When the hunters carefully peeped over a ridge to the beavers’ lumber-yard, the hearts of the white boys almost stopped beating. Close by, within twenty yards they saw eight or ten beavers. “They are working [[182]]like beavers,” Ray whispered. And so they were. Some sitting on their haunches were cutting down trees, others were busy cutting felled trees into sections four or five feet long, and still others seemed to be lopping off the smaller branches.
But there was not much time to watch a scene which very few white men have ever been lucky enough to observe. When Ganawa gave the signal to fire, four beavers toppled over, and Tawny caught and killed two more before the frightened animals could scamper to the safety of their pond.
Ray let out a shout and was going to run over to the game, but Ganawa reminded him that a good hunter always reloads his gun before he does anything else.
Neither of the lads had ever closely examined a beaver, and they had many questions to ask about its peculiar structures. They were curious about the flat hairless tail, which looks as if it were covered with black scales; the short and stubby forelegs, the powerful hindlegs with webbed feet, and [[183]]the sharp front teeth with which the beaver people can cut down trees much faster than any Indians with primitive stone axes.
But Ganawa fingered fondly the dense woolly fur under the long dark brown hair. “The fur is good,” he remarked. “It will make a good warm robe for my sons.”
On the way to camp, the lads received another jolt to their former idea about the lazy life of an Indian hunter. Ganawa carried three beavers, Bruce took two and Ray carried one. An adult beaver weighs from thirty to fifty pounds, and when Ray dropped his game at the end of a three-mile walk through brush and timber, he felt sure that his beaver weighed a hundred pounds.
Ganawa quickly skinned the smallest beaver, cut up the best of the meat and put it in the kettle. Then he scalded the black tail over the fire, and the skin blistered and came off easily. He cut the tail into several pieces and added them to the meat in the kettle.
“My sons,” he spoke, “put a little salt [[184]]in the kettle and some of the wild onions you have gathered. And when the meat is almost done, you must add a little of the wild rice I have in my pack. To-night we shall make a big feast. We shall have beaver meat and beaver-tail soup. Some white hunters say they do not care much for beaver meat, but all are very fond of beaver-tail soup. I have cut up the meat of a young beaver and you will find it very good.”
The lads had grown accustomed by this time to a diet of fish and meat, but they were glad of any change and both of them said that beaver meat and beaver-tail soup were the best foods they had ever eaten. The meat was dark and tasted much like the dark meat of a chicken.
The tail of a beaver does not consist of muscle, but of a peculiar white, fatty, and gristly texture. When boiled it looks and tastes like very young fat pork, and the boys left none of it in the kettle. It is this part of the beaver which furnishes the beaver-tail soup, highly praised in many old journals [[185]]but never described in detail. The writer of this story has cooked beaver meat and beaver-tail soup and can testify to the fact that both are good.