80 BEAVERS—THEIR WAYS. 
would escape the helpless little beast except some long 
drawn groans after the brain had lapsed into uncon- 
sciousness. 
As far as the writer could learn from personal obser- 
vation or from observation of others who have studied 
their habits, beavers follow close to the line of the ten 
commandments. They neither kill, steal or covet the 
property of another. They are generous with the 
product of their labor and share with all who accept 
their simple offers of comfort. The wild fowl will al- 
ways hover around the beaver homes as does the tame 
fowl about the barn yard of a farmer. 
Like the human kind, male beavers will occasionally 
take a fall out with each other through jealousy over 
some female or other cause, and cut and slash at each 
others tails. But there is no record of fatal encounters ev- 
en between two colonies that are strangers to each other. 
Male beavers with mutilated tails are common enough 
as the trapper finds them, showing that their pride and 
usefullness is largely of the tail This is certainly true 
as to manner of locomotion and their distant signaling, 
and also as trowling and plastering in the matter of 
dam and house construction. 
Their feats of engineering are many and puzzling te 
us who do not understand, but the best construction en- 
gineers of our own race, when their attention is called 
to beaver engineering work, say it is simply miraculous 
in the approved methods of the highest attained art in 
dam construction, and the best of our engineers can 
learn the beaver’s angle work in its successful resistance 
to the floods and torrents that frequently bear down on 
