176 ROMANCE OF THE BEAVER 
the slack winter season, during which time trees 
are cut, but the hard stumps are frozen into the 
ground, and not until the soft rains have thawed 
the earth can they be removed. Rotting them out 
is a slow process. involving many years during 
which cultivation of the stump-strewn land is 
difficult and unsatisfactory. Blasting them out is 
far too expensive for the poor settler, so that every 
acre of ready cleared land means a tremendous saving 
of labour; and what is even more important, the 
forest land, though it may be fairly rich, does not 
compare in fertility with that of the meadows, and 
is of course usually so rough that cultivating is far 
more difficult. But the farmer who thus reaped 
the benefit of countless ages of beavers’ work 
had no thought for the little fellows. On every 
possible occasion he trapped them, though perhaps 
the very ones he killed were the direct descendants 
of those that had originally built the dams which 
had made the meadows for him and his family. 
His house might even be built on the site of the 
original lodges, and years later a village or a town 
be built around the same place. Factory whistles 
might scream to thousands of busy men and 
women, calling them to begin or finish their day’s 
labour where formerly the evening call of the owl 
had summoned forth the beaver to their night’s 
work. The saw mill onthe old beaver pond might 
screech as its many-toothed, buzzing saws tear 
through the heart of the stoutest trees, in the very 
