Doomsdorf stood erect, and his eyes gleamed. Evidently the great, savage monarch of the islands of which he spoke was some way close to his own savage heart. “He can move your heart into your throat just to look at him!” he said. “One of the grandest mammals that ever lived—the great, brown bear of the islands. Of course, you ought to know he’s by all odds the biggest bear on earth, he and the polar bear just north of here—and the biggest carnivorous animal on earth, for that matter. Your lions, your tigers wouldn’t last a minute under those great hooks of his. He’d tear your whole chest out in one swipe. This seems to be about the northern limit of his range—the big brownies go all the way from Admiralty Islands, in the south, clear up to here, with very little variation as to size and color. There are not many on the Skopins—but going around with just an axe and a hunting knife for weapons, you’ll be glad there aren’t any more. At this point their range begins to coincide, to some slight degree, with the polar bear—but of course just a stray gets down below the Arctic circle. You’ve got to have a whole caribou carcass to interest the old devil in the way of bait. And now I’ll show you how to outfox him.”
He cut a slender whip, about half an inch in diameter, from a near-by willow, and thrusting both ends into the ground in front of the trap, made an arch. “When the old boy comes along, he’ll lift his front foot right over that arch, to avoid stepping on anything that looks so unstable, and then straight down into the trap,” Doomsdorf explained. “If it was heavy wood, he’d rest his foot on it and miss the trap.”
A few minutes later they came to what seemed to Ned a new and interesting geological formation. It seemed to be a noisy waterfall of three or four feet, behind which the creek was dammed to the proportions of a small, narrow lake. Yet the dam itself didn’t appear to be a natural formation of rock. It looked more like driftwood, but it was inconceivable that mere drift could be piled in this ordered way.
Keenly interested, he bent to examine it. Farther up the creek some heavy body struck the water with a mighty splash. It was too swift, however, for him to see what it was. There were no power plants or mill wheels here, and thus it was difficult to believe that human hands had gone to the great labor of building such a dam. Only one explanation remained.
“It must be a beaver dam,” he said.
“You’re right for once,” Doomsdorf agreed. “Did you ever see better engineering? Even the dam is built in an arch—the strongest formation known to man—to withstand the waters. Sometime I’ll tell you how they do it—there isn’t as much premeditated cunning in it as you think. Do you know what a beaver looks like?”
“Got big teeth——”
“Correct. It has to have ’em to cut all this wood. Likely enough the little devils go considerable distances up and down this creek to get their materials. Sometimes they’ll dig great canals for floating the sticks they use in their dams.
“A big beaver weighs about fifty pounds—and he’s about the handiest boy to trap there is. You’ll wonder what the purpose of these dams is. As far as I can make out, simply to keep the water at one level. You know these little streams rise and fall like the tides. They’ve learned, in a few hundred thousand years of their development, that it doesn’t pay to build a nice house and then have the creek come up and wash it away and drown them out. When they put down their winter food, they want to be sure it’s going to be there when they want it—neither washed away nor high and dry out of water. The solution was—to build a dam. Now I’ll show you how to catch a beaver.”
It seemed to Ned that the logical place to lay the trap was on the beaver house itself—a great pile of sticks and mud. But Doomsdorf explained that a trap set on the house itself so alarmed the animals that the entire colony was likely to desert the dam. Instead, the trap was set just below the surface of the water at a landing,—a place where the beaver went in and out of the water in the course of their daily work.