THE OUTLAW; A CHARACTER STUDY OF A BEAVER 

 WHO WAS CAST OUT BY HIS COMPANIONS.^ 



By a. Radclyffe Dugmore. 



[Mr. Dugmore's extraordinary photographs of wild birds and animals in their 

 daily occupations have already attracted much attention. He seems to have a 

 peculiar faculty, like Thoreau, of making friends of all sorts of wild creatures; in 

 two days in the woods, for instance, he will get such a wild bird as a worm-eating 

 warbler so accustomed to him that she will feed her young on his hand, having her 

 picture taken at the same moment ! This story is the first of a series which will give 

 'character studies" of different animals with whom he has become acquainted, 

 along with reproductions of the author's surprisingly lifelike and interesting photo- 

 graphs. It is the most intimate and illuminating sort of natural history. The pic- 

 tures reproduced herewith are particularly notable, as they are perhaps the first good 

 photographs of beaver ever secured, the nocturnal habits and shyness of these ani- 

 mals making them peculiarly difficult subjects for the animal photographer. — Every- 

 body's JNIagazine.] 



It would be difficult to imagine a more pathetic sig-ht than that of 

 this poor old beaver, living in a land of many animals and yet so 

 entirely alone; within sight of his comrades, yet not among them; 

 unable to join in their games and their work, living his lonely life 

 like a prisoner, within sight and sound of his fellow-beings, but sepa- 

 rated ])y a Ijarrier as strange as it was secure. This was the animal 

 that appeared after I had been watching for an hour or two in the 

 beaver inclosure at the Washington National Zoo. T4iere was a 

 movement in front of the large Inirrow opening on the water, and a 

 head peeped cautiously out, to see that all was safe for the owner's 

 regular evening exercise. The sun had long since disappeared behind 

 the hill, and everything had the quiet hush of evening. The deep 

 roaring of the lions and tigers, and the more distant ])arking of the 

 seals, alone disturbed the silence, when the beaver believing himself 

 to be alone, plunged noiselessly into the water, dived beneath the log 

 that lay partly submerged but a few feet from the entrance of the 

 burrow, and reappeared in the middle of the small pond. 



Almost like a short piece of driftwood he lay, his dark, head-like 

 eyes gazing intently at me, where I stood in the s hadow of a small 



1 Copyright, 1900, by Doubleday, Page & Co. Reprinted, by permission, from 



Everybody's Magazine, March, 1901. 



517 



