Canadian Beaver 



I fancy that toward the end of winter they must get just a 

 little impatient and watch eagerly for the first sign of open 

 water at the edge of the ice; knowing that it is only a ques- 

 tion of time before their whole pond shall be free once more, 

 and they may splash and paddle in the shallow margin to their 

 hearts' content with the spring sun warm on their backs, and 

 their lungs filled with fresh living wind from the woods. As 

 their family increases in size they enlarge their cabin each fall to 

 accommodate the new members, or else construct new lodges 

 along the shore, until, if undiscovered by the trapper, they have 

 established a busy and contented little settlement, for they are 

 a social folk and fond of one another's company, with the ex- 

 ception of certain ill-natured old bachelors who refuse to associate 

 with the rest but live apart in burrows of their own digging. 



Just as among the muskrats you will find a solitary in- 

 dividual here and there making its lone mud-hut at the head of 

 any little meadow brook, and apparently avoiding the rest of its kind 

 as much as possible; the chief difference being that these recluse 

 muskrats are generally females — at least most of those that have come 

 under my own observations have been; while among beavers 

 the hermits are almost always old males as already stated. 



When in the course of years the beavers' colony gets so 

 large that the matter of getting food for the whole in the im- 

 mediate vicinity of the pond begins to look doubtful, the 

 youngest generation usually starts off with the purpose of found- 

 ing a new colony. 



The trappers say that they always start off in pairs accom- 

 panied by the old ones; the time chosen for the pilgrimage is 

 in the early part of the fall while the streams are still low and 

 food abundant. 



The little party explores together every promising stream and 

 watercourse, until a suitable location is discovered for the new 

 pond, when they all set to work, old and young together, and 

 it is not until the dam is completed and the new cabin raised 

 with a good supply of green wood beside it, that the old beavers 

 go back to their own pond, to attend to the regular fall work 

 of repairing the old dam and cabin and cutting and hauling 

 their winter's wood down to the water, and then settle down 

 to the dull routine and humdrum life of a beaver's winter. 



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