“Yes,” answered Hugh, “that’s the way they do it. Now, you’ve never seen the inside of a beaver house, but I have told you how the floor is pretty level and not very far above the water, and I’ve told you also that often they have benches all around the room on which they lie when they are in the house. Now, these benches are made in just the same way that the room is made, that is to say, they are gnawed out of the solid sticks that the house is made of. First, perhaps, one old beaver will gnaw out a kind of a hollow in the wall of the room, with a flat level floor just about big enough for her to lie on, and then, perhaps, her mate will gnaw out another place like this, next to her, and perhaps a place will be gnawed out for the young ones, so that all the beaver that live in the house will have benches to rest on, which, I suppose, are drier, or, at all events, more comfortable, than the floor of the house would be.”
“I think I understand, Hugh,” said Jack. “Anybody that has seen a beaver’s teeth, and the work that they do, the trees that they cut down, and knows the short time that it takes them to do this, can understand easily enough how it’s perfectly possible for them to gnaw their way through a lot of small sticks, such as the houses are made of.”
“Yes,” said Hugh, “it’s simple enough, of course, to know how beaver could chew through anything made of wood.
“I’ve told you,” he went on, “about the open canals that the beaver dig to get near where they are gathering their food, so as to get that food to their houses and so as to have refuge in case an enemy should get after them, but I don’t believe I thought to tell you about the underground tunnels that they dig, like those we’ve just been talking about. Of course, after a while, when the water has been raised, these underground tunnels are all covered up. The beaver no longer use them and they are very likely to fall in. Then if you are riding or wading in a beaver pond, you may suddenly step into a ditch that is a foot and a half or two feet deeper than the rest of the pond. Very likely if you are on horseback, the horse will fall down. A beaver pond or a beaver meadow is likely to be full of traps for anyone who goes through it.
“There’s another thing,” he continued. “Sometimes, if there is a little pond or lake not far off from a creek where the beaver have made a pond they will dig a channel to that. They are more likely to do that if the water in the pond toward which they are digging stands higher than the water in their own pond. They can travel through this channel up to the other pond, and, perhaps, there get a lot of food which they can float down through this channel. I remember once seeing such a place, where the channel had evidently been used to float down the food, but when I saw the place, the water was low in the creek and in the pond, and in many places the channel between the two was nearly dry. At one point the beaver had run up against a big boulder which lay in the channel that they were digging, and they had had to go around it. They had cut a big cottonwood stick in the upper pond, perhaps eight inches through and four or five feet long, and had started to float it down the canal. Then the water seemed to have given out on them, and there was this big stick stranded on the boulder, where, of course, it had to wait until the water was high next spring, when it would be floated down to the place they wanted to get it to.”
Jack had been listening eagerly to this account, and when Hugh stopped speaking, said, “Dear me, Hugh, how much you know about this country and the animals that live in it. I wonder if anyone else knows as much. I made a point this winter of reading two or three books on beaver and trying to find out everything that I could about the animal, but none of these books said one word about what you have been telling me; they just said that the beaver built dams and houses and kept talking about how smart he was, but really they didn’t know anything about the animal. They were just guessing all the time. There wasn’t a word said about how the beaver got into their houses, nor how they made the passage or the rooms. They didn’t explain a bit, and yet, from the way they wrote, you’d suppose they knew it all.”
“Well,” answered Hugh, with a smile, “when they came to a place where they did not understand how the beaver did anything, I suppose they didn’t have anybody to go to and ask, and so they had to just keep on writing and pretending that it was all simple enough to them, even if they didn’t explain how it was to the people that read the books.”
“Well,” said Jack, “I think they’re frauds; regular frauds. If a man is pretending to tell about anything, and comes to a place where he doesn’t know any more, he ought to stop writing there, and then go on and write about something that he does know about.”
“Well, now,” said Hugh, “ain’t you a little mite hard on these fellows that write books? I expect that they don’t like to say that they don’t know. Of course, a man that don’t know oughtn’t to be telling people about the things he don’t know about.”
“No,” said Jack, “you bet he oughtn’t to, and that’s what I’m kicking about.”