FOREST AND STREAM 
23 
Some Queer Things Happen in the Woods 
John and His Zero Weather Frog and His Self-Shaving Beavers Only Second to Petes Belief in Pte- 
Glacial Monsters 
4 % 
I N LOOKING over a new book on the 
beaver, by a very capable author, I was 
impressed again with how muoh might 
be written on the natural history of this 
little animlal and how little has been con¬ 
tributed in the way 6f literature on the subject. 
Indian legends, or to dignify them by a title bet¬ 
ter known, Indian mythology, are saturated with 
the beaver. 'Who can wonder at this, when the 
intelligence of the animal is considered? No 
doubt a lot of foolishness has appeared in print 
on the subject, but to me the most interesting 
tales are those which, while seemingly incredible 
at first hearing, are capable of logical deduction, 
or find their foundation in absolute fact. 
I recall a few years ago having gone into the 
woods with John -, a lumber foreman 
who at that time was well known all over the 
upper Gatineau and Ottawa River country. John 
had expressed a desire to take a “day off,” as 
he called it, during the summer and so we went 
wayfaring together with a small outfit into new 
and unfished and unhunted regions. Sitting one 
day at lunch on the shore of a lake that even the 
timber cruisers had not discovered, John took up 
a stick which a beaver had been gnawing. Space 
will not permit repeating John’s natural history 
lecture on the beaver, but he did know the ani¬ 
mal both from personal observation and from 
years of contact with the Indians. Winding up 
his expressions of admiration of the beaver’s in¬ 
telligence, he said: 
“And they even shave themselves.” 
“They what?” 
“Well,” continued John, “they shave each 
other.” 
He then went on to explain. “If you trap a 
beaver near his house and find the whiskers 
grown to their natural length, you can make up 
your mind at once that no other beaver dwells 
there, but if you catdh a beaver with whiskers 
partly gnawed off, you may be pretty sure that 
there are other beaver in the saime colony.” 
This was a staggerer. I had never trapped 
beaver myself. John had, and as he was always 
a truthful man, it was not for me to express 
incredulity. 
John was always seeing things. He told me 
a story one day of the strangest thing he had 
ever seen in the woods. According to his tale, 
he was crossing the ice on a lake near where his 
men were working and all at once he noticed 
a puzzling trail which he could not read—and 
the trail that John could not read was some 
mystery. 
“I knew it was not a bird,” said John, “and it 
must have been a queerish animal, so I fol¬ 
lowed the tracks up for two or three hundred 
feet, and what do you think I found? Nothing 
but a big bull-frog, frozen stiff. How did he get 
there? I don’t know, 'for the thermometer was 
just about hitting zero.” 
John and I discussed the matter for some time 
and I put this proposition to him. 
“Suppose, in the mud at the bottom of the 
-jk*. 
WATER CONSERVATION BY BEAVERS IN CANADA. 
Note the Beaver Dams and the Different Levels of Water in the Three Ponds. 
