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 19th 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- 
