CHAPTER X
REBUILDING A BEAVER COLONY
In passing the Meadow Beaver Colony one July afternoon I saw an old beaver come up out of the water with a ball of mud in his forepaws. He jammed this mud into a low spot in the dam. Tracks in the mud along the top of this old dam, and a number of green aspen sticks with the bark eaten off lying on the side of the house, showed that a number of beavers had been using this old house and pond for several days.
This was interesting because the place had been abandoned fifteen years before and most of the old beaver works were in ruins. One house, now a mound overgrown with willows, retained its form. The pond it was in had not filled with sediment.
Did this repairing of the dam mean that this old colony was to be resettled by beavers? It probably did, for the beavers ever work for a purpose and not just to be working. It was mid-summer and all beavers who were not making emergency repairs or extensive improvements were off on a summer vacation.
Beavers, like people, occasionally settle in scenes formerly occupied by their kind, and build among the ruins of the long ago. Many a beaver colony, like many an ancient city, has one or more cities buried beneath it.
A few days after seeing the big old beaver at work on the dam I discovered him digging in a canal all alone. Tracks showed that other beavers had been working in the canal, but just why this one was so bold and showed himself during the daytime I could not guess.
That these beavers were at work on a canal left no doubt about their having come to stay. Meantime, the beavers occupied the old house and pond while making this canal and doing other pioneer settlement work. They cleaned it out and patched it up for a temporary camp only.
A canal is one of the best exhibitions of beaver skill. About twenty feet of this canal was finished and it was about three feet wide and eighteen inches deep. It began in the northeast corner of the old pond and was being dug across a filled-in grass-grown pond which had been washed full of mud and sand. It pointed at an aspen grove out in the pines two hundred feet away. It was probable that this canal would be dug as close as possible to the aspen grove, then the canal filled with water from somewhere and used to float aspen poles down to the beginning—the lower end—of the canal. And close to the lower end a house was almost certain to be built.