away the friendly oxygen until they smothered; and some had never really lived at all. But one danger they had been spared, for there were no saw-mills on the stream to send a flood of fungus-breeding sawdust down with the current. And in spite of all the misfortunes and disasters to which trout eggs are liable, a goodly number of them were doing quite as well as could be expected. I suppose one could hardly say that they were being incubated, for, according to the dictionaries, to incubate is to sit upon, and certainly there was no one sitting on them. Their mothers had not come near them since the day they were laid. But the gravel hid them from the eyes of egg-eating fishes and musk-rats; the water kept them cold, but not too cold; the fresh oxygen came and encouraged them if ever they grew tired and dull, and so the good work went on.

Through each thin, leathery, semi-transparent shell you could have seen, if you had examined it closely, a pair of bright, beady eyes, and a dark little thread of a backbone that was always curled up like a horseshoe because there wasn't room for it to lie straight. But along the outside of the curve of each spinal column a set of the tiniest and daintiest muscles was getting ready for a long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull all together. And one day, late in the winter, when the woods were just beginning to think about spring, the muscles in one particular egg tugged with all their little might, the backbone straightened with a great effort, the shell was ripped open, and the tail of a brand-new brook trout thrust itself out into the water and wiggled pathetically.

But his head and shoulders were still inside, and for a while it looked as if he would never get them free. His tail was shaped somewhat like a paddle set on edge, for a long, narrow fin ran from the middle of his back clear around the end of it and forward again on the under side of his body, and with this for an oar he struggled and writhed and squirmed, and went bumping blindly about among the pebbles like a kitten with its head in the cream pitcher. And at last, with the most vigorous squirm and wriggle of all, he backed clear of the shell in which he had lain for so many weeks and months, and, weak and weary from his exertions, lay down on a stone to rest.

He had to lie on his side, for attached to his breast was a large, round, transparent sac which looked very much like the egg out of which he had just come. In fact it really was the egg, or at least a portion of it, for it held a large part of what had been the yolk. If you could have examined him with a microscope you would have seen a most strange and beautiful thing. His little body was so delicate and transparent that one could see the arteries pulsing and throbbing in time with the beating of his heart, and some of those arteries found their way into the food-sac, where they kept branching and dividing, and growing smaller and more numerous. And in the very smallest of the tiny tubes a wonderful process was going on--as wonderful as the way in which the oxygen fed the embryos through the shell. Somehow, by life's marvellous alchemy, the blood was laying hold of the material of the yolk, turning it into more blood, and carrying it away to be used in building up bone and muscle everywhere from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail. You might not have detected the actual transformation, but you could have seen the beating of the engine, and the throbbing rush of the little red rivers, all toiling with might and main to make a big, strong trout out of this weak and diminutive baby. And you could have seen the corpuscles hurrying along so thick and fast that at times they blocked up the passages, and the current was checked till the heart could bring enough pressure to bear to burst the dam and send them rushing on again. For the corpuscles of a trout's blood are considerably larger than those of most fishes, and they sometimes get "hung up," like a drive of logs sent down a stream hardly large enough to float it.

With a full haversack to be drawn upon in such a convenient manner the Troutlet was not obliged to take food through his mouth or to think about hustling around in search of a living. This was very fortunate, for the stream was full of hungry beasts of prey who would be very likely to gobble him up quick the first time he went abroad; and, besides, his frail little body was still so weak and delicate that he could not bear the light of day. So, instead of swimming away to seek his fortune, he simply dived down deeper into the gravel, and stayed there. For some weeks he led a very quiet life among the pebbles, and the only mishap that befell him during that time was the direct result of his retiring disposition. In his anxiety to get as far away from the world as possible he one day wedged himself into a cranny so narrow that he couldn't get out again. He couldn't even breathe, for his gill-covers were squeezed down against the sides of his head as if he were in a vise. A trout's method of respiration is to open his mouth and fill it with water, and then to close it again and force the water out through his gills, between his cheeks and his shoulders, about where his neck would be if he had one. It's very simple when you once know how, but you can't do it with your gill-covers clamped down. His tail wiggled more pathetically than ever, and did its level best to pull him out, but without success. He was wedged in so tightly that he couldn't move, and he was fast smothering, like a baby that has rolled over on its face upon the pillow. But at the last moment, when his struggles had grown feebler and feebler until they had almost ceased, something stirred up the gravel around him and set him free. He never knew what did it. Perhaps a deer or a bear waded through the stream; or a saw-log may have grounded for a moment in the shallow; or possibly it was only the current, for by this time most of the snow had melted, and the little river was working night and day to carry the water out of the woods. But whatever it was, he was saved.