Just over the tunnel, perhaps a foot above the level of the ground, is a small chamber which serves as the entrance hall and dining-room of the lodge. Here the beavers shake the water from their hairy outer coats when they emerge from the tunnel (the inner coat of fur is always dry), and here they eat their meals. The hard-packed floor of this hall invariably slants upward from the mouth of the tunnel, and the evident purpose is to allow the water to drain away more easily.
From one end of the hall a stairway, just big enough for a single beaver at a time, mounts through the middle of the lodge to the living room above. Sometimes this central passage is the guiding part of the building plan, the lodge being constructed around it; but quite as often the material is piled in a solid mass, and hall and stairway are then cut out from beneath, as a continuation of the tunnel from the pond. Around the top of the stairway, just under where the roof is to be, runs a circular bench or gallery, which is covered deep with dry grass or shredded wood. This bench forms the floor of the living room; on it each member of the family will have his separate nest, from which he can slip into the central opening and down the stairway without disturbing any other beaver.
The bench is then roofed over, making a circular room from four to eight feet in diameter, with an arched ceiling just high enough to enable a beaver to move around without bumping his head. A small ventilator is left among the poles that project through the roof, and the structure is covered to a thickness of two feet with grass, sods, and rushes, all mixed with mud from the pond bottom. This last is the beaver’s mortar, and the frost hardens it to his purpose.
Like most other buildings, whether of bird or beast or man, the completed house receives a final “touch,” and a very suggestive one; but whether Hamoosabik adds it consciously, with purpose of concealment, who can say? When the lodge is finished so far as comfort and safety are involved, the beaver throws over it a litter of weatherbeaten sticks, making it appear like a pile of drift stuff cast up by winds or high waters. With nights of sharp frost the lodge walls harden, becoming finally so granite-like that no enemy can break in, and the beaver himself cannot gnaw a way out. The only door left him is the opening in the middle of his living room, which leads down the stairway through hall and tunnel, and emerges under five or six feet of water at the bottom of the pond.
While all this building is going on, the ice forms thicker and thicker, and presently the beaver is locked in until waters are open once more, and returning birds are filling the silent woods with melody. Meanwhile he will spend the greater part of the time in his upper living room, and for exercise will pass a few pleasant hours every day in swimming about his pond with its roof of ice. Farther he cannot go, and even here his journeys must be short; since there is no air under the ice, he must return to his lodge or enter one of his refuge burrows every time he wants to breathe. When hungry he slips down through the tunnel to the food pile, takes a stick up to his hall, and there eats the bark to the last scrap. Then he carries the peeled stick back to the pond, where it is thrown aside with a growing multitude that have no more interest for the beaver family; unless, perchance, they use the pond another season. In that event the peeled sticks, no longer glistening white, but sodden brown, may be used to repair the dam or disguise the new lodge.
That the beaver wearies of his diet of water-soaked bark is evident from the fact that he explores every inch of his pond for roots of the yellow lily; from this also, that if you cut a hole in the ice and push in a pole of fresh willow or “popple” or moosewood, he will find it within the hour and carry it away. Should you hold the pole, keeping very still and throwing a blanket over the air hole to exclude the light, he will attempt to pull it out of your hand. And if you stick one end deep in the mud, leaving the upper end frozen fast in the ice, he will promptly cut it in two places, one just above the bottom, the other just below the ice, and so carry the pole away to his dining-room.
The only variation of this winter-existence comes when there is an open spring-hole in the pond or a bit of swift water at the inlet. The imprisoned beavers make glad use of such an opening, which they may have to reach by a long swim under the ice. They come every day to play in the free water or to sit erect beside it, sunning themselves by the hour on pleasant days, combing their fine fur meanwhile, or coaxing a snarl out of it, using for the latter purpose the peculiar split claw which every beaver carries on one of his hind toes.
Such hermits are happy fellows, lucky above the majority of beavers, who have no sunlit playground in winter; but they enjoy themselves circumspectly, knowing the danger of being caught in the open. At the slightest alarm, the faint click of snowshoes or a breath of your scent drifting downwind, every beaver disappears under the ice, giving the danger signal by slapping his broad tail on the water as he goes down; and when you hear them again they will be creeping into the living room of the lodge. Rap the roof sharply, after approaching on silent feet, and you hear plop! plop! plop! as the beavers drop into their tunnel one after another. Go out on the ice now, and hammer it with your ax. If your ears are keen, you may hear a faint rumble or gurgling of water as some of the family return to their lodge, while others enter refuge burrows in the bank. So they are driven back and forth; but spare them any prolonged fright, for they are the most inoffensive little prisoners in the wilderness.
Meanwhile Keeonekh the otter is a foot-loose creature, a rambler, an erdstappa or earth-hitter, as our forbears called one with a gift for roaming. He has the whole wilderness for a hermitage; yet his world is only as big as he makes it. Like most wild creatures, he has definite limits beyond which he rarely passes, and then only when food fails in his familiar district. The waters are sealed, to be sure; but every large lake has an air hole or two, and swift streams offer plenty of open places. When fishing for his dinner Keeonekh holds close to one opening, coming out where he went in; but when on a journey he may enter one air hole and emerge at another so far away that you cannot see him. And this because he has learned the curious trick of breathing under the ice, where another animal must quickly drown.