CHAPTER XII

THE WAYS OF BEAVER

The next morning Hugh and the boys made an early start, and crossing the wide flat below the lake, entered the valley of the Swift Current River. They passed close to the Kootenay camp, where the women were at work dressing hides and occupied with other tasks, while the children played among the lodges.

The valley of Swift Current is narrow and flanked on either side by high hills which, though at first rounded and grass-covered, grow steeper and nourish a growth of pines and aspens as one ascends the stream. The trail climbs steeply and, before long, splendid snow-capped mountain peaks cut off the view to the southwest. From time to time the stream enlarges into a series of lakes, in and about which Hugh detected much beaver sign. Trees and bushes had been felled and, floating in the water or lying on the bank, were many lengths of aspen and willow branches, stripped of their bark by the beaver.

“I reckon, son,” said Hugh, as the three paused to look at these signs, “that the Kootenays have trapped all along this creek and have got out a good many of the beaver. Nevertheless, there are lots of them left, I expect; and I wouldn’t be surprised if a man could make good wages all winter trapping right here. There are some marten in these hills, and now and then an otter and some fisher. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to have out a line of traps here.”

“No,” said Jack, “it wouldn’t. I shouldn’t mind wintering here a bit. I believe there would be a lot of bears in early spring, to say nothing of the fur that you would get through the winter.”

“Yes,” said Hugh, “it’s a pretty good trapping ground, and I don’t believe that it’s ever been systematically gone over in winter. A man could live pretty well here, too, for there’s lots of sheep and elk, and some deer and moose, to say nothing of the birds and a heap of fish in the lakes and streams.”

“I’m afraid I’ll never get a chance to winter in this country, Hugh,” said Jack. “It seems that I must spend my winters back East.”

“Well,” said Hugh, “that’s right enough, too. The day of the hunter and the trapper has gone by in this country, and now we can only do for sport what we used to do for a living.”

All through the morning and until well after noon, the party traveled up the beautiful valley, constantly drawing nearer to the great mountains which towered before them.

Early in the afternoon they came to a wide meadow, bordered by green timber, through which ran the river, flanked on either hand by the towering cliffs of two great mountains. Here Hugh decided to camp, and before long the tent was put up and a smoke built for the benefit of horses and men alike, for the flies were very bad.

After dinner, Jack got from the pack some mosquito netting and, working for a short time with a needle and some thread, and, helped by Joe, made three bags of the netting wide enough to slip over the head and come down to shoulders and breast. When one put on his coat and buttoned it over the net, his head and neck were protected from the mosquitoes. This work done, Jack put together his fishing rod and, drawing on his gloves, went over to the stream to fish for trout, which Hugh said were plenty in the river.

Not far above the camp was a considerable fall, where the water from a lake tumbled thirty feet over the rocks into a deep pool below, in which Jack was interested to see a great school of fish. He drew back and made a number of casts, but the fish paid no attention to his flies, and after he had faithfully whipped the pool for some time, he made up his mind that the fish would not bite. Lying on the rocks, with his face close to the water, he looked down upon the hundreds of them holding themselves in place, head against the current, apparently without moving a fin. As he studied them, he made up his mind that they were not trout, and his disappointment at not catching them was considerably modified.

While he was there, his attention was attracted by a dipper flying across the water and, presently, he saw that on a little shelf of rock, almost directly below the falls, the bird had a nest formed of green moss. There was a little hole in the bundle of moss, at the mouth of which the bird alighted and seemed to pass in food. No doubt his mate was sitting on her eggs, which a little later would hatch into hungry young, to satisfy whose appetites would tax the efforts of both parents, no matter how hard they might work.

But Jack was hungry for fish and soon started down the stream. At first it was so overgrown by willows and spruces that he could not fish, but not far beyond this the trees stood farther back from it and he began to cast. Before he had gone far he had a rise and caught a nice ten-inch trout. Just below was a dark pool, from which he took four large fish, the largest weighing perhaps two pounds. His third fish was different from any of those he had taken before, and so was the fourth. Instead of being spotted with black, these two had red spots on them and heads larger and more clumsy than the black-spotted trout. They were not like the brook trout of the East and Jack was puzzled to know what they were, but felt sure that Hugh would tell him.

Keeping on down stream, he soon had ten fish strung on a willow twig, and the load was so heavy that he turned from the river and, passing through a fringe of timber, found himself near camp.

Joe was sitting not far from the fire half in the smoke, and was rubbing a lot of green leaves between his palms and then passing his hands over his face, neck and arms. Hugh, not so near the fire, was smoking vigorously, but seemed to be little troubled by the mosquitoes. The horses were still standing together, crowded into the smoke.

“Well, son,” said Hugh, “that’s a nice string of fish you’ve got. You’ve done well. That ought to last us for a couple of meals. Did you find the fish plenty?”

“Yes,” replied Jack, “there are lots of them, and I want to ask you some questions about them. In the first place that pool right under the falls there is just full of fish, and yet not one of them would rise to my flies. I looked at them pretty carefully and I don’t believe they’re trout. Do you know what they are?”

“Peamouths, I reckon,” answered Hugh.

“Peamouths?” said Jack. “I think I’ve heard that name, but I don’t know what it means.”

“Why,” replied Hugh, “it’s a kind of a brook white fish, I reckon. They’re quite a little like the white fish that we catch in the lake here, and yet they’re different, smaller, different in color and the mouth is some different, too. Some people call them stone rollers. I don’t know just why, unless, perhaps, they turn over the stones at the bottom of the stream when they’re looking for food; but that’s just my guess from the name.”

“Well,” said Jack, “if we get a chance I’d like to catch one and see it, so that I’ll know it again.

“And now, Hugh,” he went on, “what kind of a trout is that?” and he pointed to one of the red-spotted fish on his string.

“That’s a bull trout,” answered Hugh.

“Well,” said Jack, “there’s another new fish. I never heard of bull trout before, and I don’t know what it is.”

“I don’t either,” said Hugh, “except that I know that it’s a trout that we have in these Northern waters and that I never saw in the Rocky Mountains, south of here. I never saw one south of Milk River ridge, I think.”

“When I first got hold of it,” explained Jack, “I thought for a minute that maybe it was the Eastern brook trout, but it’s a very different fish.”

“They are mighty good eating,” declared Hugh, “but I don’t know that they are any better than the regular trout, that fellow with black spots.”

“All trout are good enough,” said Jack.

Presently Jack went over to Joe, who had finished his operations with the leaves, and asked him what it was that he had been doing, and why he did not wear his net.

“Trying to keep the flies off,” said Joe. “There’s a kind of a weed that grows in the wet places and I’ve heard that it’s good medicine against flies, so I gathered a lot of the leaves and rubbed them up and then rubbed them over my skin, and it seems to me that the flies don’t bother me as much now. That net I don’t like. I can’t see when I wear it.”

“That’s so,” said Jack. “It does seem mighty warm and sort of takes my breath away, but it isn’t as bad as the mosquitoes. What’s the weed you’ve got?”

Joe showed him the plant, but Jack did not know it.

As they sat about the fire that evening after supper, the insects no longer troubled them, for it was very cold; almost freezing. They had had a hearty meal and were feeling as lazy and comfortable as could be. Not much was said, but once in a while some one would make a remark which required no reply.

Presently Jack said, “Hugh, I’ve been thinking about that beaver work that we saw down the creek to-day and I want to ask you some more questions about beaver. You told me a great deal last year, of course, but I still don’t feel that I know much about them. I suppose I do know more than a good many other people, but I don’t know much. I’d like to have you tell me something more about them.”

“That’s so, son, we did talk a whole lot about beaver last year, when we were trapping, and, of course, you saw something about their ways while we were catching them; but you’re dead right, you don’t know much about them. For the matter of that, though, nobody does. I expect I know a lot more than you, but I’ve got a whole lot to learn. They’re a mighty curious animal.”

“Well, Hugh,” replied Jack, “of course, it’s hard to find out much about animals that spend a good deal more than half their lives out of sight and that one only sees now and then.

“There’s one thing,” he went on, “that I never thought of while we were trapping, but that I did think of last winter, and it’s puzzled me a whole lot. There are the beavers’ houses built out in deep water and yet there is a passage from under the water up into the house. I don’t understand how that passage is made. Is it possible that the beavers build the house so carefully that a tunnel is left leading from the bottom of the water up into the middle of the house, and then build about a room at the end of that tunnel? That doesn’t seem possible, and if they do, how do they get the first sticks to stop at the bottom of the water. Why don’t the sticks rise up and float away? I’ve been puzzling my head over that for some months now, and have wanted to ask you about it. I thought it would be a long story, and so it would not be worth while writing you about it.”

“Well,” said Hugh, “I ought to have told you about that last year. I don’t wonder that it puzzled you. It’s enough, it seems to me, to puzzle anybody. But now suppose I go ahead and try to explain it to you the way I understand it. Whatever I have learned comes, of course, from what I’ve seen a beaver do, but more than anything from the few houses that I have had occasion to tear down.”

“Well, I wish you would explain, Hugh,” said Jack, “for I want to understand about this.”

“Well, now,” Hugh went on, “let’s suppose you’ve got a little creek coming down from the mountains where no beaver have ever been, and a couple that have left some colony where they belonged go off and find this little creek, and think it’s a pretty good place to stop. Maybe the creek is shallow, and, if it is, about the first thing they do is to build two or three low dams across it, so as to give them deep water for safety. Then from one of these little ponds where the water is deep, they’ll dig a tunnel off at right angles to the stream, pretty well under the ground, about on a level, and when they get thirty or forty feet from the creek they’ll enlarge it and make a room, and there is where they’ll live for a little while. In the bottom of the tunnel there is water for quite a little way, but when they have dug up and made a room it’s pretty dry there, except for the water that they pack in on their fur. Maybe they’ll stay there for quite a while, but after a little while they dig upward and come out to daylight--on top of the ground in the stream bottom, I mean.

“Now, like enough they go off and begin to cut willows or cottonwood or aspen and bring it down close to the hole that they have in the ground, and very likely they’ll pile sticks over that hole, possibly, at first, with the idea of hiding it. They drag down more and more sticks and make the hole from the tunnel bigger, and, presently, they begin to cut out the sticks that were first piled on top of the hole, so that, finally, they have their nest in the lower portion of this pile of sticks. Meantime, very likely, they have been working, more or less, on the dam on the creek below the house, and have raised the water still more, so that perhaps the tunnel is now full of water, and then, instead of using this tunnel to get out of, they’ll gnaw a hole through the sticks of the house, making a passage-way from the room they occupy down to beneath the surface of the water. They still keep working at the dam, raising it and making it level, so that the pond gets bigger and bigger all the time.

“Perhaps the water is raised, so that it begins to come into the room in the house that they occupy; the place is getting too wet for them. Then it’s quite possible that they will start down at the very edge of the water and gnaw a tunnel upward, in a slanting direction, perhaps quite close to the covering of the house, and, finally, when they get up near the top of the house, they’ll gnaw out another room, almost above the two they had occupied before. All this time they’re working at the dam and raising the water, and all this time, too, they are packing sticks up on top of the house, raising it higher and higher, and perhaps bringing mud, which they get along the bank, and putting this among the sticks on top of the house so as to bind the whole together and make it tight and warm for winter. If you study some old beaver pond, as I have, you will find that all along the edge of the pond, under the bank, but above the water, but, of course, below the grass-roots, the beaver have tunneled out roads partly hidden by the overhanging sod and grass. They take this mud, as I have told you, and use it on the houses and on the dams, and these hidden ways under the bank enable them to go quietly from one place in the pond to another without ever being seen.”

“Well,” said Jack, “that gives me a whole lot of new ideas. I never thought of that way of making the passageways or the rooms. I knew that there must be some way, but what it was I couldn’t tell, though I figured over it a whole lot.”

“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.”

“Well, son, your kicking may give you some satisfaction, but it won’t hurt the men that are writing the books.”

“No,” said Jack, “I guess not, but it’s a fraud all the same.”

“Well,” said Hugh, “it’s about time for us to turn in. Suppose you boys go out and catch two of the riding horses and picket them strongly, and I guess the others will stay with them until morning.”

The boys did this, and when they returned to camp all hands turned in for the night.