Photograph by Delancy Gill.
In low ground the dams backing the water around trees killed them and in course of time they would disappear, leaving in their place an open, boggy space covered with a growth of rank vegetation. These were called by the hunters "beaver meadows." The "beaver canals" were cut through marshy places and were sometimes prominent features of the local landscape, extending four or five hundred feet in length, and having a breadth of three feet, with a depth of fifteen to thirty inches.
When in the water the beaver was far more graceful and active than when on land, swimming powerfully by means of its large, strong, webbed hind feet, aided, when speed was desired, by the broad, flat tail used like the blade of a sculling oar, which, indeed, it much resembled, being ten inches long by five wide, and smooth, hard, and scaly, and entirely devoid of the soft fur which covered the body. Besides this use in swimming, the tail served as a prop when the animal desired to sit up on land, and also as a sort of trowel for beating down the mud-mortar used in dam building. At night it was also struck sharply on the surface of the water as a signal of alarm, giving a report which sounded, in the stillness, like a pistol shot and could be heard for a long distance. In regions frequented by man, or where in any way likely to be disturbed, the beaver was nocturnal and did most of its work during the dark hours, but where unmolested it spent much time out in the broad daylight. I saw large numbers swimming about in daytime when on Green River in 1871, in Wonsits Valley, where white men had rarely passed, and they gave no indication of special alarm at sight of us. Perhaps they regarded our boats as nothing more than drifting logs, just as the seal of Alaska is deceived by the trick the natives there have of covering themselves and their canoes with white cloth to resemble floating ice. At one point where we were in camp a whole day within a few hundred yards of a colony actively engaged in their various labours in the sunlight of the river bank, they apparently did not notice our presence, and even a rifle ball sent among them did not seem to derange their equanimity. In this locality the banks were full of burrows, and as we passed along in our boats we could see the beaver swimming around in every direction. We shot at several, but as they immediately sink to the bottom when killed, the gun is not successful in taking them, except in very shallow streams. We would have failed altogether albeit we made no special effort, had not one of the boats been able to head off a large fellow that was wounded, just as he arrived at the opening of his burrow, which happened, at that stage of river, to be a little above the water-level. A moment more and the animal would have been safe from us, but though the bottom was invisible on account of the turbidity of the river, one of our men quickly took the plunge and grasped the beaver from behind firmly around the middle at the moment when its head was almost against the steep high bank. The depth was no more than about three feet, and though the beating of the heavy tail, and the fierce struggles, made it anything but easy, the beaver was thrown into the boat, where a blow from an oar finished him. The captor, drenched and covered with mud, climbed triumphantly on board. Some of the meat was cooked and suggested to me beef in flavour, though it was rather tough and unappetising. The tail makes a soup which is the delight of the epicure, or was, when beaver tails were procurable, but somehow that which our cook concocted did not strike our palates favourably and we abandoned it for the regulation bacon and beans. Beaver meat was often the only food the trapper and frontiersman could obtain, and they considered it quite a good article of diet. The one we tested was doubtless too old a specimen, and we had no opportunity to secure another, for we passed on into the great Canyon of Desolation and saw beaver no more.
Trees Cut by Beavers.
From Morgan's American Beaver.
When at work cutting down a tree they stood on their hind legs, supported also by the tail, two working at one time on the same tree. They began eight or ten inches above the base and cut round and round, making each successive cut wider and deeper, the chips thrown off being some three inches in length by one and one-half wide, and one-quarter thick, each showing the sharp, clean strokes of the teeth, and resembling chips made with an axe. As the trees selected were always soft wood, they were easily gnawed while green. A tree of considerable size would be readily felled in two or three nights. Often they worked in pairs at a number of trees at one time, and nineteen falls, says Morgan, have been counted in a single night between the hours of seven and twelve. Cottonwoods twenty-four inches in diameter were brought down, though the more ordinary size was fourteen to sixteen inches. Father de Smet saw a stump that was thirty inches in diameter.
At first glance a beaver stump looks almost as if it might have been cut by an axe in the hands of an inexperienced chopper. Pine trees were sometimes cut down, but the boughs were not used for food. Food branches were cut up into lengths of one to two feet, for convenience in handling and storing. Sometimes trees that fell with their tops in the deep water were allowed to remain this way till winter, when the branches were cut off under the ice. As the beaver was able to stay below the surface comfortably from five to ten minutes, he could accomplish his work there with ease. Both sexes possessed in two glands of the groin a musky secretion called castoreum, which was used in medicine and also as a bait for the animal itself. When at play they would void some of this musk upon the ground, and their favourite playgrounds were consequently called by the trappers "muskbogs."
Hunters sometimes found trees standing near a stream that were partly cut, and they observed that in these cases the trees would not have fallen into the water, from which they inferred that cutting these trees had been started by young, inexperienced beavers who had finally been stopped in the useless labour by their wise elders. Bradbury, the English naturalist who was in the West with Wilson Price Hunt in 1809, thought he found some substantiation of this theory in trees he carefully examined—at least, none of these trees would have fallen across the neighbouring streams. Inasmuch as these animals, however, were in constant need of food branches, there would seem to have been no good reason for preventing the young beaver from completing the cutting of any tree no matter where it might drop. That the beaver had gone into the study of forestry and was endeavouring to preserve the woods is not likely, nor is it probable that the time of the youthful beaver was valuable. If all stumps in a given locality had been examined, doubtless it would have been found that a considerable number of trees had not fallen across the stream or even in its direction. A more probable explanation of these half-cut trees would be that from time to time some of those engaged in gnawing were interrupted during the operation, perhaps killed, and prevented from resuming, and that the rest, having their attention engaged on other trees or their branches, were not impelled to take up the work. The tree being girdled soon died. Then the fibre of the wood growing dry and hard, the tree would be avoided, because there were always plenty of fresh, juicy ones to cut. The tops of the old dead trees would also be of no use for food. So while the young may have been regularly educated as the trappers believed, this particular illustration of wise guidance does not appear convincing. It was also believed that an old beaver which had once escaped a trap could not again easily be caught, for the reason that thereafter it carried a stick in its mouth with which to test suspicious places and spring any trap that might be in its way.