May 14, 1910.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
769 
had once been a beaver pond, but was now cov¬ 
ered with a thick growth of alders with many 
white birches, some of them ten to twelve inches 
through scattered among them. We found that 
they had flooded this swamp to the depth of at 
least three feet and had cut away cords of the 
birches when in leaf in June. Some were all 
cut up into short lengths, while many, cut three 
feet from the ground by beaver floating in the 
water as they worked, were notched along at 
intervals, but not cut through. Some treetops 
lay lodged high up enough from the ground for 
us to walk under them, while the trunks, cut in 
pieces, lay beneath. Why, after doing so much 
work, they had deserted the place, was a mys¬ 
tery. Our plan gave this as a brook uniting 
with another brook farther north and running 
into a pond called Francis Lake. 
We built a trap for mink in the beaver dam— 
our tenth trap for the morning—made ten more 
and shot an owl before dinner; made our noon 
halt at a small brook near two bogs; continued 
our line in the raiin across a wide bog, open ex¬ 
cept for a few widely scattered dwarf spruces, 
the limbs of which were draped with a stiff, 
black moss. Again we slept out under some hem¬ 
locks. Some time in the night while sound 
asleep I was awakened by having my head sud¬ 
denly jerked up, and on fully awakening I could 
feel several places on each side of my head 
smarting. It was easy to tell the cause. My 
head was not covered by the blanket and my hat 
had fallen off. An owl, mistaking my head for 
a rabbit or some other animal, had seized me 
and on my speaking had let go. This is not an 
uncommon thing, as I have known of several 
other cases, and Napoleon A. Comeau, in his 
“Life and Sport on the North Shore” (page 
422), speaks of knowing several similar in¬ 
stances. In all the cases I have known, some 
six in all, it was evidently done by mistake. 
Wednesday was fair, and running a northerly 
course we soon came to the other branch of the 
brook, and here found the beaver with a new 
dam and house and a large pond. After aban¬ 
doning their works on the other branch they had 
evidently descended to the forks and come up 
this branch. The cuttings showed the marks of 
three sizes of teeth, indicating six beavers. While 
I have known instances of six young at a birth, 
the usual number is two; probably at least nine 
out of ten females have but two. So much has 
been written about beaver and their habits that 
I will only say that they do not use their tails 
to plaster with or to haul mud on, as many 
writers state; the principal use is to slap with 
it in giving an alarm or to use it as a third leg 
when fighting a trap or rolling in large wood. 
Anyone wishing to get a truthful description of 
the beaver will find it in Morgan’s “The Ameri¬ 
can Beaver.” 
We set traps until noon. Coming to a small 
brook after dinner we began to build a shelter 
camp of cedar splits. Before night we had a 
nice little camp, open in front, and plenty of 
good wood. I shot a very large partridge which 
came to us while building. We slept nice and 
warm that night. Leaving our blankets here we 
veered our line to a little west of north. In 
makihg trap lines for sable we try to cross the 
ridges. A ridge may be two or ten miles long 
and but one wide, but a few traps set across it 
will, in a short time, catch all the sable that 
there are on that ridge, when they will take 
bait, as they usually play lengthwise of the 
ridges. The places where the most are taken 
are where spruce and hardwood are mixed. 
When there are cedar swamps in the hollows 
between ridges we build a trap near the edge 
on each side, often one of them for fisher, but 
FIG. 2—SABLE TRAP. 
Similar in every respect to that described by Mr. 
Hardy save that this one was set on a stump; the one 
described on the ground. 
only cut a path through the swamp and spot 
the line plainly. In the very open hard growth 
we set our traps farther apart and make the 
spots large, as often in a driving snowstorm 
the damp snow will be plastered over the spots 
so as to make it very difficult to follow a line. 
This day we made thirty-eight traps and re- 
METHOD OF MAKING THE STRETCHER. 
turned to our camp at night, having got a par¬ 
tridge on the way. 
Friday it rained, and as we were out of pro¬ 
visions, having made what was intended for 
three days last five by the aid of the partridges 
killed, we started back for home. It was a cold 
driving rainstorm and the bogs we crossed 
looked dreary enough with their funereal spruces. 
In crossing one an owl flew up and alighted on 
one of them—a very fitting place for an owl on 
one of those stunted trees with the black moss 
hanging above and below him. I really felt 
as if I were aiming at a “jumbie bird” as I 
touched the trigger, but the owl fell at the re¬ 
port of the rifle. What little food we had left 
we ate standing in the rain. 
By noon we reached the Baker Lake Carry. 
Although it was better traveling for the feet, it 
was wetter than in the woods, as the sprouts as 
high as one's head whipped the water into our 
clothing. We were glad when we reached the 
canoe. We took out a muskrat coming down 
Avery Brook and reached home benumbed by 
cold and very hungry. 
After eating and drying up a little, Rufus 
thought we had better go up Avery Brook again 
and catch one of the beavers, as we needed meat. 
As Rufus was the best beaver hunter, he set the 
trap for the beaver. The usual rule to catch a 
beaver by the hind foot is to set the trap just 
deep enough for the water to come up to the 
trapper’s wrist joint when his forefinger is touch¬ 
ing one of the trap jaws, or about eight inches. 
Rufus set two inches deeper, as he had footed 
one of the last ones he had set for at the usual 
depth. While a beaver rarely, if ever, takes off 
a hind foot, he will in many cases take off a 
fore foot, sometimes within a few minutes. I 
have seen beaver skins which showed that the 
owner had lost both fore feet. Rufus set in the 
usual way of setting on a stream, making a wide 
mud bed with a nice white-wood (fish-tail 
maple) stick behind it some two feet, and the 
trap set to one side of the center, as a beaver 
is wide, like a turtle. He guided with green 
sticks, with dry ones set outside and fastened to 
a perfectly dry, hard swimmer, the end of which 
was fastened by a withe to a bush. Everything 
was washed with water thrown by a paddle. I 
also set seven traps for muskrats. The rain still 
continued, and of course we reached home wet. 
Sept. 24. It rained all night hard and con¬ 
tinued all day. On looking at our traps we 
found that in spite of Rufus having set his trap 
very deep he had caught the beaver by the fore 
foot, and by pulling back on the swimmer the 
beaver had got enough slack chain to hook the 
trap jaw over a sunken log, and then by revers¬ 
ing the pull had taken his fore leg off close to 
the body. It is useless to say that this was done 
by accident. There must have been as much 
brain work as the average man possesses to take 
advantage of the only possible chance there was 
to get a solid fastening to pull against. 
As the rainy night had been favorable for both 
beavers and muskrats to swim, I got from my 
seven traps four muskrats and two feet, and one 
trap was gone, stake and trap together. The 
water had risen several inches, but by reaching 
down I found that the hole made in pulling out 
the stake was elongated toward a deep pool op¬ 
posite. It was plain that a beaver had got 
caught in attempting to get the white-wood stake 
of my trap to eat. I figured that he was surely 
caught by the fore foot; that the weight of the 
trap had sunk him in this pool, and that, as the 
stake some four feet long had a fork at the 
upper end, it would prevent the ring of the chain 
from slipping off, and being light enough to float 
the chain, the newly cut end must be from four 
to five feet from the bottom of the pool, float¬ 
ing upward. To-day, as the water was dark, it 
could not be seen. We worked a long time 
punching down with a steel-shod setting pole 
to make it clink against the trap. But the water 
was some ten feet deep and the pool quite large 
and we had to give it up. It rained so that we 
stayed in camp, mending, running bullets, cook¬ 
ing, etc. 
“Sunday was bright and pleasant. The leaves 
