appened upon
an old trapper's log cabin and stopped to visit him. Mountain
hospitality generously insists that guests be fed, no home or hut is
too poor to provide a bite for the chance visitor. Upon this occasion
I was handed a tin plate with some meat on it.

"Guess what it is," my host urged.

I tasted the meat, examined it, smelled it and tried to make out what
it was. It tasted somewhat like venison, yet not quite the same. It
had something the flavor of cub-bear steak broiled over a campfire, but
it was sweeter and not so strong. I guessed wrong several times before
the trapper informed me.

"Beaver tail," he laughed, pleased at outwitting me.

Still chuckling he went outside to a little log meat house and returned
with a whole beaver tail for my inspection. The tail was about ten
inches in length, nearly five inches wide at the broadest part and
perhaps an inch thick. The skin that covered the tail was dark in
color and very tough, suggestive of alligator skin. The meat of the
beaver tail was much prized by explorers and trappers, and visitors,
such as I, were often given this meat as a special treat.

The old fellow talked at length about the wise ways of the beaver he
had caught. Though I made note of a number of his observations for
future reference, I was skeptical of their authenticity. As years
passed and I talked with many men, I found that their observations
varied greatly. They were not always unprejudiced observers, their
observations were colored by their personal point of view, under
diverse conditions.

I early learned that trappers and hunters, as a rule, are not real
nature students. They are killers, and killers have not the patience
to wait and watch, to take painstaking care and limitless time in the
study of an animal. They will spend only a few minutes watching an
animal that a man without a gun might study for days, or even weeks.
They are prone to snap judgment. Then their over-active imaginations
supply ready misinformation for missing facts.

"A beaver has as many wives as he can git," my host informed me as we
sat before his fire. "There's some that don't have many, and agin
there's some that have a lot, and that's the reason we find some ponds
with only a little house an' others with mighty big ones."

A Brigham Youngish sort of conception of beaver domestic economy!

That same summer another trapper in Middle Park, not many miles from
the first, gave me his ver