The Chief Engineer. Abbott Henry
webbed, like those of a goose, fore feet resembled the hands of a child but with long, sharp toe nails. He might have weighed forty or fifty pounds. He was a slow and clumsy traveler on land but a very efficient citizen in the water. He could dive and remain under water from eight to ten minutes without apparent inconvenience. Swimming, he could tow a log twice his own weight and against the current when necessary.
Early in September, his wife arrived. Whether the "old man" went after her, whether he sent a wireless message or a telepathic command, or whether the date of her coming had been arranged between them before he left home, we never knew. It seems quite probable that she just naturally knew that it was high time for her husband to stop exploring and loafing and to get busy building a house and storing a supply of food for the winter, so she arrived.
She would have no difficulty in following his trail, which after the habit of his kind, he doubtless marked at more or less frequent intervals by scooping up from the bottom of the pond or stream a double handful of soft mud, which he would place on the shore, shape it up into a nice round mudpie and deposit in its center a few drops of "Castoreum." This material has a peculiar, pungent and individual odor easily recognized by members of a beaver family. The Indians also highly prized the castoreum of the beaver for its supposed medicinal properties.
Immediately on the arrival of the female beaver the two began work building a house. This was placed on a point of land between the mouth of the river and a shallow bay or slough. The base of the house was about a foot above the normal level of the pond. Straight sticks and crooked branches two to four inches in diameter and about five feet long were placed on the ground for a foundation and were arranged in a circle like the spokes of a wheel. On these were piled other sticks, brush, stones, sod and mud, which latter was used as cement or mortar to bind the other materials together. An open space was left in the center, which grew smaller in diameter as the walls were carried up and was finally arched over. The house when finished was fourteen feet in diameter at the base; it was cone shaped and six feet high. It had no door or entrance visible on the surface; but as the side walls were being carried up one of the beavers dug a round hole twelve inches in diameter, straight down from the center of the house about eighteen inches, when it was curved toward the river and opened out in the bottom. Then he dug a second entrance, close to the first one, but this curved toward the slough. The water there being shallow, a ditch or canal dug in the bottom carried the outer end of the burrow down about three feet below the surface and a hundred feet or more out to deep water. The mud procured in digging the entrance and exit was used in plastering the walls of the house. No mud was used on the ventilating flue, which was a space about a foot in diameter in the center of the cone. This was thoroughly protected from outside enemies by two feet in thickness of criss-crossed sticks, but air could freely pass through the interstices.
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