A little turning of nature from her own courses banishes the beaver from
his primal haunts, but his less renowned and lesser cousin, the muskrat,
philosophically accommodates himself to the changed conditions of their
common foster mother and still clings fondly to her altered breast.
The ancient forests may be swept away and their successors disappear,
till there is scarcely left him a watersoaked log to use as an
intermediate port in his coastwise voyages; continual shadow may give
place to diurnal sunshine, woodland to meadow and pasture, the plough
tear the roof of his underground home, and cattle graze where once only
the cloven hoofs of the deer and the moose trod the virgin mould, yet he
holds his old place.
In the springtides of present years as in those of centuries past his
whining call echoes along the changed shores, his wake seams with
silver the dark garment of the water, and his comically grim visage
confronts you now as it did the Waubanakee bowmen in the old days when
the otter and the beaver were his familiars.
Unlike the beaver's slowly maturing crops, his food supply is constantly
provided in the annual growth of the marshes. Here in banks contiguous
to endless store of succulent sedge and lily roots and shell-cased
tidbits of mussels, he tunnels his stable water-portaled home, and out
there, by the channel's edge, builds his sedge-thatched hut before the
earliest frost falls upon the marshes. In its height, some find prophecy
of high or low water, and in the thickness of its walls the forecast of
a mild or severe winter, but the prophet himself is sometimes flooded
out of his house, sometimes starved and frozen in it.
In the still, sunny days between the nights of its unseen building, the
blue spikes of the pickerel-weed and the white trinities of the
arrow-head yet bloom beside it. Then in the golden and scarlet
brightness of autumn the departing wood drake rests on the roof to preen
his plumage, and later the dusky duck swims on its watery lawn. Above it
the wild geese harrow the low, cold arch of the sky, the last fleet of
sere leaves drifts past it in the bleak wind, and then ice and snow draw
the veil of the long winter twilight over the muskrat's homes and
haunts.
These may be gloomy days he spends groping in the dark chambers of his
hut and burrow, or gathering food in the dimly lighted icy water, with
never a sight of the upper world nor ever a sunbeam to warm him.
But there are more woful days when the sun and the sky are again opened
to him, and he breathes the warm air of spring, hears the blackbirds
sing and the bittern boom. For, amid all the gladness of nature's
reawakened life, danger lurks in all his paths; the cruel, hungry trap
gapes for him on every jutting log, on every feeding-bed, even in the
doorway of his burrow and by the side of his house.
The trapper's skiff invades all his pleasant waters; on every hand he
hears the splash of its paddles, the clank of its setting pole, and he
can scarcely show his head above water but a deadly shower of lead
bursts upon it. He hears the simulated call of his beloved, and voyaging
hot-hearted to the cheating tryst meets only death.
At last comes the summer truce and happy days of peace in the tangled
jungle of the marsh, with the wild duck and bittern nesting beside his
watery path, the marsh wren weaving her rushy bower above it.
So the days of his life go on, and the days of his race continue in the
land of his unnumbered generations. Long may he endure to enliven the
drear tameness of civilization with a memory of the world's old
wildness.