CHAPTER XI.
INDIAN MODE OF HUNTING BEAVER.
Wa-sa-Kejic came over to the post early one October, and said his boy had cut his foot, and that he had no one to steer his canoe on a proposed beaver hunt. Now nice, fat beaver, just before the ice takes, is one of the tidbits that come to the trader's table, and having spare time just then I volunteered to accompany him, knowing I would get a share of the game.
As we made our way over the several small portages between the large lake on which the post is built and the one in which he had located the beaver, he told me there were two lodges on the lake to which we were making our way.
We pitched our tent on the last portage, so as not to make a fire near the beaver. Beavers have very poor eyesight, but very acute hearing and smell, and once they are frightened the sport for that night at all events is finished.
We had something to eat and then started for the lake, leaving our tent and things ready to return to after dark. Smoking and talking are forbidden when one is in a beaver lake; care also must be taken that the paddle does not rasp the side of the canoe.
The beavers had built an immense dam across the discharge of the lake, and left a small cut in the middle for the overflow to pass. Here Wa-sa-Kejic placed a No. 4 Newhouse trap in about 4 in. of water. On a twig 9 in. high and set back about a foot from the trap he placed a small piece of castorum. The smell of this attracts a beaver. Then he lengthened the trap chain with three strands of No. 9 twine, tying it to a stout pole, which he planted very, very securely in deep water, out from the dam.
The beaver, when he finds himself caught, springs backward into the deep water and dives to the bottom; here he struggled to get away until shortness of breath compels him to rise to the surface, and this is repeated until the weight of the trap is too much for his exhausted condition, and he died at the bottom, from whence he is hauled up by the hunter when next visiting his traps.
After placing the trap on the dam Wa-sa-Kejic opened another ready for setting, tied the poles, and had everything ready; then giving me implicit injunctions not to make the least noise, told me to steer the canoe quietly to the lodge, which was fixed in a small bay out in the lake. When we reached the beaver's house, he carefully placed the trap in the same depth of water as he had done the previous one, with this difference, that he omitted the castorum, because, as he told me afterward, the beavers went on top of the house every night, the young ones to slide down into the water, and the old ones to do any necessary plastering.