till found in the basin of the St. Lawrence; it
has long since been extinct. There are, however, still lingering,
reindeer in the north, and elk in the forests of the east. There are
also Virginian deer (_Mazama_), but there is no bison (and, so far as
we know, never has been). There is no prongbuck, and many other
creatures characteristic of the United States and British Columbia are
not found in Upper and Lower Canada or in the maritime provinces. The
tree porcupine (_Erethizon dorsatus_), which the Canadians call
"Urson", or "Little Bear" is found still in the well-wooded regions
of eastern and southern Canada, as well as in British Columbia and
Alaska. In southern Canada there is the wood hare (_Lepus
sylvaticus_), and in the east and north the varying hare (_L.
americanus_) which turns white in winter.

Perhaps the most characteristic animal of this region was and is still
the beaver, though the beaver is found all over British North America
as far north as the Saskatchewan province and westwards into British
Columbia.

It is curious that the Indians of central Canada had a belief
(recorded by French and English pioneers) that occasionally in the
dusk, or at night, they have seen an enormously large beaver in the
water, so large that at first sight they have taken it for a moose.
Travellers who have related this have surmised that the Indian perhaps
saw a bear swimming, or a female moose, and in the dim light mistook
it for a giant beaver. But as we know that there were once giant
beavers (_Trogontherium_) as large as a bear, existing in England, it
is just possible there may have been a gigantic type of beaver
lingering in Canada before the opening up of the country by Europeans.

The beaver of North America is a very similar animal to the beaver
which used to exist wild in Wales, England, France, Germany, and
central Europe, and which still lingers in some parts of the Rhine
valley, Poland, Russia, and Siberia; but the American form is
classified as a separate species--_Castor canadensis_.

Beavers were sometimes exterminated or diminished in numbers by an
epidemic disease, which, according to JAMES TANNER[10], destroyed vast
quantities of them.

[Footnote 10: A remarkable eighteenth-century pioneer who joined the
Indians when a boy and lived as one of them.]

"I found them dead or dying in the water, on the ice, and on the land;
sometimes I found one that, having cut a tree half down, had died at
its roo