July 2, 1910.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
11 
houses stand in deep water, and when the ani¬ 
mals are alarmed they retreat to their houses, 
and if these are opened they return to the water 
and resort to hiding places near the shore. Such 
hiding places are usually wholly out of sight, 
for any pond that has been made and long occu¬ 
pied by beavers is quite sure to be tunneled out 
in many places along its edges, under the bank 
but above the water, and this tunnel being hid¬ 
den from sight by an overhanging shelf of the 
soil furnishes a place where the beaver can 
hide, and along which they can travel quietly 
from one place in the pond to another without 
being seen. 
Beaver often dig long trenches or canals from 
the margin of a pond which they occupy to some 
place where willows, aspens or other -food grow 
at quite a little distance from the edge of the 
pond. Writers have asserted that these ditches 
are dug in order to save labor; i. e., in order 
that the animals may float their wood down to 
the pond instead of dragging it. This may be 
the fact. We know at least that the beaver do 
float their wood through such canals to the 
pond, and—what is much more to the point— 
that they float through these canals wood far 
larger than it would be possible for them to 
drag over dry ground. Perhaps it is reasonable 
to suppose that originally such canals were dug 
to the point where their wood was to be cut in 
order that the beaver might swim there and back 
again, and so always be in the element on which 
they rely for safety and in a position to escape 
their enemies in the way most advantageous to 
them—by swimming. As soon as experience had 
taught them that their wood could be more easily 
transported by floating, they used the canals for 
transportation. 
A beaver has many enemies, as bear, wolves, 
wolverine, lynx, panther, fisher and so on, and 
is almost altogether without protection. He is 
not active enough or well enough armed to fight. 
Pie can inflict a severe bite to be sure, but when 
he has given a bite or two his bolt is shot. He 
must keep out, of the way of his enemies, and 
under natural conditions he does so. 
The manner in which the beaver builds his 
house and prepares it for occupancy I have never 
seen fully explained. Most writers say merely 
that a beaver builds a house which has a room 
in it, with a passage—or two—leading to that 
room. Most of us would like to know some¬ 
thing a little more definite than that. Obviously 
the beaver does not build a house with walls. 
He does not build his house around certain empty 
spaces to be used as passages and chambers. 
If a pair of beaver take up their home on 
some little shallow stream where there is no 
deep water, the first thing they do—as a matter 
of protection—is to build two or three low dams 
across it, to give them deep water—and safety. 
From one of these littla ponds of deep water 
they dig a tunnel or burrow in the bank at right 
angles to the stream, starting well under the 
water, but soon working up above the water’s 
level. When they have gone fifteen or twenty 
feet or more from the stream, they enlarge the 
burrow and make a living chamber. The air 
for this chamber must at first come through the 
soil, but very soon they dig upward to the sur¬ 
face of the ground and make a small hole which 
gives them more air. This hole is likely to be 
in the midst of a clump of willows or other 
brush, and it looks as if the situation was chosen 
so as to keep large animals from tramping on 
the ground above this chamber and so break¬ 
ing through into it. I confess, however, this 
seems to me a little far fetched. 
When they have come to the top of the ground 
at the end of this burrow, these beaver are 
likely to go off and to begin to cut willows or 
cottonwood or aspen and bring it down close 
to this hole and perhaps even to pile the sticks 
over it. The sticks may be brought down at 
first for food, or it may be that the object is 
simply to hide the hole. At all events, before 
very long—for the beaver are industrious and 
work hard and fast—they have a good sized pile 
of sticks over this hole. In the meantime they 
have been wording on the dam on the stream 
below the house, and have raised the water still 
more, and as this water rises, the tunnel that 
they occupied becomes full of water, and finally 
the pile of sticks stands in the water. But be¬ 
fore this, as the pile grows larger, the beaver 
have begun to gnaw away the sticks from the 
end of the tunnel up into the pile, and have cut 
out a passage way and then a chamber within 
this pile of sticks which has now become a 
house. 
As the water rises and the house is standing 
in the water, a passageway is gnawed by the 
beaver through the sticks out under the surface 
of the water, and the tunnel or burrow is no 
longer used. They are constantly adding sticks 
to the top of the house which grows rapidly. 
As the water rises the first chamber may be too 
close to the water, and then from the out¬ 
side of the house they gnaw a tunnel upward 
in a slanting direction, and when they have 
nearly reached to the top of the house, they 
gnaw out another chamber. All this time they 
are working at the dam and raising the water, 
and all the time they are carrying sticks and 
mud on top of the house, raising it higher. The 
thickness of the floor between the lower and 
upper chamber varies somewhat. It may be two, 
four or six inches. There is never, I think, any 
direct communication between the chambers. 
The floors of the chambers are level, and the 
chambers are of considerable size; three or four 
feet in diameter sometimes. From the side walls 
of sticks the beavers gnaw out places above the 
floor on which to lie, and this gives the effect 
of a series of benches around the chamber, for 
father, mother and young. The whole effect is 
not very unlike that of the interior of a Pawnee, 
Ree or Mandan earth lodge of olden times. 
As the dam grows higher, the pond larger and 
the water deeper, the old canals and underground 
tunnels that were constructed when the water 
was at a lower level become disused and the 
tunnels fall in. Therefore, the bottom of an 
old beaver pond is full of traps for one who 
rides or walks in it. 
In time, as I have elsewhere pointed out, the 
beaver desert the pond, the dam at last rots and 
gives way, the waters return to some narrow 
channel, and there remains a piece of flat bot¬ 
tom land formed by the debris brought down 
by the stream, on which at first grow rushes and 
grass and afterward willows and alders, and 
which later still may be cleared and be the site 
of some settler’s home. 
A story told me years ago by George Bent, 
son of the famous William W. Bent, of Bent’s 
Fort, on the Arkansas, has a distinct bearing 
on how the beaver builds his house, and confirms 
what I have said about it. 
Many years ago, three little Indian girls, ten 
or twelve years old, went to the river to bathe. 
It was one of the narrow rivers of the South¬ 
western country, with high banks, which the 
flood waters of the stream cut away, sometimes 
on one side, sometimes on the other. It was 
summer, and the children were dressed only in 
little calico smocks, which they did not trouble 
to remove. At the point where they began to 
bathe a cottonwood tree had fallen toward the 
stream and projected from the bank out over 
the water. Presently the children began to run 
out on the trunk of this tree, and as it was 
springy, to jump up and down on. it and then 
dive off into the water and swim to shore. 
At length one of the little girls came up from 
her dive and said: ‘When I went down I found 
a hole in the bank. If you will come with me 
I will show you it, and we will see where it 
goes to.” The others agreed and presently all 
dived into the water and the two others fol¬ 
lowed the first girl into the hole. They had not 
gone in very far when they found their heads 
above water, and creeping along the tunnel saw 
that it led upward and was quite large. Curious 
to see what was at the end they crept on through 
the darkness, but presently the leading girl said 
to the others: “Something is coming; squeeze 
up close to the side and let it pass. ’ The little 
girls made themselves as small as possible, and 
presently each one felt something soft and furry 
push by them, and heard it enter the water. 
The girls now all began to feel uneasy, for 
they did not know what else the hole might con¬ 
tain. The leading girl must have been full of 
courage, for she persuaded the others to go on 
and see what there was at the end. Presently 
they reached an enlargement of the tunnel, and 
looking up could see a little light coming in 
through the roof. By this time the littlest girl 
was heartily sick of the adventure and began to 
cry. She said she wanted to get out of the hole. 
None of them felt much like going back the way 
they had come and perhaps encountering the 
soft furry creature that had passed by them, so 
the leader proposed that they should dig up 
through the roof, and they began to do this. It 
was not difficult, but it was slow and very dirty, 
and by the time they had enlarged the hole above 
them sufficiently to creep out, they were covered 
with dust and dirt. When finally they found 
themselves again on top of ground, they dis¬ 
covered that they were in the nndst of a great 
patch of rose bushes. They had no moccasins 
and no clothing which would protect them against 
the thorns of the bushes, and by the time they 
had made their way out of the rose bush patch 
each was bleeding from a hundred tiny wounds, 
and of their precious dresses very little was left. 
When the little girls returned to camp and 
told their story, those who heard it knew that 
the children had explored a beaver’s burrow. 
This happened about fifty years ago. 
Most of what I have written here I put years 
ago into a boy’s book, one of my "Jack books, 
which in a way was a romance. Nevertheless, 
this story of some of the ways of the beaver is 
not romance at all. It is a part of the experi¬ 
ence of running back over many years of Thomas 
Elwood Flofer and myself, together with the 
judgment and opinions of a number of old-time 
mountain men, whose experience in beaver and 
trapping was great. G. B. G. 
