72 BEAVER—THEIR WAYS 
some cove or nook where they had finished their repast 
in secret. The porcupine is the only other animal that 
uses bark similiar to the beaver on the Upper Missouri, 
but the latter only strip branches and cut up twigs, and 
their work is easily distinguished from that of the bea- 
ver by the practiced eye of one at all familiar with 
wild animals’ ways. 
One summer day in 1899, John Harold a contract 
surveyor was running out some sectional lines in the 
Little Missouri bad lands immediately west of the Kill- 
deer mountains. The place was a particularly dreary 
and desolate one. He had seen but little of animated 
life all day—the summer’s sun was pouring down its 
hot rays upon the nearly suffocated surveyor—and the 
baked sides of the bare and verdueless buttes seemed 
asan ovento him. His canteen of water had given 
out and he did not know where to replenish it except 
to go back to his morning camp which was miles away 
over avery difficult road of buttes, cut bluffs, alkaline 
sloughs and hidden fizures. Whilein this dilemma he 
wandered down a canyon like opening through serrated 
walls until he fronted a clear, deep and cool body of 
fresh water, the thirsty man was soon at the brink and 
with unbounded joy at his deliverance from distress 
proceed to quaff the water, after which he filled his can- 
teen and then in the line of his duty looked for a crossing 
—as the stream was too wide to jump over without an 
even chance of falling backward—and too deep to wade 
without an immersion that would cover his head and 
ears. So he followed toward the source when lo, he 
heard the ripplings of a waterfall, and after rounding 
a short bend he saw what appeared to him then as a 
Pe ee ee 
