SUBSISTENCE OF BEAVERS. 181 



held ill the teeth at one end, with the remainder 

 passing diagonally across the back. Captain Johnson 

 once saw a beaver swimming in Grass Lake, in the 

 daytime, with a small bundle of grass upon the top of 

 his head, which he was evidently transporting to his 

 lodge. 



Beaver stick No. 2 in the engraving is a very in- 

 teresting specimen, since it illustrates an intermediate 

 stage of the process of cutting branches of trees into 

 short lengths. It is a yellow birch, seven feet and a 

 half long, with an average of three and a half inches 

 in diameter. They commenced cutting it into seven 

 pieces, of which the first four were each about a foot 

 long, and the remaining three each about twenty 

 inches; and the work was going on at all of these in- 

 cisions at the same time. Some of them were cut 

 about half through, the others less or more. The stick, 

 in other words, was ready to be turned for the com- 

 pletion of the work. To cut it entirely through from 

 the upper side would require an incision of such width 

 as to involve a loss of labor. Among the piles on 

 piles of cuttings seen and examined, I do not recol- 

 lect of ever finding one of hard wood of the thickness 

 of this cut entirely through from one side. There 

 was a prong at each end of this stick, the longest of 

 which is not seen in the engraving, which evidently 

 defeated their efforts to turn it over. Finding this 

 impossible, the stick was abandoned after stripping off 

 the bark on its upper surface. This specimen is in- 

 teresting from the revelation it seems to make of the 

 mannerof reducing the branches of trees. In the first 

 place, after felling a tree, they cut off from the trunk 

 such limbs as are of suitable size to be cut into lengths 



