THE LURE OF THE BEAVER 



609 



extend beyond ten or fifteen years. Of all the wild and 

 weird places one comes upon in the primeval forest, a 

 beaver pond is the most desolate. As the water backs 

 up from the dam, the cedars, tamaracks, spruces and 

 firs gradually die and within a few years they begin 

 to lean and fall in all directions, while long tufts of 

 gray lichens hang, like gray funeral wreaths, from 

 every dead bough. Few men can spend a night alone 

 at a beaver pond without having the primitive fear of 

 the wilderness creep in upon them. 



Beaver houses are constructed like the well-known 

 muskrat houses which every country boy has seen in 

 sloughs and sluggish creeks, but the beavers use sticks, 

 poles and mud as building material instead of the 

 rushes and mud employed by their small cousins. A 

 large beaver house stands about five feet above the 

 water and measures from fifteen to twenty feet in 

 width at water level. A large house at the south end 

 of Lake Itasca could be clearly seen at the distance of 

 a mile and a half. Each house has two or more en- 

 trances, always under water, but it has only one cavity 

 where from six to ten beavers live, sleep and eat. I 

 found no bedding in the deserted houses I opened, but 

 the cavities were large enough that a man might use 

 them as places of concealment. 



The beavers seem to prefer building their houses 

 in ponds where they can control the water level and 

 where no enemy, except man, can reach them, but 

 they also build many houses against the banks of 

 lakes and some of them live in burrows near the water, 

 which was undoubtedly the manner in which their 

 ancestors lived long ago. How and when they learned 

 to build dams, create artificial ponds and build their 

 dome-shaped houses we can, at present, only surmise. 



Some of the extinct relatives of the beavers were 

 several times as large as the present race, and one 

 grotesque species was even provided with horns. 



Fully as striking as the hydraulic engineering of 

 the beavers is their lumbering. The term beaver clear- 

 ing is not hyperbole, for they frequently fell from 

 one to two hundred trees, occasionally taking a tree 

 of two feet in diameter, but they prefer trees from a 

 few inches to a foot thick. Just as the tiny wild mice 

 cut down grasses to secure the seeds, the beavers fell 

 trees to feed on the twigs and on the bark of the 

 boughs. Accurate observation shows that they do not 

 determine the direction in which the trees fall. Most 

 of them fall naturally toward the pond or lake ; but in 

 a large clearing trees may be seen lying in all direc- 

 tions and many become lodged in the tops of other 

 trees. These lodged trees do not fall to the ground 

 and are lost to the beavers. An intelligent lumber- 

 man secures every tree he cuts. 



For use during winter they cut boughs and trees 

 into sticks and poles varying from about two to six 

 feet in length and reaching six inches in diameter. 

 This material they pickle in the cold water near their 

 houses, just before the lakes and ponds freeze over, 



and at this time of the year they are as busy as farm- 

 ers in harvest and haying time. 



Their favorite food is the brush and bark of the 

 common poplar, but they also eat balsam poplar, Cot- 

 tonwood, white, yellow and dwarf birch and a few 

 other deciduous shrubs and trees, but no evergreens. 

 They are strict vegetarians and if their home stream 

 contains any trout, some big fish may be looked for 

 in the beaver pond. 



Very remarkable also are the beaver canals and 

 ditches. They are dug to a width of two or three feet 

 and are from one to two feet deep. They connect 

 natural lakes, marshes and ponds or run from a pond 

 to their cuttings. They use these canals for purposes 

 of travel and for floating their food to their houses. 

 I found one fifty feet long connecting two natural 

 lakes, but Lewis H. Morgan, a careful observer writ- 

 ing about 1865, observed one in Michigan which was 

 two hundred and eighty feet long. 



The beaver is a rodent and resembles in appearance 

 a large muskrat. He is very dark brown in color, 

 but has a black, paddle-shaped tail. The hind feet 

 are webbed and act as powerful propellers in swim- 

 ming, while the fore feet are rather short and not 

 webbed and are used like hands. The story that 

 beavers carry mud on their naked, scaly tails, and that 

 they use them as a trowel, is a fable. The tail is ad- 

 mirably adapted to regulate their up and down move- 

 ments under water, but whether they steer themselves 

 with their tails or their feet I have not yet been able 

 to learn. 



Recently I made a midwinter trip to the beaver 

 colonies in the Itasca Reserve. Near several of the 

 houses I could clearly trace their brush piles of winter 

 food, which extended from twenty to thirty feet from 

 the house and were about ten feet wide. One old 

 house, which had been vacated for three years, a family 

 had repaired late in the season and had then hurriedly 

 provided themselves with whatever food happened to 

 grow nearest at hand. Their brush pile contained only 

 white and dwarf birch, and a little white elm, black 

 ash and alder. Evidently they had not had time to go 

 after poplar. 



A well located colony in a pond on a small creek 

 had been able to do things right. They had built three 

 dams and created three ponds above their home pond. 

 On the bank of the upper pond they had cut their 

 winter food and had then floated it down from pond 

 to pond half a mile to their house. The three upper 

 ponds contained no houses and had only been used for 

 the transportation of food. 



On all inhabited ponds the animals had made a 

 small opening in the dams when the ice was about 

 three inches thick. In this way they had probabl) 

 provided small air holes near stumps and trees and in 

 front of the dams, because about a foot of water had 

 run out of the ponds and the ice had settled down to 

 the water level. By this procedure they had also pre- 



