THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER
All summer long he had hung about the fur company trading-posts waiting
for the signs.
And now the signs had come.
Foliage crimson to the touch of night-frosts. Crisp autumn days, spicy
with the smell of nuts and dead leaves. Birds flying away southward,
leaving the woods silent as the snow-padded surface of a frozen pond.
Hoar-frost heavier every morning; and thin ice edged round stagnant
pools like layers of mica.
Then he knew it was time to go. And through the Northern forests moved a
new presence--the trapper.
Of the tawdry, flash clothing in which popular fancy is wont to dress
him he has none. Bright colours would be a danger-signal to game. If his
costume has any colour, it is a waist-belt or neck-scarf, a toque or
bright handkerchief round his head to keep distant hunters from
mistaking him for a moose. For the rest, his clothes are as ragged as
any old, weather-worn garments. Sleeping on balsam boughs or cooking
over a smoky fire will reduce the newness of blanket coat and buckskin
jacket to the dun shades of the grizzled forest. A few days in the open
and the trapper has the complexion of a bronzed tree-trunk.
Like other wild creatures, this foster-child of the forest gradually
takes on the appearance and habits of woodland life. Nature protects the
ermine by turning his russet coat of the grass season to spotless white
for midwinter--except the jet tail-tip left to lure hungry enemies and
thus, perhaps, to prevent the little stoat degenerating into a sloth.
And the forest looks after her foster-child by transforming the smartest
suit that ever stepped out of the clothier's bandbox to the dull tints
of winter woods.
This is the seasoning of the man for the work. But the trapper's
training does not stop here.
When the birds have gone south the silence of a winter forest on a
windless day becomes tense enough to be snapped by either a man's
breathing or the breaking of a small twig; and the trapper acquires a
habit of moving through the brush with noiseless stealth. He must learn
to see better than the caribou can hear or the wolf smell--which means
that in keenness and accuracy his sight outdistances the average
field-glass. Besides, the trapper has learned how to look, how to see,
and seeing--discern; which the average man cannot do even through a
field-glass. Then animals have a trick of deceiving the enemy into
mistaking them for inanimate things by suddenly standing stock-still in
closest peril, unflinching as stone; and to match himself against them
the trapper must also get the knack of instantaneously becoming a
statue, though he feel the clutch of bruin's five-inch claws.
And these things are only the _a b c_ of the trapper's woodcraft.
One of the best hunters in America confessed that the longer he trapped
the more he thought every animal different enough from the fellows of
its kind to be a species by itself. Each day was a fresh page in the
book of forest-lore.
It is in the month of May-goosey-geezee, the Ojibways' trout month,
corresponding to the late October and early November of the white man,
that the trapper sets out through the illimitable stretches of the
forest land and waste prairie south of Hudson Bay, between Labrador and
the Upper Missouri.
His birch canoe has been made during the summer. Now, splits and seams,
where the bark crinkles at the gunwale, must be filled with rosin and
pitch. A light sled, with only runners and cross frame, is made to haul
the canoe over still water, where the ice first forms. Sled, provisions,
blanket, and fish-net are put in the canoe, not forgetting the most
important part of his kit--the trapper's tools. Whether he hunts from
point to point all winter, travelling light and taking nothing but
absolute necessaries, or builds a central lodge, where he leaves full
store and radiates out to the hunting-grounds, at least four things must
be in his tool-bag: a woodman's axe; a gimlet to bore holes in his
snow-shoe frame; a crooked knife--not the sheathed dagger of fiction,
but a blade crooked hook-shape, somewhat like a farrier's knife, at one
end--to smooth without splintering, as a carpenter's plane; and a small
chisel to use on the snow-shoe frames and wooden contrivances that
stretch the pelts.
If accompanied by a boy, who carries half the pack, the hunter may take
more tools; but the old trapper prefers to travel light. Fire-arms,
ammunition, a common hunting-knife, steel-traps, a cotton-factory tepee,
a large sheet of canvas, locally known as _abuckwan_, for a shed tent,
complete the trapper's equipment. His dog is not part of the equipment:
it is fellow-hunter and companion.
From the moose must come the heavy filling for the snow-shoes; but the
snow-shoes will not be needed for a month, and there is no haste about
shooting an unfound moose while mink and musk-rat and otter and beaver
are waiting to be trapped. With the dog showing his wisdom by sitting
motionless as an Indian bowman, the trapper steps into his canoe and
pushes out.
Eye and ear alert for sign of game or feeding-place, where traps would
be effective, the man paddles silently on. If he travels after
nightfall, the chances are his craft will steal unawares close to a
black head above a swimming body. With both wind and current meeting the
canoe, no suspicion of his presence catches the scent of the sharp-nosed
swimmer. Otter or beaver, it is shot from the canoe. With a leap over
bow or stern--over his master's shoulder if necessary, but never
sideways, lest the rebound cause an upset--the dog brings back his
quarry. But this is only an aside, the hap-hazard shot of an amateur
hunter, not the sort of trapping that fills the company's lofts with fur
bales.
While ranging the forest the former season the trapper picked out a
large birch-tree, free of knots and underbranching, with the full girth
to make the body of a canoe from gunwale to gunwale without any gussets
and seams. But birch-bark does not peel well in winter. The trapper
scratched the trunk with a mark of "first-finder-first-owner," honoured
by all hunters; and came back in the summer for the bark.
Perhaps it was while taking the bark from this tree that he first
noticed the traces of beaver. Channels, broader than runnels, hardly as
wide as a ditch, have been cut connecting pool with pool, marsh with
lake. Here are runways through the grass, where beaver have dragged
young saplings five times their own length to a winter storehouse near
the dam. Trees lie felled miles away from any chopper. Chips are
scattered about marked by teeth which the trapper knows--knows, perhaps,
from having seen his dog's tail taken off at a nip, or his own finger
amputated almost before he felt it. If the bark of a tree has been
nibbled around, like the line a chopper might make before cutting, the
trapper guesses whether his coming has not interrupted a beaver in the
very act.
All these are signs which spell out the presence of a beaver-dam within
one night's travelling distance; for the timid beaver frequently works
at night, and will not go so far away that forage cannot be brought in
before daylight. In which of the hundred water-ways in the labyrinth of
pond and stream where beavers roam is this particular family to be
found?
Realizing that his own life depends on the life of the game, no true
trapper will destroy wild creatures when the mothers are caring for
their young. Besides, furs are not at their prime when birch-bark is
peeled, and the trapper notes the place, so that he may come back when
the fall hunt begins. Beaver kittens stay under the parental roof for
three years, but at the end of the first summer are amply able to look
after their own skins. Free from nursery duties, the old ones can now
use all the ingenuity and craft which nature gave them for
self-protection. When cold weather comes the beaver is fair game to the
trapper. It is wit against wit. To be sure, the man has superior
strength, a gun, and a treacherous thing called a trap. But his eyes are
not equal to the beaver's nose. And he hasn't that familiarity with the
woods to enable him to pursue, which the beaver has to enable it to
escape. And he can't swim long enough under water to throw enemies off
the scent, the way the beaver does.
Now, as he paddles along the network of streams which interlace Northern
forests, he will hardly be likely to stumble on the beaver-dam of last
summer. Beavers do not build their houses, where passers-by will stumble
upon them. But all the streams have been swollen by fall rains; and the
trapper notices the markings on every chip and pole floating down the
full current. A chip swirls past white and fresh cut. He knows that the
rains have floated it over the beaver-dam. Beavers never cut below their
houses, but always above, so that the current will carry the poles
down-stream to the dam.
Leaving his canoe-load behind, the trapper guardedly advances within
sight of the dam. If any old beaver sentinel be swimming about, he
quickly scents the man-smell, upends and dives with a spanking blow of
his trowel tail on the water, which heliographs danger to the whole
community. He swims with his webbed hind feet, the little fore paws
being used as carriers or hanging limply, the flat tail acting the
faintest bit in the world like a rudder; but that is a mooted question.
The only definitely ascertained function of that bat-shaped appendage is
to telegraph danger to comrades. The beaver neither carries things on
his tail, nor plasters houses with it; for the simple reason that the
joints of his caudal appurtenance admit of only slight sidelong
wigglings and a forward sweep between his hind legs, as if he might use
it as a tray for food while he sat back spooning up mouthfuls with his
fore paws.
Having found the wattled homes of the beaver, the trapper may proceed in
different ways. He may, after the fashion of the Indian hunter, stake
the stream across above the dam, cut away the obstruction lowering the
water, break the conical crowns of the houses on the south side, which
is thinnest, and slaughter the beavers indiscriminately as they rush
out. But such hunting kills the goose that lays the golden egg; and
explains why it was necessary to prohibit the killing of beaver for some
years. In the confusion of a wild scramble to escape and a blind
clubbing of heads there was bootless destruction. Old and young, poor
and in prime, suffered the same fate. The house had been destroyed; and
if one beaver chanced to escape into some of the bank-holes under water
or up the side channels, he could be depended upon to warn all beaver
from that country. Only the degenerate white man practises bad hunting.
The skilled hunter has other methods.
If unstripped saplings be yet about the bank of the stream, the beavers
have not finished laying up their winter stores in adjacent pools. The
trapper gets one of his steel-traps. Attaching the ring of this to a
loose trunk heavy enough to hold the beaver down and drown him, he
places the trap a few inches under water at the end of a runway or in
one of the channels. He then takes out a bottle of castoreum. This is a
substance from the glands of a beaver which destroys all traces of the
man-smell. For it the beavers have a curious infatuation, licking
everything touched by it, and said, by some hunters, to be drugged into
a crazy stupidity by the very smell. The hunter daubs this on his own
foot-tracks.
Or, if he finds tracks of the beaver in the grass back from the bank, he
may build an old-fashioned deadfall, with which the beaver is still
taken in Labrador. This is the small lean-to, with a roof of branches
and bark--usually covered with snow--slanting to the ground on one side,
the ends either posts or logs, and the front an opening between two logs
wide enough to admit half the animal's body. Inside, at the back, on a
rectangular stick, one part of which bolsters up the front log, is the
bait. All traces of the hunter are smeared over with the elusive
castoreum. One tug at the bait usually brings the front log crashing
down across the animal's back, killing it instantly.
But neither the steel-trap nor the deadfall is wholly satisfactory. When
the poor beaver comes sniffing along the castoreum trail to the
steel-trap and on the first splash into the water feels a pair of iron
jaws close on his feet, he dives below to try and gain the shelter of
his house. The log plunges after him, holding him down and back till he
drowns; and his whereabouts are revealed by the upend of the tree.
But several chances are in the beaver's favour. With the castoreum
licks, which tell them of some other beaver, perhaps looking for a mate
or lost cub, they may become so exhilarated as to jump clear of the
trap. Or, instead of diving down with the trap, they may retreat back up
the bank and amputate the imprisoned foot with one nip, leaving only a
mutilated paw for the hunter. With the deadfall a small beaver may have
gone entirely inside the snare before the front log falls; and an animal
whose teeth saw through logs eighteen inches in diameter in less than
half an hour can easily eat a way of escape from a wooden trap. Other
things are against the hunter. A wolverine may arrive on the scene
before the trapper and eat the finest beaver ever taken; or the trapper
may discover that his victim is a poor little beaver with worthless,
ragged fur, who should have been left to forage for three or four years.
* * * * *
All these risks can be avoided by waiting till the ice is thick enough
for the trapper to cut trenches. Then he returns with a woodman's axe
and his dog. By sounding the ice, he can usually find where holes have
been hollowed out of the banks. Here he drives stakes to prevent the
beaver taking refuge in the shore vaults. The runways and channels,
where the beaver have dragged trees, may be hidden in snow and iced
over; but the man and his dog will presently find them.
The beaver always chooses a stream deep enough not to be frozen solid,
and shallow enough for it to make a mud foundation for the house without
too much work. Besides, in a deep, swift stream, rains would carry away
any house the beaver could build. A trench across the upper stream or
stakes through the ice prevent escape that way.
The trapper then cuts a hole in the dam. Falling water warns the
terrified colony that an enemy is near. It may be their greatest foe,
the wolverine, whose claws will rip through the frost-hard wall as
easily as a bear delves for gophers; but their land enemies cannot
pursue them into water; so the panic-stricken family--the old parents,
wise from many such alarms; the young three-year-olds, who were to go
out and rear families for themselves in the spring; the two-year-old
cubbies, big enough to be saucy, young enough to be silly; and the baby
kittens, just able to forage for themselves and know the soft alder rind
from the tough old bark unpalatable as mud--pop pell-mell from the high
platform of their houses into the water. The water is still falling.
They will presently be high and dry. No use trying to escape up-stream.
They see that in the first minute's wild scurry through the shallows.
Besides, what's this across the creek? Stakes, not put there by any
beaver; for there is no bark on. If they only had time now they might
cut a passage through; but no--this wretched enemy, whatever it is, has
ditched the ice across.
They sniff and listen. A terrible sound comes from above--a low,
exultant, devilish whining. The man has left his dog on guard above the
dam. At that the little beavers--always trembling, timid fellows--tumble
over each other in a panic of fear to escape by way of the flowing water
below the dam. But there a new terror assails them. A shadow is above
the ice, a wraith of destruction--the figure of a man standing at the
dam with his axe and club--waiting.
Where to go now? They can't find their bank shelters, for the man has
staked them up. The little fellows lose their presence of mind and their
heads and their courage, and with a blind scramble dash up the remaining
open runway. It is a _cul-de-sac_. But what does that matter? They run
almost to the end. They can crouch there till the awful shadow goes
away. Exactly. That is what the man has been counting on. He will come
to them afterward.
The old beavers make no such mistake. They have tried the hollow-log
trick with an enemy pursuing them to the blind end, and have escaped
only because some other beaver was eaten.
The old ones know that water alone is safety.
That is the first and last law of beaver life. They, too, see that
phantom destroyer above the ice; but a dash past is the last chance. How
many of the beaver escape past the cut in the dam to the water below,
depends on the dexterity of the trapper's aim. But certainly, for the
most, one blow is the end; and that one blow is less cruel to them than
the ravages of the wolf or wolverine in spring, for these begin to eat
before they kill.
A signal, and the dog ceases to keep guard above the dam. Where is the
runway in which the others are hiding? The dog scampers round aimlessly,
but begins to sniff and run in a line and scratch and whimper. The man
sees that the dog is on the trail of sagging snow, and the sag betrays
ice settling down where a channel has run dry. The trapper cuts a hole
across the river end of the runway and drives down stakes. The young
beavers are now prisoners.
The human mind can't help wondering why the foolish youngsters didn't
crouch below the ice above the dam and lie there in safe hiding till the
monster went away. This may be done by the hermit beavers--fellows who
have lost their mates and go through life inconsolable; or sick
creatures, infested by parasites and turned off to house in the river
holes; or fat, selfish ladies, who don't want the trouble of training a
family. Whatever these solitaries are--naturalists and hunters
differ--they have the wit to keep alive; but the poor little beavers
rush right into the jaws of death. Why do they? For the same reason
probably, if they could answer, that people trample each other to death
when there is an alarm in a crowd.
* * * * *
They cower in the terrible pen, knowing nothing at all about their hides
being valued all the way from fifty cents to three dollars, according to
the quality; nothing about the dignity of being a coin of the realm in
the Northern wilderness, where one beaver-skin sets the value for mink,
otter, marten, bear, and all other skins, one pound of tobacco, one
kettle, five pounds of shot, a pint of brandy, and half a yard of cloth;
nothing about the rascally Indians long ago bartering forty of their
hides for a scrap of iron and a great company sending one hundred
thousand beaver-skins in a single year to make hats and cloaks for the
courtiers of Europe; nothing about the laws of man forbidding the
killing of beaver till their number increase.
All the little beaver remembers is that it opened its eyes to daylight
in the time of soft, green grasses; and that as soon as it got strong
enough on a milk diet to travel, the mother led the whole family of
kittens--usually three or four--down the slanting doorway of their dim
house for a swim; and that she taught them how to nibble the dainty,
green shrubs along the bank; and then the entire colony went for the
most glorious, pell-mell splash up-stream to fresh ponds. No more
sleeping in that stifling lodge; but beds in soft grass like a
goose-nest all night, and tumbling in the water all day, diving for the
roots of the lily-pads. But the old mother is always on guard, for the
wolves and bears are ravenous in spring. Soon the cubs can cut the
hardening bark of alder and willow as well as their two-year-old
brothers; and the wonderful thing is--if a tooth breaks, it grows into
perfect shape inside of a week.
By August the little fellows are great swimmers, and the colony begins
the descent of the stream for their winter home. If unmolested, the old
dam is chosen; but if the hated man-smell is there, new waterways are
sought. Burrows and washes and channels and retreats are cleaned out.
Trees are cut and a great supply of branches laid up for winter store
near the lodge, not a chip of edible bark being wasted. Just before the
frost they begin building or repairing the dam. Each night's frost
hardens the plastered clay till the conical wattled roof--never more
than two feet thick--will support the weight of a moose.
All work is done with mouth and fore paws, and not the tail. This has
been finally determined by observing the Marquis of Bute's colony of
beavers. If the family--the old parents and three seasons' offspring--be
too large for the house, new chambers are added. In height the house is
seldom more than five feet from the base, and the width varies. In
building a new dam they begin under water, scooping out clay, mixing
this with stones and sticks for the walls, and hollowing out the dome as
it rises, like a coffer-dam, except that man pumps out water and the
beaver scoops out mud. The domed roof is given layer after layer of clay
till it is cold-proof. Whether the houses have one door or two is
disputed; but the door is always at the end of a sloping incline away
from the land side, with a shelf running round above, which serves as
the living-room. Differences in the houses, breaks below water, two
doors instead of one, platforms like an oven instead of a shelf, are
probably explained by the continual abrasion of the current. By the time
the ice forms the beavers have retired to their houses for the winter,
only coming out to feed on their winter stores and get an airing.
But this terrible thing has happened; and the young beavers huddle
together under the ice of the canal, bleating with the cry of a child.
They are afraid to run back; for the crunch of feet can be heard. They
are afraid to go forward; for the dog is whining with a glee that is
fiendish to the little beavers. Then a gust of cold air comes from the
rear and a pole prods forward.
The man has opened a hole to feel where the hiding beavers are, and with
little terrified yelps they scuttle to the very end of the runway. By
this time the dog is emitting howls of triumph. For hours he has been
boxing up his wolfish ferocity, and now he gives vent by scratching with
a zeal that would burrow to the middle of earth.
The trapper drives in more stakes close to the blind end of the channel,
and cuts a hole above the prison of the beaver. He puts down his arm.
One by one they are dragged out by the tail; and that finishes the
little beaver--sacrificed, like the guinea-pigs and rabbits of
bacteriological laboratories, to the necessities of man. Only, this
death is swifter and less painful. A prolonged death-struggle with the
beaver would probably rob the trapper of half his fingers. Very often
the little beavers with poor fur are let go. If the dog attempts to
capture the frightened runaways by catching at the conspicuous appendage
to the rear, that dog is likely to emerge from the struggle minus a
tail, while the beaver runs off with two.
Trappers have curious experiences with beaver kittens which they take
home as pets. When young they are as easily domesticated as a cat, and
become a nuisance with their love of fondling. But to them, as to the
hunter, comes what the Indians call "the-sickness-of-long-thinking," the
gipsy yearning for the wilds. Then extraordinary things happen. The
beaver are apt to avenge their comrades' death. One old beaver trapper
of New Brunswick related that by June the beavers became so restless, he
feared their escape and put them in cages. They bit their way out with
absurd ease.
He then tried log pens. They had eaten a hole through in a night.
Thinking to get wire caging, he took them into his lodge, and they
seemed contented enough while he was about; but one morning he wakened
to find a hole eaten through the door, and the entire round of
birch-bark, which he had staked out ready for the gunwales and ribbing
of his canoe--bark for which he had travelled forty miles--chewed into
shreds. The beavers had then gone up-stream, which is their habit in
spring.