As the winter wore away, thaws became more frequent, and the coons and beaver began to awake from their half-torpid state, they caught more and more, getting ten or twelve beavers a night.
They now separated, part of them living in the house camp, and part at the river camp and shanty, for the greater convenience of tending the traps, which were scattered along a range of many miles, all assembling at the home camp on the Lord’s day, when they had a meeting. As the season was now approaching when the ice would begin to break up, and the frequent rains had rendered the ice transparent, so they could see the beavers and muskrats under it, they determined to attack them in their houses. In the first place, they prepared and sharpened a great number of stakes, and, cutting through the ice, drove them into the bottom of the pond, around the houses, and around the holes in the bank, thus fastening the beavers in; then tearing down the houses with tools they had brought with them, they knocked the beavers on the head, and flung them out on the ice.
Beavers and muskrats will swim under the ice as long as they can hold their breath, then breathe it out against the ice: when it has absorbed oxygen from the water, they will take the bubble in again, and go on; the boys would follow them up, and, before they had time to take in the bubble, strike with their hatchets over them, and drive them away from their breath, when they would soon drown, and could be cut out.
They labored unremittingly, under the wildest excitement, stopping neither to eat nor drink till nearly sundown, when, bathed in perspiration, every house was in ruins, and the ice thickly strewn with dead beavers: they then desisted.
“We are all as hot as we can be,” said Uncle Isaac. “The first thing to be done is to put on our clothes, and make a fire to cool off by. We’ve got about four tons of beaver carcasses here: it would take all night to haul them to the camp; and if we leave them here, all the wolves in the woods will be on hand, and not a hide of them be left by morning. So I don’t see any other way than to build a camp, and stay here; and we can have our choice, either to take them into the camp, or sit up by turns, and watch them.”
“I say take them into the camp,” said Joe Griffin. “And here’s just the place to build it, on this old windfall.”
“Now, Charlie,” said Uncle Isaac, “while we are building a camp, you and John run to the home camp, and get the kettle, a birch dish, and some tea.”
The rude shelter, sufficient for these hardy men, was soon completed, the beaver brought inside, and a fire built. Uncle Isaac proposed, as they had met with such luck, that they should have a beaver singed for supper. “They could afford it,” he said, “though, of course, it spoilt the skin.”
This was unanimously agreed to, when, picking out one of the youngest and fattest, they cut off his tail, scalded and scraped off the scales, then, holding the rest over the fire, singed off all the hair, and scraped it clean with their knives. While Joe was turning the spit, and John making tea, Charlie noticed Uncle Isaac picking out some of the dryest of the wood, and piling it up a little distance from the camp, and putting beneath it a parcel of birch bark, as if he was going to light a fire.
“What are you going to do?” asked Charlie.