194 THE FUR TRADE OF AMERICA 



hunter, stake the stream across above the dam, cut away the 

 obstruction, lowering the water, break the conical crowns of the 

 houses on the south side, which is thinnest, and slaughter the 

 beavers indiscriminately as they rush out. But such hunting 

 kills the goose that lays the golden egg ; and explains why it was 

 necessary to prohibit the killing of beaver for some years. In the 

 confusion of a wild scramble to escape and a blind clubbing of heads 

 there was bootless destruction. Old and young, poor and in prime, 

 suffered the same fate. The house had been destroyed ; and if 

 one beaver chanced to escape into some of the bank-holes under 

 water or up the side channels, he could be depended upon to warn 

 all beaver from that country. Only the degenerate white man 

 practises bad hunting. 



The skilled hunter has other methods. 



If unstripped saplings be yet about the bank of the stream, the 

 beavers have not finished laying up their winter stores in adjacent 

 pools. The trapper gets one of his steel traps. Attaching the 

 ring of this to a loose trunk heavy enough to hold the beaver down 

 and drown him, he places the trap a few inches under water at the 

 end of a runway or in one of the channels. He then takes out a 

 bottle of castoreum. This is a substance from the glands of a 

 beaver which destroys all traces of the man-smell. For it the 

 beavers have a curious infatuation, licking everything touched by 

 it, and said, by some hunters, to be drugged into a crazy stupidity 

 by the very smell. The hunter daubs this on his own foot-tracks. 



Or, if he finds tracks of the beaver in the grass back from the 

 bank, he may build an old-fashioned deadfall, with which the 

 beaver is still taken in Labrador. This is the small lean-to, with a 

 roof of branches and bark — usually covered with snow — slanting 

 to the ground on one side, the ends either posts or logs, and the 

 front an opening between two logs wide enough to admit half the 

 animal's body. Inside, at the back, on a rectangular stick, one 

 part of which bolsters up the front log, is the bait. All traces of 

 the hunter are smeared over with the elusive castoreum. One tug 



