CHAPTER XXII.
BEAVER HUNTERS.
We left our camp at a rather early hour, and soon found below it numerous signs of beaver trees, a foot and a half in diameter, lay with a great number of smaller ones along the banks of the stream, and farther in the wood we saw trees glistening whose bark had been peeled off several feet above the ground. Any one unacquainted with these animals and their habits would surely have believed that new settlers had been busy here, and cut down wood for their block houses. The splinters lay in heaps round the bitten-through trees, as if we had been in a carpenter's shop, and many of the felled trees had been stripped of their branches. These most interesting animals generally settle on the smaller streams and brooks, and their families at first consist of but few members. On such a stream they cautiously select a spot where several tall soft-wooded trees, such as poplars, aspens, ashes, maples, &c. stand on both sides of it, then proceed together to one of the trunks, stand on their hind legs, and follow each other slowly round it, tearing out of the tree at each bite great bits of wood, as if they had been hewn out with an axe. They cut away more wood on the side of the tree turned to the river than on the opposite side, so that it becomes overbalanced and falls over into the water. Thus they fell one tree after the other across the stream, nibble off the branches, and carry other bits of wood between and under these trunks down to the river bed, while they fill up the interstices with twigs. After this is finished, they fetch on their broad flat tails mud and earth from the bank, and plaster the wooden dam, till it becomes so tight that the water rises before it, and overflows on both sides frequently for miles.
In this lake, produced by their art, the beavers build their houses, which are generally of three storeys, though at times of four. They are round and pointed like a sugar-loaf, are about twenty feet in diameter at the bottom of the water; the floors are about two feet high, and separated by a flooring, in the centre of which is a round hole, by means of which they go up and down the house. The only entrance is at the bottom of the water, and generally only the highest floor emerges from the water, so that the latter is always dry. The creatures build their house of branches three feet in length, which they bind together with twigs and earth, and make the walls nearly a foot thick. They thus build one floor over the other, each higher one being smaller, till the highest one terminates in a point. They line the interior with grass and moss, so that it affords them and their young a dry, warm abode in winter.
