THE LODGE 69 
inches; height of chamber 1 foot to 1 foot 4 inches. Size 
of entrances through floor 15 inches square, and length of 
entrances 7 and 10 feet. 
A used lodge on the margin of a slough near Palo Verde, 
on the Colorado Desert, in southeastern California, not far 
from the Colorado River, was opened. It was three feet 
high and twelve feet across the base, built of branches and 
small saplings cut when in full leaf, by the beavers and laid 
compactly. It was eight inches thick over the nest cavity. 
The chamber was 24 feet high by four to five feet across. 
‘“‘At one side the bank had been cut away to make the floor 
comparatively level, as the house was built on a sloping 
bank near its top. There was an underwater entrance at 
one side, and an opening through the wall above ground. 
A fresh willow sapling had been hauled. through this opening 
butt first. The beds were merely hollows in the earth 
floor.’ 
In the good old days when fiction had precedence over 
fact in writing about the beaver, it was said that some lodges 
were divided into several rooms, for eating, sleeping, store- 
rooms, and the like, but of course such is not the case. 
Hearne says concerning this: “It frequently happens that 
some of the large houses are found to have one or more 
partitions, if they deserve that appellation; but that is no 
more than a part of the main building, left by the sagacity 
of the beaver to support the roof. On such occasions, it is 
common for these different apartments, as some are pleased 
to call them, to have no communication with each other but 
by water; so that in fact they may be called double or treble 
houses, rather than different apartments of the same house. 
I have seen a large beaver house built in a small island, that 
had nearly a dozen apartments under one roof; and, two or 
three of these only excepted, none had any communication 
1 Grinnell, Birds and Mammals of the Colorado Valley, p. 226. 
