BEAVERS—THEIR WAYS. 85 
vers’ gifts, if he had any powers of observation or that 
his was not a perverted mind or had a heart contracted 
within an outward crust of adamantine. 
That a trapper could look back in memory on the 
beaver he had slain and find in no instance that the dis- 
tressed animal ever attempted to harm him, suffering as 
they did from the clasps of the steel trap, or the pound- 
ing of its head into a jelly mass by the merciless and 
often awkwardly directed hatchet—with eyes rolling 
from their sockets—blood and brains matting their fine 
furs—all this and worse—and not feel a qualm of con- 
science—then he himself was an animal merely, and of 
the round head, feline order and with instincts of an 
insane torturer. 
In following the fortunes of a professional beaver 
hunter or trapper, as with the Upper Missouri wood- 
yard proprietor or saw mill man—there is—in following 
that vocation, but little relief from a checkered, hap- 
hazzard life. The trapper in his profession is nearly 
always in unconventional garb, has an unkempt appear- 
ance and proverbially hard up and scanty with this 
world’s material belongings. If he succeeds in getting 
a few peltries together and makes a cash sale, like all 
blood money thus accumulated, it goes him them so 
easily, the trapper even looses the trail of its disappearing 
shadow. He isa believer in luck but more prone to 
expect the bad kind than hope for the good. 
The stories of disasters to the beaver trappers are 
many as told in the records of the old fur companies of 
halfa century ago, or as described by such fluent wri- 
ters as Washington Irving,or of the many isolated cases 
that are not generally known. When the writer looks 
