ut never
sideways, lest the rebound cause an upset--the dog brings back his
quarry. But this is only an aside, the hap-hazard shot of an amateur
hunter, not the sort of trapping that fills the company's lofts with fur
bales.

While ranging the forest the former season the trapper picked out a
large birch-tree, free of knots and underbranching, with the full girth
to make the body of a canoe from gunwale to gunwale without any gussets
and seams. But birch-bark does not peel well in winter. The trapper
scratched the trunk with a mark of "first-finder-first-owner," honoured
by all hunters; and came back in the summer for the bark.

Perhaps it was while taking the bark from this tree that he first
noticed the traces of beaver. Channels, broader than runnels, hardly as
wide as a ditch, have been cut connecting pool with pool, marsh with
lake. Here are runways through the grass, where beaver have dragged
young saplings five times their own length to a winter storehouse near
the dam. Trees lie felled miles away from any chopper. Chips are
scattered about marked by teeth which the trapper knows--knows, perhaps,
from having seen his dog's tail taken off at a nip, or his own finger
amputated almost before he felt it. If the bark of a tree has been
nibbled around, like the line a chopper might make before cutting, the
trapper guesses whether his coming has not interrupted a beaver in the
very act.

All these are signs which spell out the presence of a beaver-dam within
one night's travelling distance; for the timid beaver frequently works
at night, and will not go so far away that forage cannot be brought in
before daylight. In which of the hundred water-ways in the labyrinth of
pond and stream where beavers roam is this particular family to be
found?

Realizing that his own life depends on the life of the game, no true
trapper will destroy wild creatures when the mothers are caring for
their young. Besides, furs are not at their prime when birch-bark is
peeled, and the trapper notes the place, so that he may come back when
the fall hunt begins. Beaver kittens stay under the parental roof for
three years, but at the end of the first summer are amply able to look
after their own skins. Free from nursery duties, the old ones can now
use all the ingenuity and craft which nature gave them for
self-protection. When cold weather comes the beaver is fair game to the
trapper. It is wit against wit. To be sure, the man has superior
s