REBUILDING A BEAVER COLONY 137 



beaver with back above the water, little brother 

 holding on. 



The harvest of aspens for winter food was 

 nearly finished, and I had thus far seen only 

 the old beaver doing any tree cutting. The 

 evening of the iQth of October I had gone 

 through the aspen groves measuring and count- 

 ing. One hundred and twelve aspens had been 

 cut; these were from two to eleven inches in 

 diameter at the place of cutting, and from five 

 to nineteen inches above the ground. The 

 aspens were from twelve to twenty-one feet 

 high. 



Just at sundown, as I sat down on a boulder 

 near the aspens, I saw a beaver swimming in the 

 canal toward me. In the basin at the end he 

 smelled of two logs, then came waddling heavily 

 up the much-used trail over which logs were 

 dragged from the aspen grove. His big tail 

 swung slowly from side to side, in places drag- 

 ging on the ground. He was an old beaver 

 that I had not before seen. He must have 

 weighed fifty pounds. He glanced right and 

 left at aspens and stopped several feet from one, 

 rose up, looked into its top, turned, and looked 

 into the top of another. He went to the second 

 one. Later I saw that the first one was en- 

 tangled at the top in the limbs of a near-by pine. 



Squatting on hind legs with tail bracing be- 



