142 ROMANCE OF THE BEAVER 
longer hold back the water, the pond gets lower 
and lower until finally it vanishes. 
So much for the dam ; now let us watch the pond 
itself throughout its course of existence. It began 
as a stream whose banks were probably wooded. 
As the water rose and flooded the land the trees, 
which had not been cut for food by the beavers, 
becoming choked by water soon died, and as the 
pond grew with each year’s additions to the dams, 
more and more trees were cut down for food and 
killed by water. What started asa pond of perhaps 
fifty feet wide and covering far less than an acre 
becomes a lake of fair size. Gradually the trees 
that have died fall and no trace of them is seen 
above water. Their roots may remain hidden in the 
ground to be dug up later as proof of the previous 
existence of the trees. Nothing remains to break 
the smooth surface of the lake except perhaps one 
or more beaver islands on which the lodges were 
built. After the place has been occupied by many 
generations of beaver it is abandoned owing to lack 
of food, or for the more dismal reason that the 
trapper had paid his visits of destruction to the 
peaceful colony, and the pond of maybe ten or a 
hundred years’ growth slowly subsides. During all 
these years there has been a rich land-forming 
process going along in an automatic way. The 
growing vegetation, having been killed by the rising 
water, has decomposed. Wood and leaves, grasses 
and roots, and even stones have become a homo- 
