by John Kulish
The congregating into yards begins when snow reaches a depth that makes roaming about in search of food too difficult. The largest single yard I have seen in New Hampshire was in Stoddard. On a mid-February day ten years ago, I watched twenty-two deer moving about listlessly, after surviving a harsh winter. (On the tenth anniversary of that day, I revisited the area. Not a single deer had passed over the dozen miles of forest I covered on snowshoes. There was no deer yard. There were no deer, even though there was as much browse as there had been a decade ago.) Deer do not yard up just anywhere. They try to pick an area that has a healthy growth of both deciduous and coniferous trees. Until spring, they browse on the deciduous branches and buds, and find shelter among the spruce, pine, and hemlock thickets. Though deer do not enjoy browsing on pine and on spruce, they do relish hemlock as well as balsam twigs. Many times, I have passed through yards and found the inhabitants on a starvation diet, eating pine needles and pine branches. Less than a mile away, ample, nourishing food awaited. Why didn’t the deer go find it?
During many years of snowshoeing into many yards, to approach within a few feet of starving deer, I asked myself this question. Why don’t these pathetic creatures want to leave the well-worn trails of their winter prison to find forage elsewhere? Even though starving, they remain. The longer they remain, the less there is to eat. The less they eat, the weaker they become. Finally, malnutrition so dulls their mental and physical faculties that they allow a mortal enemy to come almost within touching distance.
In summer, fall, and early winter, when deer are in top-notch condition, the flick of a white tail is all most people ever see. During hunting season, the majority of shots are aimed at a rapidly disappearing north end going south. Now, in a browsed-off yard, they stand still. With glassy eyes, they stare at my approaching figure. Deer have a keen sense of smell, and man wears the wrong kind of perfume. Closer and closer move my snowshoes. The deer does not know whether to run or to stand still. Finally, when it sees the whites of my eyes, it takes a few feeble bounds, stops in plain sight, and resumes staring.
Suppose a vigorous man had been handling a responsible, decision-making job exceedingly well. Suddenly he is put into a tiny room. Once a day, a bowl of cornflakes is placed before him. For the first month, there is milk and sugar also, then only sugar, and, finally, only a meager half-cup of the dry flakes. After two and a half months, the door suddenly opens. His boss has a dangerous problem that demands an instant decision. Would the “prisoner” be able to grasp, to think, and to move as quickly as he had before his internment?
In a winter yard, the doe, who was so solicitous during summer and fall, does not help her young to stay alive. When browse can be reached only by the biggest deer standing on their hind feet, mature doe do not break off branches for the young who cannot reach and for the weak. In the woods, life is a personal responsibility. In some eastern states, conservation departments have tried to feed starving deer by introducing fodder into winter yards. Immediately, the big bucks took possession. What they couldn’t eat, they befouled. The doe and the yearlings didn’t get a cudful. The weak starved. The bucks, because of their size and strength, would have survived anyway. Even though we sometimes think we have caught up to nature, we can’t outwit her. Where nature, rather than human nature, is in control, there need be no fear of population explosions.
Even though I have never seen compassion among yarded deer, where, as a human, I felt it was needed most, several moving experiences have convinced me that some deer are capable of caring. The first occurred in the thirties, a few days before deer season opened. I was running a trap line and, as always, carried a shotgun loaded with birdshot. I was hiking along an old tote road that separated two ponds. The dams had long ago been washed out. From the old causeway’s high, dry surface, I could see almost a half-mile around and ahead. Among the speckled alder and the chest-high marsh grass that had repossessed the pond beds towered great, gray boulders. What an ideal place to spot wild animals!
My eyes scanned the farther end of the basin first. Scarcely fifty yards from me, with only their heads showing above the grass, stood two deer. Sensing me, the royal pair bounded away. A massive, twelve-point buck led his slender, almost girlish queen up the basin, and away from danger. Gracefully, he leaped first to the right and then to the left, his sweetie close on his heels.
About a hundred yards from me stood a gray-black, bungalow-sized boulder. Its steep, slanted front faced toward me. It was almost like a movie screen. The springing buck approached the rock broadside. Without slackening his pace, he passed in front of it, his magnificent bulk silhouetted against the stone, to partly disappear among some alders. The doe took two bounds, then stopped broadside against the granite backdrop. Her attention no longer centered on her lord and master. It was riveted on me. Female curiosity had conquered feminine obedience. What was there to be afraid of, anyway?
Suddenly, the buck realized that his mate was no longer following him. He spun around to face her. He looked at her; he looked at me; he twitched his tail; he looked back at her. For tense moments, his eyes moved back and forth from me to the queen of his heart. Every glance spoke clearly in universal, masculine tones. Abruptly, with tremendous bounds, he leaped forward to disappear behind the boulder. Before I could blink, he reappeared on the other side. Still at full gallop, he ran behind the doe, lowered his trophy-sized antlers, and jerked them up with all his outraged strength. Her hind quarters flipped a foot and a half off the ground. She flew up the basin, the boss right on her tail. That punt in the rump had been in her language.
The young doe had obviously never been shot at, but the old buck interpreted the situation differently. A veteran of many hunting seasons, he no doubt still carried buckshot under his hide. To him, any man with a gun meant only one thing. I have never forgotten that big buck who cared enough for his doe to risk his life for her.
Another time, a middle-aged doe unforgettably demonstrated her ability to love. While guiding two deer hunters, I came upon the fresh tracks of three deer. Those of a large adult intermingled with those of two smaller ones: no doubt, a doe with her twin yearlings. After being “jumped,” they took off on the run toward the men waiting on stands a quarter of a mile away.
Even when shot at, unless wounded, deer rarely double back. So, moving fast, I angled away from the direct line of the tracks. In case there was a miss, I could intercept the escaping deer, turn them, and give the hunters a second chance to fill out their deer tags. Upon hearing a fusillade of shots, I stopped underneath a stand of tall hemlocks.
Suddenly, less than fifty yards from me, the fleeing doe put on her brakes with such force that leaves and debris splattered her heaving undersides. She was not a young deer. She looked full at me, hesitated for a moment, then turned to face the direction from which she had just fled. Ignoring me, she paced back and forth, her great white flag rising and falling, her big, upright ears twitching forward and back. Liquid, dark eyes were turned hopefully toward the scene of the shooting. Across the clearing that separated us, her anguish reached out and touched me.
A mixture of emotions rushed through my heart. Because of me, both her yearlings were dead. At that moment, I would have given almost anything if I could have undone what had just been done. I knew she had seen me. I knew she was terribly afraid of me, but she loved her twins even more than she feared me. If she had been the last deer I could ever shoot, I would not have raised my rifle.
Anyone who studies beaver cannot help but be impressed and improved. The beaver’s engineering skills, its single-minded devotion to duty, its perseverance in the face of unnatural as well as natural obstacles, surpasses the liveliest imagination. Their ability for solid group cooperation can make philosophers of us all. But there’s a muscle-pulling step between mutual acceptance and loving response.
Poppa Beaver doesn’t throw his arm around Junior’s shoulders and say, “Son, that was a good day’s work you did tonight. I appreciate it.” He hasn’t th
e time. Besides, that kind of display might well loosen the tight reins needed to maintain discipline within the colony. A communal society usually demands rigid behavior.
In every lodge, a motto hangs over the door: “He who will not work, cannot eat.” No beaver ever forgets it, not even the littlest one. (Daddy doesn’t have that broad, flat tail for nothing.) A beaver’s life of toil makes the salt mines seem appealing. I have never seen a beaver play. For them, life is just one dam after another.
I cannot agree with those naturalists who claim that some beaver prefer to live alone. By heritage and by habit, these woods engineers possess a group fidelity as compelling as that of the ant, the bee, or the Daughters of the American Revolution. Beaver need each other. How could one engineer construct a dam, build a lodge, dig canals, and store a winter’s food? I have yet to see a beaver with battle scars. They do not fight among themselves. Dedicated wholeheartedly to the same cause, they do not waste their energies and their characters fighting one another. Their ability to work and to live together in natural harmony can only command our awe and our respect. But, like Paradise itself, their social order has flaws, especially when viewed through man’s moral bifocals. Within the colony, the individual is nothing, except as he benefits the group. The colony always comes first. Because they live such interdependent lives, no beaver leaves a colony by choice. He departs only by decree.
Eighteen years ago, halfway through the beaver trapping season, I was snowshoeing up a frozen deadwater to reach an old beaver pond in hopes that it had been resettled. About a mile below the dam, the river narrowed, then twisted down a series of short pitches over a tumble of rocks. Even in zero weather, large openings among the churning rapids remained unfrozen. As I was detouring around the white water, a fresh trail in the snow surprised me. They were the tracks of a solitary, mature beaver. To find an unmarried beaver is unusual enough. To find a celibate who is also “eating out” in the middle of February is a phenomenon. What had happened to this production engineer’s time standards?
It had emerged from the fast water to make its way into the woods. The tracks led to a birch tree eight inches in diameter. It had been cut down a week before. Since then, each night, the beaver had emerged from the white water to eat his fill of bark. Something was wrong. Beaver do not usually eat their bark sandwiches on the stump; it’s too dangerous. Mr. Flat Tail could himself end up as a hot lunch for a bobcat. After filling up on birch bark, the maverick re-entered the water and swam upriver. Why was this beaver breaking all rules of beaver behavior? Who ever heard of an impulsive engineer? Pondering the paradox, I snowshoed up to the pond.
The lodge had been abandoned five years before. This loner had been living there since early autumn. Never before had I seen a bachelor beaver. Never before had I seen a beaver who left a lodge in the winter. Never before had I seen a beaver who didn’t have a feed pile. Never before had I seen a beaver that swam a mile for a meal. What had happened? Why was he doing these unnatural things? Only the beaver could answer my questions.
As a professional, I set a trap so a wild creature caught in it dies quickly. The best place to catch a water animal is in its own element where it cannot get to shore. With beaver, this means trapping them underneath the ice. When a beaver or an otter is in danger, it heads for deep water as naturally as a drowning man struggles to reach the surface. When trapped properly, an animal drowns quickly in deep water.
Fifty feet below the lodge, I located a suitable place in the pond, where this recluse would have to pass, en route to his unfinished birch dinner. After clearing away the snow and chopping a hole in the ice, I set a trap. To it was attached a stout piece of a dead tree. Beaver do not cut dead trees, only live ones; they like tree sap gravy with their stakes. After baiting the trap with a piece of freshly cut poplar, I lowered it into six feet of water, and covered the hole up with snow. The next time I made my rounds, I cut out the mushily frozen snow, lay prone on the ice, shielded my eyes, and stared into the murky water. The trap was gone. The chain stretched out of sight downstream. I had my beaver.
I lifted the dead pole onto the ice, grabbed the chain, and pulled the beaver out of the hole. Even though it was an immense animal, weighing at least sixty-five pounds, it was not a patriarch. No gray silvered its muzzle. It was in the prime of life. Then I saw why it was living alone, why it had no feedpile, why it had to travel so far to get its food. This beaver could no longer store food. Both of its front feet had been amputated. The brutal surgery had been performed a year before by novice trappers.
How could this beaver carry mud and sticks for a dam? How could he help fill the family pantry? What good was he to the group without his front feet? When this beaver could no longer lift his end of the log, he had been expelled from the colony.
It was not unusual for me to catch beaver with one foreleg missing. Like most other states, New Hampshire is interested primarily in revenue from trapping licenses. The state does not require trappers to furnish evidence of their ability to trap intelligently and humanely. Most part-time trappers, armed with a one-dollar mail order booklet on “How to Trap,” and a burning desire to get rich in one season, head for the culverts. Trapping is a profession. It takes years of thoughtful toil to acquire the knowhow that makes it profitable for the trapper and comparatively painless for the trapped. After an initial eye-opening season, most of the would-be millionaires give up, but not before leaving unnecessary cripples in our rivers and our lakes.
Since that day, I have caught several “bachelor” beaver. These were not crippled. Each was a gigantic male. Each was a “senior citizen,” certainly a great-grandfather—perhaps even a fourth-or fifth-generation patriarch. Why was he living alone? you ask. Here is my theory.
When beaver mate, they swim off to find a likely brook, build a dam and a lodge. They start a family. After the first litter of one to four kits, Mrs. Beaver usually has quintuplets. Naturally, father and mother are boss. No matter how tempted, teen-age beaver hesitate to question either the authority or the judgment of their parents; it’s pretty hard to pierce armor that always practices what it preaches. In their third year, the children, now newly graduated engineers, leave, pick a mate, and get married. Like some people, a few of them come back to the old homestead to live. Trouble brews. Here are the parents still telling their grown-up children what to do. Sometimes, when grandchildren arrive, the emotional stew begins to boil. It is a struggle to raise children, even without interference. “Well,” bristles Grandpa, “that’s not the way you were raised. I swear, I don’t know what this generation is coming to.” As Grandpa gets older, his advice gets stuffier.
When a similar impasse occurs among humans, the old folks are banished into nursing homes. As yet, beaver do not have “rest homes,” so the troublemakers are expelled from the colony, to live out their remaining years in exile. For some strange reason, I have never found an old matriarch living alone. Obviously, beaver lodges have only father-in-law problems.
If God has a favorite animal, surely it is the otter. Why else would he have been so generous? As if the gift of a built-in compass wasn’t enough, He gave the otter the gift of love. I believe otter are monogamous because a lifetime’s experience with their character, personality, and habits has convinced me that for them it’s “till death do us part.” Whenever sign tells me that a single otter has passed through my territory, it is to me a definite indication that this otter has lost its mate, not by divorce, but by trap or by gun.
Twenty years ago, in the dead of winter, a group of them clearly demonstrated their ability to love. I was snowshoeing up an isolated river, ten miles long. Even though this was ideal otter country, I was amazed. Never before had I seen the sign of nine or ten at the same time and place.
They were not just passing through. They had spent several weeks fishing and swimming together along the ten-mile stretch of river. They fished the frozen deadwaters and romped in the ice-free rapids. Sometimes, they split up into pairs, with some of them goin
g upriver while others went downstream for a few miles. But they always regathered. The sign showed they had been there for several weeks.
I have often noted three, or even four otter, from different watersheds, together for a week or two. Never before, or since, have I observed so large a clan gathered for such a long reunion.
Because otter love each other, the family circle is a close one. Food and fun are shared. Whenever death strikes its hard blow, the bereaved otter do what no other animal except man does: they mourn. I can remember the first otter I caught. I picked up my trap with a never before felt sense of accomplishment. Within a few years, I discovered that whenever I trapped one of these beautiful animals, its mate and its family grieved. Otter truly feel grief. There is no other animal I know of, once its mate is trapped, that will remain in the vicinity, sometimes for many weeks, searching and waiting for its beloved. It seems willing to risk a similar fate to find out whether it is really true that its loved one is gone forever.
After thirty years it still hurts me to remember a family of four who were fishing a forty-mile section of the Ware River and its tributaries. Studying their particular timetable, I concluded they would return to the starting place in about two weeks.