Watched by Wild Animals

by Enos A. Mills

One day I saw a beaver enter the house. There were a number of muskrats inside. I do not know the nature of his visit but there was no excitement. Another time a beaver turned aside and touched noses with a muskrat. Still another time a beaver playfully dived beneath a muskrat. As the beaver came up the muskrat grabbed beaver fur with forepaws and sat down on the beaver’s back. Away swam the beaver with back above the water, little brother holding on.

The harvest of aspens for winter food was nearly finished, and I had thus far seen only the old beaver doing any tree cutting. The evening of the 19th of October I had gone through the aspen groves measuring and counting. One hundred and twelve aspens had been cut; these were from two to eleven inches in diameter at the place of cutting, and from five to nineteen inches above the ground. The aspens were from twelve to twenty-one feet high.

Just at sundown, as I sat down on a boulder near the aspens, I saw a beaver swimming in the canal toward me. In the basin at the end he smelled of two logs, then came waddling heavily up the much-used trail over which logs were dragged from the aspen grove. His big tail swung slowly from side to side, in places dragging on the ground. He was an old beaver that I had not before seen. He must have weighed fifty pounds. He glanced right and left at aspens and stopped several feet from one, rose up, looked into its top, turned, and looked into the top of another. He went to the second one. Later I saw that the first one was entangled at the top in the limbs of a near-by pine.

Squatting on hind legs with tail bracing behind, he reared up and put forepaws against a four-inch aspen. He took several bites into the tree; then several inches higher—as high as he could reach—he did more biting; after this he split and bit out the space between these two cuttings. He then repeated cutting above and below and again followed by splitting out the chip between—roughly following the plan of an axeman.

Once he stopped to scratch; he rubbed his back against the stump, and clawed at the itchy spot with left forepaw. He ate a mouthful of bark and resumed work. All the cutting had been done from one side, and for the few final bites he scraped a quantity of trash against the stump and stood upon this so as to reach the last bit to be cut off. He was two or three minutes less than an hour in cutting off this four-inch aspen, but aspen is of soft wood. He galloped behind a pine until the aspen tumbled over. Waddling back to it, he snipped off several little limbs, a single bite for each. He scratched his neck. Then he fell rapidly to gnawing the trunk in two. But before this was accomplished he took fright, perhaps from my scent, and went full gallop like a fat cow to the end of the canal and dived in with tail whack and splash.

During summer beavers eat their meals on the side of the house, or bank of the pond, or on a log or boulder that is above the surface of the pond. If enemy appear the beaver in a second dives to safety. For the winter meal the beaver goes through the inclined tunnel from the house into the water. At the food pile he cuts off a short section of one of the aspens, takes this up into the house, and sits on the floor, which is above water level, to eat the bark.

Two hundred and eight aspens were cut in the grove, dragged to the canal, floated down this and finally deposited in the pond. This made a large food supply for the winter. A little more than one half these were used, and the number of colonists fed probably was nine.

Each spring beavers come out of winter quarters as early as possible and at once begin to use fresh food. If any of the winter food harvest remains canned in the water this is thrown out next autumn and used in dam and house repairs.

Many old beaver colonies have a den in addition to the house, and others have a tunnel under the pond that comes out on shore some distance beyond the shoreline. This tunnel is sometimes used in winter while the pond is frozen over. But these new settlers were without tunnel or den.

These beaver pioneers had founded a new home before winter came. The house was completed, a deep water pond had stored in it the autumn harvest—food for months. This necessary work was completed a month before the pond froze solid and several weeks before the first snow.