This beaver house was made of sticks of wood of varying size fastened together by mud. It was cone-shaped and placed on the bank with one edge in the water. It was about fifteen feet in diameter at the base and seven feet high at the center. There were five separate canals or ditches sunk below the bottom of the pond, all entering the house under its base and about four feet below the surface of the water. These allowed the beaver entrance and exit when the ice was very thick in winter.
We stopped our boat alongside, pounded on the roof with the paddle and waited for a response. We heard a murmur of beaver talk inside, and in two or three minutes there came a sudden splash directly behind us and a shower of water poured over my head and down the back of my neck. The grandfather beaver, the largest of his tribe, had come out through one of the cellar passages, under the boat, had come to the surface behind us, had lifted his tail, which was as broad and flat as Bige's paddle, and slapped the water with it, throwing spray at least six feet into the air. When I caught sight of him he was in the act of diving, but he presently came to the surface again, about fifty feet away, and started swimming toward the opposite shore. I wanted his portrait for my collection, so we went paddling after him. Five or six times we got near enough to focus the camera on him and press the button at just the instant when he slapped the water and dove under. The result was a half-dozen pictures of fountains but no beaver.
We were now a half-mile away from the house up the pond and for the first time realized that we were victims of a perfidious beaver trick. His sole purpose was, clearly, to allure us as far away from his house and his family as possible, and he had won.
About fifteen years previously a fire had burned over nearly a hundred acres of forest on the northern shore of Otter Pond, and this was now grown up with poplar and white-birch saplings. The bark of both these trees is used as food by the beavers, and they were now busily at work cutting down, clearing away, and storing for winter use this second growth of timber.
Unlike the bear. Brother Beaver is very thorough and economical in his operations. Nothing is wasted. He cuts down a tree with his chisel-shaped teeth, takes out a chip just such as comes from a lumberman's ax, cuts the tree into approximately four-foot lengths, trims out the branches, and carries away every scrap of it, even the small twigs. Nothing is left where the tree fell but stump and chips. What is not required for immediate use is piled up under water to keep the bark soft and fresh for winter consumption. And when he has peeled and eaten the bark from a stick, he saves that stick for use in enlarging his house or in repairing his dam.
At one corner of the pond was a swampy place through which a system of canals had been dug, down which the lumber might be floated to the open water on the way to the storage place. There were also roadways on the hillside, cleared and smooth, down which hundreds of sticks had been dragged to the water. About ten acres had been thoroughly cleared, and there were signs of activity on every hand, but most of the actual work was done at night. The beaver was the pioneer civil engineer of the American continent. At Otter Pond he had repaired and rebuilt a dam which had been used by a lumber company twenty years before.