Shaggycoat: The Biography of a Beaver

by Clarence Hawkes

You would have laughed if you had seen these two comparatively small animals at the foot of that giant pine, nipping away at it like persistent little wood-choppers. The old tree was tall and majestic. It had withstood the winds of a century, and its heart was still stout. The chips that they took were so small, and the task before them so great, but, if you had happened by the following day and seen the furrow, some two or three inches in depth, you would have marveled, and not been so sure of the old pine's ability to withstand these ambitious rodents.

Night after night they worked, and once or twice they had to widen the cut, which had become so narrow that they could not get their heads in to work, but, even as water wears away stone by constant action, they wore away the stout heart of the old pine.

At last, one morning, just as the moon was setting and the pale stars were fading, a shudder ran through the tall pine and it quivered as they cut through the last fibres of its strong heart. A moment it tottered like an old man upon his staff, then swayed, as though uncertain which way to go, and fell with a rush of wind and a roar that resounded from foothill to foothill until the meadow echoed with the downfall of the old sentinel.

It had fallen squarely across the stream, just as they had hoped. This was probably not through any prowess of the beavers as woodsmen, but nearly all timber that grows upon the bank of a stream leans toward the water, owing to the fact that trees grow more freely upon that side.

The sun was now rising, so they left their work, well pleased that the tree was down, but by dusk they were at it again.

The trunk of the pine, and particularly its thick foliage, had dammed the water somewhat, so it was already beginning to set back, but most of it trickled through and went upon its way rejoicing at its escape. Some large limbs upon the tree still held it several feet from the ground, so they set to work on the under side of the tree, cutting off the limbs and lowering the trunk to just the height they wished. Some of this work had to be done under water, but that is no hardship for a beaver, for he can stay under several minutes. When breathing had become difficult they would come up, bringing the severed limbs in their teeth. These would be jammed into the mud just in front of the tree trunk, like the pickets upon a fence. If you had tried to pull out one of these limbs after they had once planted it, you would have found it a difficult task.

In two nights they lowered the pine to the desired height, and made it look like a dam.

The following night, they began upon the other pine on the opposite bank, and girdled it as they had done the first. The tree looked lonely now with its mate gone. Perhaps it felt so and did not care that the sharp teeth were nipping away at its bark, or maybe it still longed to battle with the elements, and this spasmodic pain in its sap filled it with forebodings.

As relentlessly as they had gnawed away at the first tree, they worked at the second until it, too, fell with a rush of air, the snap of breaking branches and a thunderous thud that shook the valley. They were not as fortunate this time as they had been before and though the pine fell across the stream, it fell further up than its mate, leaving a gap between them.

You could never guess how they remedied this mishap. They certainly could not move the tree, but that was really what they did, for they gnawed off the limbs that supported it on the down-stream side, and it rolled over of its own weight, so that in this way the gap was filled. The structure now looked quite like the outline of a dam.