192 THE FUR TRADE OF AMERICA 



While ranging the forest the former season the trapper picked 

 out a large birch-tree, free of knots and underbranching, with the 

 full girth to make the body of a canoe from gunwale to gunwale 

 without any gussets and seams. But birch-bark does not peel 

 well in winter. The trapper scratched the trunk with a mark of 

 "first-finder-first-owner," honored by all hunters; and came 

 back in the summer for the bark. 



Perhaps it was while taking the bark from this tree that he first 

 noticed the traces of beaver. Channels, broader than runnels, 

 hardly as wide as a ditch, have been cut connecting pool with pool, 

 marsh with lake. Here are runways through the grass, where 

 beaver have dragged young saplings five times their own length 

 to a winter storehouse near the dam. Trees lie felled miles away 

 from any chopper. Chips are scattered about marked by teeth 

 which the trapper knows — knows, perhaps, from having seen 

 his dog's tail taken off at a nip, or his own finger amputated almost 

 before he felt it. If the bark of a tree has been nibbled around, 

 like the line a chopper might make before cutting, the trapper 

 guesses whether his coming has not interrupted a beaver in the 

 very act. 



All these are signs which spell out the presence of a beaver-dam 

 within one night's travelling distance ; for the timid beaver fre- 

 quently works at night, and will not go so far away that forage 

 cannot be brought in before daylight. In which of the hundred 

 water-ways in the labyrinth of pond and stream where beavers 

 roam is this particular family to be found ? 



Realizing that his own life depends on the life of the game, no 

 true trapper will destroy wild creatures when the mothers are 

 caring for their young. Besides, furs are not at their prime when 

 birch-bark is peeled, and the trapper notes the place, so that he 

 may come back when the fall hunt begins. Beaver kittens stay 

 under the parental roof for three years, but at the end of the first 

 summer are amply able to look after their own skins. Free from 

 nursery duties, the old ones can now use all the ingenuity and craft 



