When the hunters reached the first wash, they knew at once that one or more beavers had taken refuge in this burrow, because the water which had been perfectly clear a short time ago was now roiled. Ganawa broke the ice with his hatchet and pushed a pole under the bank to find out how far back the beavers were, and with a paddle, which he had brought along, he dug a hole into the cavity near the end where the beavers were hidden. Then, to the great surprise of both lads, he lay down flat on the ground, and before the lads realized what was happening, he had reached into the wash and had flipped out three beavers, which Tawny caught and killed as quickly as a good terrier disposes of rats.
“An Indian surely knows how to do and get things in the woods,” exclaimed Ray. “Don’t they ever bite you?”
“Yes, my son, they bite,” replied Ganawa [[200]]laughing, “if you give them time. But this is the way our fathers always caught beavers before the white traders brought us iron traps.”
By opening two other washes, the hunters caught a total of eight beavers, but some of them were small, being the young of the previous spring. Ganawa said they had now enough beaver skins so he could make a cap and some warm mittens for each of them.
“After the snow has come, I think we can find a moose to furnish us meat during the winter. If we had to live on beaver all winter, we should have to catch some more now, for when the ice gets thick and the ground is frozen, we cannot catch them in their washes.”
During the week that the beaver skins were drying and were being made up into caps and mittens, the boys tried fishing through the ice, but they had very little luck, because pickerel, pike, and lake trout seldom pay any attention to dead bait, and the boys could find no minnows, although they had [[201]]made a crude dip-net out of a piece of gunny sack.
A few days later there was a light snowfall, and the three campers began to look for moose tracks. However, there seemed to be more wolves in the country than moose; for, almost every night, they heard wolves howl and they found wolf tracks within a few rods of their camp. [[202]]