An inviting trail leads up beside the brook, and we follow it to find where several of the family have been cutting a huge yellow birch this very morning. That this tree was intended for food is most improbable; the branches are untouched, and beavers do not care for yellow-birch bark at any season. Had they been driven to such fare by necessity, there are smaller trees with more tender bark near the lodge. They have cut this tough tree for exercise, I think. Their teeth grow rapidly, and unless cutting edges are worn down to the proper bevel they soon grow troublesome. That is why a beaver often comes out beside his lodge, if he can possibly reach open water, and cuts for an hour or two at the butt of a tree to keep his teeth in trim. If he is unable to reach open water, he may find himself in need of heroic treatment when the ice breaks up. I once found a beaver that had starved to death simply because his cutting teeth had grown so long, overlapping below and above, that he could not open his mouth wide enough to separate them and so peel the bark from his food-wood.
Farther up the brook the trail of a solitary beaver leaves the path and heads away into a swamp. Step by step we follow him, till he finds a young cedar tree and cuts it down. That is an odd proceeding, since beavers never eat cedar bark for food. See, as the tree falls he jumps aside to be clear of the butt, which has a trick of lashing out and knocking over anything in its path. Then he mogs around to the very tip, where he eats a few of the greenest sprays, filled with pungent oil of cedar. This for medicine, undoubtedly, which some beavers seem to need in winter, perhaps because of their scant exercise and restricted diet.
The lodge looms up finely across the stream, inviting a closer inspection. It is an enormous structure for a single family, higher than my head and full twelve feet in diameter. An old wolf trail leads to the top on one side, a fresh lynx trail on the other, showing where these hungry prowlers climbed up on tiptoe, as if stalking game, for a smell of the odors that steamed through the beavers’ ventilator. A ravenous smell it must have been to them, like the smell of frying onions to a hungry man. There is hardly a flesh-eating animal in the north that will not leave any other game for a taste of musky beaver. Neither wolf nor lynx attempted to dig the game out, you see; they merely sniffed and passed on; and that, too, tells a story. When they were cubs, perhaps, both animals tried to dig a beaver out of some other lodge like this, only to find that the thick walls of sticks and grass, cemented by frozen mud, were too strong to be breached by any beast in the wilderness.
At thought of these hungry brutes, some vague hint of a nearer hunger floats in and turns our mind to minnows; for that bit of open water looks fishy, and if we can catch a minnow there, we are sure of a good breakfast. There are plenty of trout in the lake by the home camp; but lately they have shown a capricious appetite for minnows, which are more precious here than rubies. To catch a trout is easy enough. All you need do is to place a slanting twig over the hole from which we get drinking water, tie a bit of cloth to your line for a flag, stick this into the split upper end of the twig, and sit comfortably by the fire till your flag is jerked into the hole; whereupon you run quickly and pull out your trout, a fat, delicious trout that tastes as if he had been raised on milk and honey. But first you must catch a minnow for bait, and that calls for a fisherman.
Spreading some brush to distribute my weight, for the ice here is dangerous, I crumble a bit of bread from our lunch into the open water—this to attract any minnow that happily may dwell in the beavers’ playground. Suddenly a flash of silver flickers in the black water amid the sinking crumbs. It inspires hope, tingling and electric, like that which thrills one when the swirl of a noble salmon follows his cast. Then for an hour, it seems, or until I am almost frozen, I use all my fisherman’s art with a bent pin, a morsel of meat, a thread and a moosewood twig; after which I wriggle ashore proudly, holding up one minnow a good inch-and-a-half long. Letting him freeze in the snow while we kindle a fire and brew a dipper of tea for lunch, I carry him off in an outside pocket, where he will keep cold enough until we need him. Sport is a matter of sentiment, and is nine-tenths imagination; but real enjoyment is born of necessity. Never a big salmon, of all that I have taken on the fly, was so well angled for or gave so much solid satisfaction as that tiny minnow.
We shall cruise in strange woods for the rest of the day, taking a hint from Malsun the wolf when he left the otter’s spring-hole. Turning away from the lake, we head rapidly northeast through broken country, on a course which may bring us to the trail of the wolves we heard howling in the night. Malsun was heading this way when we left his trail, and a wolf always knows where to find his pack.
Over a hillock we go, and across a white-faced bog bordered by ghostly larches, so wild, so lonely, that it seems nothing ever breathed here since the world began. Nature seems dead, her form shrouded in snow, her lips sealed with ice; but she is only playing with us, having slipped on another of her many masks. Though nothing moves here, though your snowshoes glide on hour after hour and start no bird or beast, there is life near you at every instant, an eager, abundant life, which finds health and cheerfulness in these apparently desolate places. That you cannot see it is part of the winter game; wild life is too alert now, and much too secretive, to reveal itself to any careless eye.
Beyond the bog an immense ridge of hardwood sweeps upward to the sky line. As we climb it, we cross a succession of delicate trails that seem to move onward at a stealthy fox trot. No wonder that Indians call the maker of such a trail Eleemos the sly one! A dozen foxes have crossed the ridge this morning, probably between dawn and sunrise. That seems too many for one locality until you consult the snow, which says that most of the “sly ones” are heading the same way, and that they are no longer hunting, but moving to a definite goal. In the ledges yonder, which front the sunshine, are probably two or three dens that have been used by generations of foxes; and the cubs, after hunting far afield, come back every morning to pass the day near the familiar place or, it may be, near familiar companions, as young foxes commonly do in regions where they are not disturbed by hunting.
Would you like to see one of these wilderness foxes? Then come, follow this dainty trail. It was made by a young dog fox (his habits betray him), and we shall not be long in finding his day bed.