Part 3

In it an old male beaver appeared. He swam easily downstream until within a few yards of me and then dived, apparently frightened. But presently he reappeared near by and dived again. While I was watching him, the youngsters edged a few yards nearer the river. To stop them and prolong the exhibition, I advanced close to them as though to grab them. At this the mother beaver struggled out of the water and set up a tumbling and rolling so close to me that I thought to catch her for examination. She dodged right and left and reached the water. While this was going on, the youngsters escaped into the river. Mother beaver instantly recovered, and as she dived gave the water a scornful whack with her tail.

The beaver is not often heard. He works in silence. When he pauses from his work, he sits meditatively, like a philosopher. At times, however, when, in traveling, beaver are separated from one another, they give a strange shrill whistle or call. Occasionally this whistle appears to be a call of alarm, suspicion, or warning. Sometimes when alarmed, a young beaver gives a shrill and frightened cry not unlike that of a lost human child. On a few occasions I have heard, while listening near a beaver house in the early summer, something of a subdued concert going on inside, a purring, rhythmic melody. They have a kind of love ditty also. This is a rhythmic murmur and sigh, very appealing, and it seems strangely elemental as it floats across the beaver pond in the twilight.

It is probable that beaver mate for life. All that is known concerning their ways indicates that they are good parents. The young are usually born during the month of April. The number varies from one to eight; probably four is the number most common. A short time before the birth of the youngsters, the mother invites the father to leave, or compels him to do so,--or he may go voluntarily,--and she has possession of the house or burrow, probably alone, at the time the youngsters are born. Their eyes are open from the beginning, and in less than two weeks they appear in the water accompanied by the mother. Often I have investigated beaver colonies endeavoring to determine the number of youngsters at a birth. Many times there were four of these furry, serious little fellows near the house on a log that was thrust up through the water. At other times from one to eight youngsters sunned themselves on the top of the rude home.

One May, in examining beaver colonies, I saw three sets of youngsters in the Moraine Colony. They numbered three, and two, and five. One mother in another colony proudly exhibited eight, while still another, who had been harassed all winter by trappers and who lived in a burrow in the bank, could display but one.

It is not uncommon for young orphan beavers to be cared for and adopted by another mother beaver. I have notes of three mothers who, with children of their own, at once took charge of orphans left by the death of a neighbor. One June a mother beaver was killed near my camp. Her children escaped. The following evening a new mother, with four children of her own adopted them and moved from her own home, a quarter of a mile distant, to the home of her dead neighbor and there brought all the youngsters up.

Beaver have great fun while growing up. Posted on the edge of the house, they nose and push each other about, ofttimes tumbling one another into the water. In the water they send a thousand merry ripples to the shore, as they race, wrestle, and dive in the pond. They play on the house, in the pond, and in the sunshine and shadows of the trees along the shore.

Beaver are mature the third summer of their lives, and at this time they commonly leave the parental home, pair, and begin life for themselves. There are stories to the effect that the parents of the youthful home-builders accompany the children to new scenes, help them select a building-site, and assist in the construction of the new house and dam. After this the parents return home. This probably is occasionally true. Anyway I once saw this program fairly well carried out, and at another time in a limited manner.

The beaver is practical, peaceful, and industrious. He builds a permanent house and keeps it clean and in repair. Beside it he stores food-supply for the long winter. He takes thought for the morrow. These and other commendable characteristics give him a place of honor among the hordes of homeless, hand-to-mouth folk of the wild. During the winter he has but little to do except bathe and eat his two or three meals a day from the food he has stored in the autumn. Towards spring, when his wild neighbors are lean, hungry, and cold, he is fat and comfortable. In the spring he emerges from the house, but then his only work is occasionally to cut a twig for food. In the summer he plays tourist. He visits other colonies, and wanders up and down streams, going miles from home. In the late summer or early autumn he returns, makes repairs, and harvests food for winter.

The beaver is a valuable conservationist, but there are localities in which he cannot be tolerated. Although dead wood is rarely cut by the beaver, many a homesteader has been disturbed by his cutting off and carrying away green fence posts. Recently beaver have returned to a few localities and got themselves into bad repute by felling fruit trees. Occasionally, too, in the West, they have lost caste by persistently damming an irrigation-ditch and diverting the water, despite the fact that a court has given both the title and the right to this water to some one else a mile or so down the ditch.

In all logging operations, beaver never fail--where there is opportunity--to cut trees upstream and float them down with the current. Tree-cutting is an interesting phase of beaver life. A beaver will go waddling dully from the water to a tree he is about to cut down. All will look about for enemies; one may be wise enough--but the majority will not do so--to look upward to see if the tree about to be felled is entangled at the top. All appear to choose a comfortable place on which to squat or sit while cutting.

Commonly when the tree begins to creak and settle, the beaver who has done the cutting thuds the ground a few times with his tail, and then scampers away, usually going into the water. Sometimes the near-by workers give the thudding signal in advance of the one who is doing the cutting. Now and then no warning signal is given, and the logging beaver occasionally fells his tree upon other workers with a fatal result. As with axe-men, the beaver doing the cutting is on rare occasions caught and killed by the tree which he fells.

Rarely does the beaver give any thought to the direction in which the tree will fall. In a few instances, however, I have seen what appeared to be an effort on the part of the beaver to fell a tree in a given direction. From an uncomfortable place he cut the lowest notch on the side on which he probably wanted the tree to fall. On one of these occasions, the aspen tree selected stood in an almost complete circle of pines. The beaver took pains to cut the first and lowest notch in this tree directly opposite the opening in the pines. I have seen a number of instances of this kind. And he will sometimes leave the windward side of a grove on a windy day, and cut on the leeward, so that the felled trees are not entangled in falling.

Rarely does more than one beaver work at the same time at a tree. In some instances, however, if the tree be large, two or even more beaver will work at once. But after the tree has been felled, ofttimes three or four beaver will unite to roll a large section to the water. In doing this, some may stand with paws against it and push, and others may put their sides or hips against it. On land, as in the water, small limb-covered trees are dragged butt foremost so as to meet the least resistance. Sometimes the beaver drags walking backwards; at other times he is alongside the tree carrying and dragging it forward.

Early explorers say that beaver do most of their work at night. In this they are practically unanimous. However, in Long's Journal, written in 1820, beaver were reported at work in broad daylight. A few other early writers have also mentioned this daylight work. They probably work in darkness because that is the safest time for them to be out. During dozens of my visits to secluded localities,--localities which had not been visited by man, and certainly not by trappers,--I found beaver freely at work in broad daylight. I am inclined to think that day work was common during primeval times; and that, although the beaver now do and long have done most of their work at night, in localities where they are not in danger from man, they work freely during daytime.

Both the Indians and the trappers have a story that old beaver who will not work are driven from the colony and become morose outcasts, slowly living away the days by themselves in a burrow. I have no evidence to verify this statement, and am inclined to think that solitary beaver occasionally found in abandoned colony-sites and elsewhere are simply unfortunates, perhaps weighed down with age, unable to travel far, with teeth worn, the mate dead, without ambition to try, or without strength to emigrate. It is more likely that these aged ones voluntarily and sadly withdraw from their cheerful and industrious fellows, to spend their closing days alone. Although, too, there were among Indians and trappers stories of beaver slaves, I am without material for a story of this kind.

The beaver is peaceful. Although the males occasionally fight among themselves, the beaver avoids fighting, and plans his life so as to escape without it. Now and then in the water one closes with an otter in a desperate struggle, and when cornered on land one will sometimes turn upon a preying foe with such ferocity and skill that his assailant is glad to retreat. On two occasions I have known a beaver to kill a bobcat.

Beaver are not equally alert. In many cases this difference may be due to a difference in age or experience. Beaver have been caught with scars which show that they have been trapped before, a few even having lost two feet in escaping from traps. On the other hand, skillful trappers have found themselves after repeated trials, unable to catch a single beaver from a populous colony. Sometimes in colonies of this kind, the beaver even audaciously turned the traps upside down or contemptuously covered them with mud.

Nor is the work of all beaver alike. The ditches which one beaver digs, the house one builds, or the dam one makes, may be executed with much greater speed and with more skill than those of a neighboring beaver. Many houses are crude and unshapely masses, many dams haphazard in appearance, while a few canals are crooked and uneven. But the majority do good work, and are quick to take advantage of opportunity, quick to adjust themselves to new conditions, or to use the best means that is available. Beaver probably have made numbers of changes in their manners, habits, and customs, and those changes undoubtedly have enabled them to survive relentless pursuit, and to leave descendants upon the earth.

The industry of the beaver is proverbial, and it is to the credit of any person to have the distinction of working "like a beaver." Most people have the idea that the beaver is always at work; not that he necessarily accomplishes much at this work, but that he is always doing something. The fact remains that under normal conditions he works less than half the time, and it is not uncommon for him to spend a large share of each year in what might be called play. He is physically capable of intense and prolonged application, and, being an intelligent worker, even though he works less than half the time he accomplishes large results.

The Beaver Past and Present

All Indian tribes in North America appear to have had one or more legends concerning the beaver. Most of these legends credit him with being a worthy and industrious fellow, and the Cherokees are said to trace their origin to a sacred and practical beaver. Many of the tribes had a legend which told that long, long ago the Great Waters surged around a shoreless world. These waters were peopled with beaver, beaver of a gigantic size. These, along with the Great Spirit, dived and brought up quantities of mud and shaped this into the hills and dales, the mountains where the cataracts plunged and sang, and all the caves and cañons. The scattered boulders and broken crags upon the earth were the missiles thrown by evil spirits, who in the beginning of things endeavored to hinder and prevent the constructive work of creation.

The beaver has been found in fossil both in Europe and in America. Remnants of the dugout and the teeth of beaver, together with rude stone implements of primitive man, have been found in England. Near Albany, New York, gnawed beaver wood and the remains of a mastodon were dug up from about forty feet below the surface in sediment and river ooze. Fossil beaver were of enormous size.

Coming down to comparatively modern times, the animal as we now know him appears to have been distributed over almost all Asia, Europe, and North America. There was no marked difference in the individuals that inhabited these three continents. The beaver is probably extinct in Europe, but in July, 1900, I found a piece of wood floating in the Seine that had been recently gnawed by a beaver. At this time I was assured that not even a tame beaver could be found in Europe. It is still found in parts of Siberia and Central Asia. That form which inhabits South America is very unlike those in the Northern Hemisphere, and may be called a link between the muskrat and the beaver.

Reference is made to the beaver in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Herodotus makes repeated mention of it. Pliny also gives a brief account of this animal. In Germany, in 1103, the right of hunting beaver was conferred along with other special hunting privileges; and a bull of Pope Lucius III, in 1182, gave to a monastery all the beaver found within the bounds of its property. A royal edict issued at Berlin in March, 1725, insisted upon the protection of beaver.

Before the white man came, beaver--Castor canadensis--were widely distributed over North America, perhaps more widely than any other animal. The beaver population was large, and probably was densest to the southwest of Hudson Bay and around the headwaters of the Missouri and Columbia rivers. Their scantiest population areas in the United States appear to have been southern Florida and the lower Mississippi Valley. This scantiness is attributed by early explorers to the aggressiveness of the alligators. All the southern half of Mexico appears to have been without a beaver population; but elsewhere over North America, wherever there were deciduous trees and water, and in a few treeless places where there were only water and grass, the beaver were found. Along the thousands of smaller streams throughout North America there was colony after colony, dam after dam, in close succession, as many as three hundred beaver ponds to the mile. Lewis and Clark mention the fact that near the Three Forks, Montana, the streams stretched away in a succession of beaver ponds as far as the eye could reach. The statements made by the early explorers, settlers, and trappers, together with my own observations,--which commenced in 1885, and which have extended pretty well over the country from northern Mexico into Alaska,--lead to the conclusion that the beaver population of North America at the beginning of the seventeenth century was upwards of one hundred million. The area occupied was approximately six million square miles, and probably two hundred beaver population per square mile would be a conservative number for the general average.

In the United States there are a number of counties and more than one hundred streams and lakes named for the beaver; upwards of fifty post-offices are plain Beaver, Beaver Pond, Beaver Meadow, or some other combination that proclaims the former prevalence of this widely distributed builder. The beaver is the national emblematic animal of Canada, and there, too, numerous post-offices, lakes, and streams are named for the beaver.

Beaver skins lured the hunter and trapper over all American wilds. These skins were one of the earliest mediums of exchange among the settlers of North America. For two hundred years they were one of the most important exports, and for a longer time they were also the chief commodity of trade on the frontier. A beaver skin was not only the standard by which other skins were measured in value, but also the standard of value by which guns, sugar, cattle, hatchets, and clothing were measured. Though freely used by the early settlers for clothing, they were especially valuable as raw material for the manufacture of hats, and for this purpose were largely exported.

From this animal were prepared many remedies which in former times were believed to have high medicinal value. Castoreum was the most popular of these, and from it was compounded the great cure-all. The skin of the beaver was thought to be an excellent preventive of colic and consumption; the fat of the beaver efficient in apoplexy and epilepsy, to stop spasms, and for various afflictions of the nerves. Powdered beaver teeth were often given in soup for the prevention of many diseases. The castoreum of the beaver was considered a most efficient remedy for earache, deafness, headache, and gout, for the restoring of the memory and the cure of insanity. Next in importance to its skin, the beaver was valued for the castoreum it yielded.