Part 18

It is true that blessings brighten as they take their flight: not till I read that crude sign of dispossession did I know how much pleasure my little pond had given me. The lonely beauty which could quiet a man like a psalm, or like an Indian’s wordless prayer; the glimpses of wild creatures at home and unafraid; the succession of radiant pictures, at sunny midday, or beneath the hushed twilight, or in the expectant morning before the shadows come,—all these had suddenly taken wing, driven away by mud-grubbing animals with a notion in their dull heads that they wanted deeper water about the site they had chosen for their house of sticks. It was too bad, too hopeless! I might have prevented the ruin had I known; but now it was beyond all remedy. With a different interest, therefore, and still resentful that my pond was spoiled as thoroughly as any lumberman would have spoiled it, I made my way around the flood to examine the beavers’ work at the outlet.

XV

BEAVER WORK

Hidden among the larches at the lower end of my pond was a tiny outgoing stream, which had proved hard to find when first I explored the region, and almost impossible to follow afterward. Under a fallen log, so weathered and mossy that it seemed part of the natural shore, a volume of water escaped without ripple or murmur, wandering away under bending grasses to lose itself in an alder swamp, where innumerable channels offered it lingering passage. From the swamp it found its way, creepingly, among brooding cedars to a little brook, which went singing far down through the woods to Upper Pine Pond; and beyond that on the farther side was a long dead-water, and then Pine Stream making its tortuous way through an untraveled region to the Penobscot. The nearest beavers, a colony of four lodges which I unearthed on a hidden branch of Pine Stream, were twelve or fifteen miles away, as the water flowed; yet over all that distance an exploring family had made its lonely way, guided at every turn by the flavor of distant springs, till one after another they crept under the fallen log and entered my pond, which was solitary enough to satisfy even their pioneer instincts. They had first picked a site for their new lodge, on a point overlooking the lower half of the pond, and had then gone back to the outlet to raise the water.

Their dam was a rare piece of wild engineering; so much I had to confess, even while I wished that the beavers had chosen some other place to display their craft. Finding where the water escaped, they stopped the opening beneath the log, and made a bank of mud and alder-brush above it. This bank was carried out a dozen feet or more on either side of the stream, the ends being bent forward (toward the pond above) so as to make a very fine concave arch. On a small or quiet stream like this, beavers almost invariably build a straight dam; and where swift water calls for a stronger or curving structure, they present the convex side to the current; but here they had reversed both rules, for some reason or impulse which I could not fathom,—except on the improbable assumption that the animals could foresee the end of their work from the beginning. The finished dam was an amazingly good one, as you shall see; but whether it resulted from planning or happy experiment or just following the water, only a certain old beaver could tell.

Since there was no other outlet to my pond, the beavers were obliged to build here; but the site was a poor one, the land being uniformly low on all sides, and no sooner did they finish their dam than the rising water flowed around both ends of it. To remedy this they pushed out a curving wing from either end of their first arch, so that the line of their dam was now a pretty triple-curve. Again and again the outgoing water crept around the obstacle; each time the beavers added other curving wings, now on this side, now on that, bending them steadily forward till the top of their dam suggested the rim of an enormous scallop-shell. Then, finding the water deep enough for their needs, they thrust out a straight wing from either end of their dam, resting their work on the slopes of two hillocks in the woods, some fifty yards apart,—this in a straight line, or across the hinge of the scallop-shell: if measured on the curves, their dam was three or four times that length. Their next task was to build a lodge on the point above; then they dug a canal through the bog to the nearest grove of hardwood, and cut down a liberal part of the trees for their winter supply of bark. The branches of these trees had been cut into convenient lengths, floated through the canal, and stored in a great food-pile in the deep water near the lodge.

When I found the dam, several deer (to judge from the tracks) were already using the top of it as a runway in passing from the flooded ground on one side of the pond to the other. From either end a game-trail led upward along the shore, no longer following immemorial paths over the bog, which was submerged with all its splendor of color, but making a new and rougher way through the black growth. When I followed one of these trails it led me completely around the pond, going confidently till it neared the salt-lick, where it halted, wavered and trickled out in aimless wanderings. There, where once the ground was trodden smooth by many feet, was now no ground to be seen. The precious spring, over which a thousand generations of deer had lingered, had vanished in a dull waste of water. Twice I watched the place from early morning till owls began to cry the twilight; in that time only a few animals appeared, singly, at long intervals; and after wandering about as if seeking something and finding it not, they disappeared in the dusky woods.

And so I went away, looking for the last time sadly on the little pond, as upon a place one has owned and loved, but which has passed into other hands. Though the wild ducks still breed or gather there, it is no longer the same. There is no restful spot from which to watch the waters dance with the wind, or frown at the cloud, or smile at the sunshine; the little larches are all dead beside their ancestors; the carpet of colored moss is but a memory. When the beavers go to pioneer a remoter spot, I shall break their dam and let the water return to its ancient level. Then, if happily I live long enough for another fringe of larches to grow, and another mossy rug to crimson under the waning sun, perhaps it will be my pond once more.

THE END

NOTES

[1] For further example and analysis of the matter, see pp. 196–199.

[2] Crawford, Thinking Black (1904).

[3] I am speaking of starlings as they now appear in southern New England. They were brought from Europe a few years ago, and are multiplying at an alarming rate. They have formed some curious new habits here; even their voices are very different from the voices of starlings as I have heard them in Europe.

[4] In parts of the West, I am told, wolves often kill more than they need. Formerly they fed on the abundant game and were wholly natural animals; but their habits have changed with a changed environment. When the game was destroyed by settlers or hunters the wolves began to feed on domestic animals; and the descendants of these wolves, which killed right and left in a crowding, excited herd of sheep or cattle, are now said to kill deer wantonly when they have the chance. I cannot personally verify the saying, and know not whether it rests on exceptional or typical observation. In the North, where there are no domestic animals, I have rarely known a timber-wolf to kill after his hunger was satisfied.