THE LODGE Le 
A bank lodge at a pond by the Cooke City road had a 
cavity extending into the bank. ‘This was divided into two 
parts by a large rock. The longer portion was some six or 
eight feet long, two wide, and a foot high. The other was 
about two feet shorter. There was some shredded bark 
on the bottom of the longer cavity, apparently the bedding 
(Fig. 37). 
I examined two abandoned bank lodges on the same 
stream in Colorado, each of which had the living-room just 
below the surface of the ground. ‘These had each been a foot 
or more high and covered with a roof of sticks a foot or more 
in thickness. Owing to age this had settled so that the 
original thickness could not be told. Each of these lodges 
was several feet from the stream bank. 
H. A. English, in a letter, describes a beaver house which 
he found in Saskatchewan, Canada, and which seems to show 
that at times the beavers may make very serious mistakes 
in locating their lodges. It was in a long, narrow muskeg. 
There was no open water, and while it was muskeg, grass 
and moss grew all about the lodge, and the animals had 
dug canals to willow thickets about sixty yards from it. 
“In thinking it over I am unable to see how the beaver got 
their food or kept the passages open. ... . I have 
never before or since seen a lodge which looked more out of 
place. . . . . It was November and of course there was 
heavy ice on lakes and creeks. I would not like to say the 
beaver were in the lodge, but think they were, in which case 
they might starve or come out very poor, where they are 
usually very fat and sleek... . . While trapping in 
Manitoba I have come across muskrat houses that were 
built in shallow water and the rats had been able to keep a 
very limited space from freezing and were very poor and 
nearly starved, while rats that had their houses in the same 
marsh but in deep water were fat and prime.” 
G. B. Grinnell, in “The Cheyenne Indians,” tells an 
