MAMMALIA, 107 
year, to secure the enjoyment of this luxury; and Indians of note have generally 
one or two feasts in a season, wherein a roasted Beaver is the prime dish. Hearne 
terms it delicious food. It resembles pork in its flavour, but the lean is dark- 
coloured, the fat oily, and it requires a strong stomach to sustain a full meal of 
it. The tail, which is considered a great luxury, consists of a grisly kind of-fat, as 
rich, but not so nauseating, as the fat of the body. 
The Beaver attains its full size in about three years ; but breeds before that 
time. According to Indian report, it pairs im February, and after carrying its 
young about ten weeks, brings forth from four to eight or nine cubs, towards the 
middle or end of May. Hearne states the usual number of young, produced by 
the Beaver at a time, to be from two to five, and that he saw six only in two 
instances, although he had witnessed the capture of some hundreds in a gravid 
state*. The female has eight teats. In the pairing season the call of the Beaver 
is a kind of groan; but the voice of the cubs, which are very playful, resembles 
the ery of an infant. When the Beaver cuts down a tree it gnaws it all round, 
cutting it however somewhat higher on the one side than the other, by which the 
direction of its fall is determined. ‘The stump is conical, and of such a height as a 
Beaver, sitting on his hind quarters, could make. The largest tree I observed 
cut down by them was about the thickness of a man’s thigh (that is, six or seven 
inches in diameter;) but Mr. Graham says, that he has seen them cut a tree 
which was ten inches in diameter. 
Pennant fixes the southern range of the American Beaver in latitude 30°, in 
Louisiana, not far from the Gulf of Mexico; whilst Say mentions the confluence 
of the Ohio and Mississippi as their limit, which is about seven degrees further 
to the northward. In high latitudes they are confined to the wooded districts, 
there not being even willows enough for their subsistence on the banks of the 
small lakes and rivulets of the Barren Grounds. Their most northern range 
is perhaps on the banks of the Mackenzie, which is the largest American river 
that discharges itself into the Polar Sea, and is also the best wooded, owing 
to the quantity of alluvial soil deposited on its banks. Beavers occur in that 
quarter as high as 673° or 68° of latitude, and their range from east to west 
extends from one side of the continent to the other, with the exception of the 
Barren districts. They are pretty numerous in the country lying immediately to 
_ * I was informed by a hunter, that the Indians are accustomed, on breaking up alodge of Beavers, to open the old 
female as soon as they kill her, for the purpose of ascertaining, by counting the dilatations of the tubular uterus, what 
number of young may be expected to be found in the washes Hearne also says, ‘‘ On examining the womb of a Beaver, 
when not with young, there is always found a hardish round knob, for every young one of the last litter.” 
J2o, 
