Henry 
Braithwaite’s 
Tales 
of the Forest 
Some Traits of That Busy 
Woodland Engineer, 
the Beaver 
ing animals. They are heavily 
built and exceedingly strong for 
their size. They are well adapted for 
the life they lead with a wonderful 
broad, flat tail and webbed hind feet. 
Both fore and hind feet are four toed, 
but the second toe of the hind foot is 
peculiar in having two claws, which the 
beaver uses for a comb and with which 
he can comb out the finest particle of 
dirt that gets into his fur. 
The beaver’s food is nearly all hard 
woods, such as maple, birch, poplar, 
alder and willow; also pond lily roots. 
They are wonderful workers, and I once 
mentioned that fact to an Indian, to 
which he replied, “Yes, damn fool all 
same white man, work all time.” I 
have measured white birch trees, six- 
teen inches in diameter, that they have 
cut down. A hunter once told me he 
saw a poplar, twenty-two inches in di- 
ameter, they had cut. They will cut 
off the limbs and then cut them up 
and hand them into their ponds; and 
in some cases when food is scarce they 
will gnaw nearly all the bark off the 
trunk. 
Beaver houses vary in size according 
to the number of beavers living in them. 
They are usually from six to twelve 
feet in diameter and from three to six 
feet high. They are built of brush, 
sticks, stones and mud. To build them 
the beaver first gets a pile of dirt 
started, then he goes through a tunnel, 
starting under water and digs out his 
dirt pile from the inside. The mud, 
sticks, etc., he digs out from the inside 
he carries in his fore pores and deposits 
on the outside. He does not use his tail 
for plastering his house as is com- 
monly believed, but uses it to keep 
his balance while carrying out the 
B EAVERS are our largest gnaw- 
*% 
’ 
| 

Henry Braithwaite in a typical north-country canoe. 
mud, as he walks on his hind feet only. 
Usually there are the two old beavers 
and two or three young ones in a house. 
The young ones do not mate until they 
are three or four years old; they get 
their full growth at five or six years. 
The old female stays at the house to 
have her kittens in the spring, which 
average as near as I could learn from 
three to five, according to her age. The 
yearlings and two-year-olds stay with 
her. The male goes off rambling in 
the spring and comes back about the 
first of September. The three-year- 
olds then mate and go off on their own 
hook and build a house. 
If hunters would use judgment when 
they find a good lake or stream for 
beavers and be careful not to set traps 
near the houses in the spring of the 
year, beavers would never become ex- 
terminated from a locality. I caught 
a very large beaver a number of years 
ago and after skinning her I examined 
her and found she would have had 
seven kittens. When I thought of kill- 
ing eight and only saving one, it cured 
me of setting traps near the houses in 
the spring; it was too much like kill- 
ing the goose that laid the golden egg. 
Indians and a great many white men 
generally camp near a beaver house and 
stay till they get the last beaver, which 
ends the family and that is the reason 
why beavers are getting so scarce. 
APL AS beaver’s object in building dams 
is to protect his food in winter 
from freezing. He cuts trees and brush 
and floats them to his house, and lets 
them sink in the water. The stories 
about his sucking the air out of the 
wood, so it will sink, is all nonsense. 
He simply keeps piling up the trees and 
brush in front of his house until its 
own weight sinks it to the bottom. 
When the pond freezes over, a good bit 
of this brush can be seen sticking up 
through the ice. I saw one dam that 
measured eight feet high and twenty 
feet long. It was built in a brook with 
high banks, but as a rule, the dams 
average four to six feet high. 
| ONCE saw a stone dam an eighth 
of a mile long, which two or three 
different men came and measured. I 
came to the conclusion that the beavers 
had been building it for the last hun- 
dred years and as the brush at the bot- 
tom rotted away the stones fell down 
to fill the gap and finally formed a 
stone foundation. One spring, river 
drivers dug up a hole in it to let the 
water out for driving purposes, and it 
took three days to drain the lake to its 
former level. I returned to the place 
two years later and noticed that the 
beavers had built up the gap again with 
brush, mud and stones. 
As a rule, when routed, beavers make 
upstream and sometimes make long 
overland journeys. I once caught a 
large beaver in a bear trap up in a 
hard wood ridge nearly a mile from 
the water. He was no doubt making 
for some other lake or stream, and 
smelling the bait in the bear trap, had 
gone in to investigate. 
Another time in April when the snow 
was between three and four feet deep, 
I came on the trail of a family of four 
or five beavers which had left a small 
brook and was making: across country 
to another stream running in a differ- 
ent direction. I followed them until 
I came to the water and knew it was 
of no use to follow further, as they 
might go miles without stopping. 
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