208 TWO DIANAS IN ALASKA 



bit of bark from the supply. Mr. and Mrs. Beaver 

 alone dwell in these houses, no mother-in-law or 

 sisters, or cousins, or aunts. Just Mr. and Mrs. 

 Beaver and the youngsters of one season. 



On two of the backwaters of the Kuskokwim River 

 we found beaver dams of great size, amazingly 

 planned. One was in the course of construction, the 

 other alas useless now, and all its little engineers 

 and contractors were dead and gone. The hand of 

 the trapper is over the land, and where for generations 

 the beavers have worked unmolested the day inevit- 

 ably comes for their whereabouts to be discovered. 



The life of the trapper is a terribly hard one, work- 

 ing as he usually does all alone through the bitter 

 winter that he may catch the fur-bearing creatures 

 when their pelts are at the best. He has a string of 

 residences dotted about his district, for his traps are 

 laid over a great tract of country and each trap is 

 visited once a week or so, if possible. With the 

 aid of his snow-shoes the trapper can put a girdle 

 round his little world. 



The sky was intensely blue and almost always 

 cloudless, only the jagged peaks of the mountain 

 monarchs round us were swathed about the summits 

 with white vapour. 



In one desolate ravine we found the former home 

 of some energetic trapper, the abode of him, I 

 suspect, who had put an end to the engineering works 

 of the beaver colony near by. The tiny hut was of 

 tree stems, laboriously garnered. It stood there, 

 looking so out of place man's handiwork in a 



