Twenty-six years ago, while studying glaciation on the slope of Long's
Peak, I came upon a cluster of eight beaver houses. These crude
conical mud huts were in a forest pond far up on the mountainside. In
this colony of our first engineers were so many things of interest
that the fascinating study of the dead Ice King's ruins and records
was indefinitely given up in order to observe Citizen Beaver's works
and ways.
A pile of granite boulders on the edge of the pond stood several feet
above the water-level, and from the top of these the entire colony and
its operations could be seen. On these I spent days observing and
enjoying the autumnal activities of Beaverdom.
It was the busiest time of the year for these industrious folk.
General and extensive preparations were now being made for the long
winter amid the mountain snows. A harvest of scores of trees was being
gathered and work on a new house was in progress, while the old
houses were receiving repairs. It was a serene autumn day when I came
into the picturesque village of these primitive people. The aspens
were golden, the willows rusty, the grass tanned, and the pines were
purring in the easy air.
The colony-site was in a small basin amid morainal débris at an
altitude of nine thousand feet above the sea-level. I at once
christened it the Moraine Colony. The scene was utterly wild. Peaks of
crags and snow rose steep and high above all; all around crowded a
dense evergreen forest of pine and spruce. A few small swamps reposed
in this forest, while here and there in it bristled several gigantic
windrows of boulders. A ragged belt of aspens surrounded the several
ponds and separated the pines and spruces from the fringe of
water-loving willows along the shores. There were three large ponds in
succession and below these a number of smaller ones. The dams that
formed the large ponds were willow-grown, earthy structures about four
feet in height, and all sagged downstream. The houses were grouped in
the middle pond, the largest one, the dam of which was more than
three hundred feet long. Three of these lake dwellings stood near the
upper margin, close to where the brook poured in. The other five were
clustered by the outlet, just below which a small willow-grown,
boulder-dotted island lay between the divided waters of the stream.
A number of beavers were busy gnawing down aspens, while others cut
the felled ones into sections, pushed and rolled the sections into the
water, and then floated them to the harvest piles, one of which was
being made beside each house. Some were quietly at work spreading a
coat of mud on the outside of each house. This would freeze and defy
the tooth and claw of the hungriest or the strongest predaceous enemy.
Four beavers were leisurely lengthening and repairing a dam. A few
worked singly, but most of them were in groups. All worked quietly and
with apparent deliberation, but all were in motion, so that it was a
busy scene. "To work like a beaver!" What a stirring exhibition of
beaver industry and forethought I viewed from my boulder-pile!
At times upward of forty of them were in sight. Though there was a
general coöperation, yet each one appeared to do his part without
orders or direction. Time and again a group of workers completed a
task, and without pause silently moved off, and began another.
Everything appeared to go on mechanically. It produced a strange
feeling to see so many workers doing so many kinds of work effectively
and automatically. Again and again I listened for the superintendent's
voice; constantly I watched to see the overseer move among them; but I
listened and watched in vain. Yet I feel that some of the patriarchal
fellows must have carried a general plan of the work, and that during
its progress orders and directions that I could not comprehend were
given from time to time.
The work was at its height a little before mid-day. Nowadays it is
rare for a beaver to work in daylight. Men and guns have prevented
daylight workers from leaving descendants. These not only worked but
played by day. One morning for more than an hour there was a general
frolic, in which the entire population appeared to take part. They
raced, dived, crowded in general mix-ups, whacked the water with
their tails, wrestled, and dived again. There were two or three
play-centres, but the play went on without intermission, and as their
position constantly changed, the merrymakers splashed water all over
the main pond before they calmed down and in silence returned to work.
I gave most attention to the harvesters, who felled the aspens and
moved them, bodily or in sections, by land and water to the harvest
piles. One tree on the shore of the pond, which was felled into the
water, was eight inches in diameter and fifteen feet high. Without
having even a limb cut off, it was floated to the nearest harvest
pile. Another, about the same size, which was procured some fifty feet
from the water, was cut into four sections and its branches removed;
then a single beaver would take a branch in his teeth, drag it to the
water, and swim with it to a harvest pile. But four beavers united to
transport the largest section to the water. They pushed with fore
paws, with breasts, and with hips. Plainly it was too heavy for them.
They paused. "Now they will go for help," I said to myself, "and I
shall find out who the boss is." But to my astonishment one of them
began to gnaw the piece in two, and two more began to clear a narrow
way to the water, while the fourth set himself to cutting down another
aspen. Good roads and open waterways are the rule, and perhaps the
necessary rule, of beaver colonies.
I became deeply interested in this colony, which was situated within
two miles of my cabin, and its nearness enabled me to be a frequent
visitor and to follow closely its fortunes and misfortunes. About the
hut-filled pond I lingered when it was covered with winter's white,
when fringed with the gentian's blue, and while decked with the
pond-lily's yellow glory.
Fire ruined it during an autumn of drouth. One morning, while watching
from the boulder-pile, I noticed an occasional flake of ash dropping
into the pond. Soon smoke scented the air, then came the awful and
subdued roar of a forest fire. I fled, and from above the timber-line
watched the storm-cloud of black smoke sweep furiously forward,
bursting and closing to the terrible leaps of red and tattered flames.
Before noon several thousand acres of forest were dead, all leaves
and twigs were in ashes, all tree-trunks blistered and blackened.
The Moraine Colony was closely embowered in a pitchy forest. For a
time the houses in the water must have been wrapped in flames of
smelter heat. Could these mud houses stand this? The beavers
themselves I knew would escape by sinking under the water. Next
morning I went through the hot, smoky area and found every house
cracked and crumbling; not one was inhabitable. Most serious of all
was the total loss of the uncut food-supply, when harvesting for
winter had only begun.
Would these energetic people starve at home or would they try to find
refuge in some other colony? Would they endeavor to find a grove that
the fire had missed and there start anew? The intense heat had
consumed almost every fibrous thing above the surface. The piles of
garnered green aspen were charred to the water-line; all that remained
of willow thickets and aspen groves were thousands of blackened
pickets and points, acres of coarse charcoal stubble. It was a
dreary, starving outlook for my furred friends.
I left the scene to explore the entire burned area. After wandering
for hours amid ashes and charcoal, seeing here and there the seared
carcass of a deer or some other wild animal, I came upon a beaver
colony that had escaped the fire. It was in the midst of several acres
of swampy ground that was covered with fire-resisting willows and
aspens. The surrounding pine forest was not dense, and the heat it
produced in burning did no damage to the scattered beaver houses.
From the top of a granite crag I surveyed the green scene of life and
the surrounding sweep of desolation. Here and there a sodden log
smouldered in the ashen distance and supported a tower of smoke in the
still air. A few miles to the east, among the scattered trees of a
rocky summit, the fire was burning itself out; to the west the sun was
sinking behind crags and snow; near by, on a blackened limb, a
south-bound robin chattered volubly but hopelessly.
While I was listening, thinking, and watching, a mountain lion
appeared and leaped lightly upon a block of granite. He was on my
right, about one hundred feet away and about an equal distance from
the shore of the nearest pond. He was interested in the approach of
something. With a nervous switching of his tail he peered eagerly
forward over the crown of the ridge just before him, and then crouched
tensely and expectantly upon his rock.
A pine tree that had escaped the fire screened the place toward which
the lion looked and where something evidently was approaching. While I
was trying to discover what it could be, a coyote trotted into view.
Without catching sight of the near-by lion, he suddenly stopped and
fixed his gaze upon the point that so interested the crouching beast.
The mystery was solved when thirty or forty beavers came hurrying into
view. They had come from the ruined Moraine Colony.
I thought to myself that the coyote, stuffed as he must be with the
seared flesh of fire-roasted victims, would not attack them; but a
lion wants a fresh kill for every meal, and so I watched the movements
of the latter. He adjusted his feet a trifle and made ready to spring.
The beavers were getting close; but just as I was about to shout to
frighten him, the coyote leaped among them and began killing.
In the excitement of getting off the crag I narrowly escaped breaking
my neck. Once on the ground, I ran for the coyote, shouting wildly to
frighten him off; but he was so intent upon killing that a violent
kick in the ribs first made him aware of my presence. In anger and
excitement he leaped at me with ugly teeth as he fled. The lion had
disappeared, and by this time the beavers in the front ranks were
jumping into the pond, while the others were awkwardly speeding down
the slope. The coyote had killed three. If beavers have a language,
surely that night the refugees related to their hospitable neighbors
some thrilling experiences.
The next morning I returned to the Moraine Colony over the route
followed by the refugees. Leaving their fire-ruined homes, they had
followed the stream that issued from their ponds. In places the
channel was so clogged with fire wreckage that they had followed
alongside the water rather than in it, as is their wont. At one place
they had hurriedly taken refuge in the stream. Coyote tracks in the
scattered ashes explained this. But after going a short distance they
had climbed from the water and again traveled the ashy earth.
Beavers commonly follow water routes, but in times of emergency or in
moments of audacity they will journey overland. To have followed this
stream down to its first tributary, then up this to where the colony
in which they found refuge was situated, would have required four
miles of travel. Overland it was less than a mile. After following the
stream for some distance, at just the right place they turned off,
left the stream, and dared the overland dangers. How did they know the
situation of the colony in the willows, or that it had escaped fire,
and how could they have known the shortest, best way to it?
The morning after the arrival of the refugees, work was begun on two
new houses and a dam, which was about sixty feet in length and built
across a grassy open. Green cuttings of willow, aspen, and alder were
used in its construction. Not a single stone or handful of mud was
used. When completed it appeared like a windrow of freshly raked
shrubs. It was almost straight, but sagged a trifle downstream. Though
the water filtered freely through, it flooded the flat above. As the
two new houses could not shelter all the refugees, it is probable that
some of them were sheltered in bank tunnels, while room for others may
have been found in the old houses.
That winter the colony was raided by some trappers; more than one
hundred pelts were secured, and the colony was left in ruins and
almost depopulated.
The Moraine Colony site was deserted for a long time. Eight years
after the fire I returned to examine it. The willow growth about the
ruins was almost as thrifty as when the fire came. A growth of aspen
taller than one's head clung to the old shore-lines, while a close
seedling growth of lodge-pole pine throve in the ashes of the old
forest. One low mound, merry with blooming columbine, was the only
house ruin to be seen.
The ponds were empty and every dam was broken. The stream, in rushing
unobstructed through the ruins, had eroded deeply. This erosion
revealed the records of ages, and showed that the old main dam had
been built on the top of an older dam and a sediment-filled pond. The
second dam was on top of an older one still. In the sediment of the
oldest--the bottom pond--I found a spearhead, two charred logs, and
the skull of a buffalo. Colonies of beaver, as well as those of men,
are often found upon sites that have a tragic history. Beavers, with
Omar, might say,--
"When you and I behind the veil are past,
Oh but the long long while the world shall last."
The next summer, 1893, Moraine site was resettled. During the first
season the colonists spent their time repairing dams and were content
to live in holes. In autumn they gathered no harvest, and no trace of
them could be found after the snow; so it is likely that they had
returned to winter in the colony whence they had come. But early in
the next spring there were reinforced numbers of them at work
establishing a permanent settlement. Three dams were repaired, and in
the autumn many of the golden leaves that fell found lodgment in the
fresh plaster of two new houses.
In the new Moraine Colony one of the houses was torn to pieces by some
animal, probably a bear. This was before Thanksgiving. About
mid-winter a prospector left his tunnel a few miles away, came to the
colony and dynamited a house, and "got seven of them." Next year two
houses were built on the ruins of the two just fallen. That year's
harvest-home was broken by deadly attacks of enemies. In gathering the
harvest the beavers showed a preference for some aspens that were
growing in a moist place about one hundred feet from the water.
Whether it was the size of these or their peculiar flavor that
determined their election in preference to nearer ones, I could not
determine. One day, while several beavers were cutting here, they were
surprised by a mountain lion which leaped upon and killed one of the
harvesters. The next day the lion surprised and killed another. Two or
three days later a coyote killed one on the same blood-stained spot,
and then overtook and killed two others as they fled for the water. I
could not see these deadly attacks from the boulder-pile, but in each
case the sight of flying beavers sent me rushing upon the scene, where
I beheld the cause of their desperate retreat. But despite dangers
they persisted until the last of these aspens was harvested. During
the winter the bark was eaten from these, and the next season their
clean wood was used in the walls of a new house.
One autumn I had the pleasure of seeing some immigrants pass me _en
route_ for a new home in the Moraine Colony. Of course they may have
been only visitors, or have come temporarily to assist in the
harvesting; but I like to think of them as immigrants, and a number of
things testified that immigrants they were. One evening I had been
lying on a boulder by the stream below the colony, waiting for a gift
from the gods. It came. Out of the water within ten feet of me
scrambled the most patriarchal, as well as the largest, beaver that I
have ever seen. I wanted to take off my hat to him, I wanted to ask
him to tell me the story of his life, but from long habit I simply lay
still and watched and thought in silence. He was making a portage
round a cascade. As he scrambled up over the rocks, I noticed that he
had but two fingers on his right hand. He was followed, in single
file, by four others; one of these was minus a finger on the left
hand. The next morning I read that five immigrants had arrived in the
Moraine Colony. They had registered their footprints in the muddy
margin of the lower pond. Had an agent been sent to invite these
colonists, or had they come out of their own adventurous spirit? The
day following their arrival I trailed them backward in the hope of
learning whence they came and why they had moved. They had traveled in
the water most of the time; but in places they had come out on the
bank to go round a waterfall or to avoid an obstruction. Here and
there I saw their tracks in the mud and traced them to a beaver
settlement in which the houses and dams had been recently wrecked. A
near-by rancher told me that he had been "making it hot" for all
beavers in his meadow. During the next two years I occasionally saw
this patriarchal beaver or his tracks thereabout.
It is the custom among old male beavers to idle away two or three
months of each summer in exploring the neighboring brooks and
streams, but they never fail to return in time for autumn activities.
It thus becomes plain how, when an old colony needs to move, some one
in it knows where to go and the route to follow.
[Illustration: THE MORAINE HOUSE BEFORE AND AFTER ENLARGEMENT]
The Moraine colonists gathered an unusually large harvest during the
autumn of 1909. Seven hundred and thirty-two sapling aspens and
several hundred willows were massed in the main pond by the largest
house. This pile, which was mostly below the water-line, was three
feet deep and one hundred and twenty-four feet in circumference. Would
a new house be built this fall? This unusually large harvest plainly
told that either children or immigrants had increased the population
of the colony. Of course, a hard winter may also have been expected.
No; they were not to build a new house, but the old house by the
harvest pile was to be enlarged. One day, just as the evening shadow
of Long's Peak had covered the pond, I peeped over a log on top of the
dam to watch the work. The house was only forty feet distant. Not a
ripple stirred among the inverted peaks and pines in the clear,
shadow-enameled pond. A lone beaver rose quietly in the scene from the
water near the house. Swimming noiselessly, he made a circuit of the
pond. Then for a time, and without any apparent purpose, he swam back
and forth over a short, straight course; he moved leisurely, and
occasionally made a shallow, quiet dive. He did not appear to be
watching anything in particular or to have anything special on his
mind. Yet his eyes may have been scouting for enemies and his mind may
have been full of house plans. Finally he dived deeply, and the next I
saw of him he was climbing up the side of the house addition with a
pawful of mud.
By this time a number of beavers were swimming in the pond after the
manner of the first one. Presently all began to work. The addition
already stood more than two feet above the water-line. The top of this
was crescent-shaped and was about seven feet long and half as wide. It
was made mostly of mud, which was plentifully reinforced with willow
cuttings and aspen sticks. For a time all the workers busied
themselves in carrying mud and roots from the bottom of the pond and
placing these on the slowly rising addition. Eleven were working at
one time. By and by three swam ashore, each in a different direction
and each a few seconds apart. After a minute or two they returned from
the shore, each carrying or trailing a long willow. These were dragged
to the top of the addition, laid down, and trampled in the mud.
Meantime the mud-carriers kept steadily at their work; again willows
were brought, but this time four beavers went, and, as before, each
was independent of the others. I did not see how this work could go on
without some one bossing the thing, but I failed to detect any beaver
acting as overseer. While there was general coöperation, each acted
independently most of the time and sometimes was apparently oblivious
of the others. These beavers simply worked, slowly, silently, and
steadily; and they were still working away methodically and with
dignified deliberation when darkness hid them.