by John Kulish
He swam like a retriever, spending hours fetching sticks or chasing uncatchable beaver. He had a special place to sit in our fifteen-foot canoe, from where he scrutinized the shoreline. He realized that that’s where the action was. Alert and calm, he never moved about, whether we were floating across a mirror or scudding down a five-mile-long lake with a southwest gale threatening to swamp us. He enjoyed the isolated ponds and streams we frequented. He was always the first one in and the first one out of a canoe. Whenever we came ashore, he always had an initial chore. Picking out a lonely strip of cove, he would go down to the water’s edge, search it for stones, then with muzzle, mouth, and paws methodically roll and carry them into a cairn. He would fish underwater with his front paws, get them behind one and move it up to shore, where he would pick it up in his mouth, carry it over to the chosen spot, and drop it. Sometimes, when his paws weren’t enough, he would duck his head, hound ears and all, to grab a stone from as much as two feet of water. Nothing distracted him until he had finished building his cairn. They were usually about ten inches high, and as much as a foot across at the bottom. Then, proudly lifting his leg, he would sign his name and depart, ready to belong to the family for the rest of the day.
When he was wet, the fur on his lower back curled. We wondered about that until Belle, his only mate, who was a registered redbone, bore him thirteen puppies. Among the ten survivors were recognizable progeny from a golden retriever, two Labradors, one Weimaraner, one bluetick, two Walkers, two redbones, and a lone Black and Tan. Everything but an Airedale. He was embarrassed by the whole terrible business and would have nothing to do with any of them. When accosted, he would head for the safety of the woods, his tail between his legs.
To me, my hounds were always guys, either “good guys” or “bad guys.” Their place was in a kennel until they had earned the right to join me inside of my home. Ol’ Kitty Guy was not yet four when he graduated. Allowed to come into the house to lick his wounds, he behaved exactly as I would if suddenly transported from the New Hampshire woods into Buckingham Palace. Uneasy and unsure of himself, he retired under the kitchen table to adjust to the royal surroundings. If I raised my voice, he disappeared. He never took advantage of any furniture, even when left unguarded. Venison steaks, left on a low table to defrost while we were gone, remained untouched. Even when placed on the floor in front of him, any meat still in butcher’s wrapping paper would not be eaten. He figured we’d made a mistake. At mealtime, he watched us from a respectful distance. His turn would come later, for he was the link between table and dishpan.
Gentle as a loving woman, he coukl also be as vicious as one scorned. When left alone in the house, he greeted strangers so savagely that, over the years, we forgot what pedlars looked like. Once, one of my customers, hastily dumped off with his duffle by a spouse eager to get back to her urban cronies, spent a fearful afternoon in ten-degree temperatures. Unable to accept our written invitation to “go right in and make yourself at home,” because Jiggs didn’t know him from a Fuller Brush salesman, the man who had engaged me as a guide had wandered into the garage where my saws and axes were kept. At dusk, when I returned, a mountain of wood welcomed me.
Jiggs disliked only one man. His bête noir lived alone, year round, in a tent, in the deep woods about two miles from our house. He had the biggest kitchen in New Hampshire, for he cooked his meals on a black iron stove, out-of-doors, with the sky for a ceiling, and the wind for a fan. How amazed I was the first time I saw a steaming pumpkin pie emerge from that oven to spice below zero air.
His only companions were a half-dozen huskies. During the winter, once or twice a week, the crack of a whip and the shout of “Mush, damn ya!” could be heard long before he appeared. As if out of the pages of Jack London, he rode the runners of a dog sled, his chest-long white whiskers stiff with frost. The sledge would shoot by with runners striking sparks as they hit the plowed road.
Jiggs couldn’t stand the sight of him, but he never actually attacked his enemy. Snarling and snapping, he would run abreast of him and his team from the moment they burst into sight until they disappeared down the hill. He always kept far enough away to avoid the whip, but close enough to incite the dogs. His hatred for the sled-dog man troubled me, especially since Kitty Guy had started the feud. “Baldy” had never either insulted nor struck him. But hate “Baldy” he did. Obviously, Jiggs didn’t think dogs should be forced to work. Pulling a loaded sledge was for horses. Dogs were supposed to hunt bobcats all day, in snow up to a man’s neck.
While Jiggs was still young, he learned to kill snakes, and after he retired from active service, he spent hours hunting for them in fields and in stone walls, following their pungent, mouth-foaming scent. The neighbor’s cats also got regular workouts, creating a painful paradox he was never able to fathom. He expected me to shoot them just as I had their wild cousins. The fact that I did not remained the one facet of my character he was never quite able to understand. As he grew older, his game became smaller: woodchucks, field mice, spiders, and finally, ants.
He never took advantage of our love. He was his most demonstrative while sitting beside me in a car. Suddenly a black head would push up under my driving arm and press firmly against my chest. For miles, he would sit thus quietly.
Wherever I went, he went. One bright fall day we waited our turn on a lift at the base of Sunapee Mountain. My wife and daughters were already exclaiming over the brilliant foliage viewed from the single chairs as they rode up the mountain. When my chair approached, I sat down quickly. “Jump!” I ordered, and up Jiggs jumped to squeeze in beside me. One arm around him, I could feel his body, relaxed and comfortable against mine. Alert and interested, he looked all around, unruffled even when our chair, rocked by gusts of wind, swung like a pendulum over granite ledges forty feet below.
In the early fall of 1964, when the Old Guy was thirteen, he ran the wilderness Allagash River in a canoe with us. Because of his age, we had at first planned to have him stay with a friend, but when it was revealed that they had a cat, our plans were changed.
“John,” my wife pleaded, “he’s been retired for four years. Surely he wouldn’t mind being with a cat now! The war is over.”
“Never!” I objected. “It would be like putting General Patton in the Peace Corps.”
So down one hundred miles of sometimes turbulent river he went, wedged happily between my legs as I paddled stern. Calmly he watched the rapids in Chase Carry boil around him. On nights when we knew a half-inch of frost would coat the tiny tent by morning, we made a place for him to sleep inside, near the front opening. The unaccustomed intimacy made him uncomfortable, for he never forgot that he was a dog.
In his fifteenth year, we realized that Ol’ Kitty Guy was stone deaf. A tenuous film began to form over his bright eyes. His hind legs were hard pressed to support his body. We had to carry him up and down stairs, but he still showed his respect, even at a personal price. Whenever he was left alone in the house for hours, as he sometimes had to be, he greeted us with happy thumps of his worn tail, but the greeting was necessarily short. His love seemed to grow stronger as his body grew weaker. He didn’t seem to mind being old. As naturally as we were eager to give it, he accepted the help he needed to get up. God designs us to grow old, man and dog alike. It is love that gives our mutual fate its final dignity.
Perhaps an animal does not know it is mortal until close to the end. I think he had come to understand and to accept. It was I who would not yield. We hadn’t truly realized how he had aged until our younger daughter returned home after two years in Colorado. When she walked into the living room and saw him sleeping in front of the fireplace, his wasted legs and feet moving as, in his dreams, he once more coursed over Osgood Mountain, her face crumpled. “Oh, Dad,” she wept, “he’s old.”
Because he was unable to take care of himself, many friends, kind and good people though they were, had asked why I didn’t have Jiggs put to sleep. How could I execute the truest friend I had ever
had, one who had loved me since the first moment we met, and who never once had given me cause to be angry? When I had needed Jiggs, he had never failed me. Now he needed me. I wouldn’t fail him. So I had sworn that, unless in pain, Kitty Guy would die naturally, either in his sleep or in my arms.
Now I sat on the floor in front of the fireplace, but the blazing hardwood logs couldn’t warm me on that cold morning in May. Outside, it was snowing. I held the Ol’ Guy’s head and shoulders in my lap. He seemed more comfortable that way. All night we sat in this embrace. Now I waited for the doctor to come to ease the Ol’ Guy’s now deadly pain, and to increase my own.
It took me a long time to make his coffin. It had to be big enough to hold his bedding. I wanted his tired body to rest stretched out on his favorite rug. A weeping daughter sat on the cellar stairs and watched the pine box take shape. Her gentle, understanding husband guided my fingers that held the nails I couldn’t always see. Together, all four of us dug the grave under a towering oak on the hill behind the cabin. Somehow, the carpentry and the digging eased the pain.
He left me as he had come to me—in a snowstorm. It was fitting that I buried him while the soft, white flakes drifted into his grave. Each year, he and I had come alive with the snow. The part of me that only he had known went with him on his longest hunt.
12. Beaver: Benefactors of the Boondocks
Beaver are the salt of the animal earth. Designed by nature to be peaceable and persevering, they are also endowed with creative genius. Ask any distraught small-town road agent, fighting to keep dirt roads from being continually inundated. Beaver do not know how to quit being beaver.
Zoologists have allocated to Sir Flat Tail the seventh rung on the ladder of animal intelligence. From what I have observed in the woods, the beaver has gnawed its way up at least a couple of rungs while the scientists weren’t looking.
If intelligence can be defined as “the shaping of the present and the future by the past,” consider the dilemma of part-time trappers, with full-time reputations, who have complained to me about not being able to trap out an entire colony.
“What’s wrong, John? The first four or five are easy to catch. Then no more. It’s always the big ones that are left. All they do is eat up the bait.”
One ten-generation Yankee gentleman trapper was using a standard water set, whereby a dead pole long enough to extend above the ice is thrust into bottom mud. About a foot above the base of the pole, an exposed trap is set on a “platform” of two sticks nailed into the wood. A couple of feet above the trap, poplar sticks are wired to the pole.
“John, the next day the bait is gone, so I nail a second platform on the other side, and wire lots of bait completely around the dead stick. The next day, the bait is gone again!”
Grandpa beaver had observed what had happened to his family when they had stepped onto the “platform.” Still, that poplar looked mighty good. He hadn’t had any for weeks. He swam over to the pole, turned upside down into diving position, sidled down, approaching the fresh bait from above. Treading water, up-ended, he circled the stick, relishing every last nibble.
“Tell me, Andrew,” I chuckled, “if you were going to rob a bank, would you enter through a door where uniformed policemen were standing, brass buttons gleaming?”
The intelligence of these amphibious engineers is matched only by their unflagging diligence. No current is too swift, no tree too tall, no ridge too steep, no canal too long, no dam too demanding. It has been estimated that sixty million beaver gnawed at the primitive forests of North America before the Mayflower landed. That ship’s cargo included the age-old struggle between money and morality. During the very first meeting with Samoset, the Puritans, after oblique glances at the lustrous pelts worn by the red welcoming committee, talked business. Thanks to the beaver trade, by 1640 the Massachusetts Bay Colony was debt-free. When the white immigrants made the beaver pelt the unit of exchange, the red natives traded them for food, clothing, and firearms. The Indian was not intent on building an empire. He already had one.
By 1690, licensing systems regarding the sale of beaver were in effect in every colony except New Hampshire. For the first and last time, that staid state was wide open. The territory had been given to loyal supporters of the King of England in the form of land grants. The size of a tract equaled the depth of a loyalty. These boys made no bones about long-run consequences. Money was what they were after, and they found it in ponds and streams, on the backs of thousands upon thousands of beaver.
Towns were settled and roads built close to beaver ponds. Cattle grew fat on wild grass growing in meadows kept fertile and moist by these backed-up ponds, some of which covered several hundred acres. For years, even after they were abandoned, the dams still served as foot bridges for crossing brooks and ponds. By 1820, the state was nearly trapped-out. By the end of the century, even in the most primitive parts of New Hampshire, beaver were hard to find. In 1905, the legislature finally gave the dam builders complete protection. It was too late. There wasn’t a beaver left. Again, a barn door was locked after a horse was stolen. Drawing blood with their spurs, the thieves had sped westward.
Sometime during the next decade, beaver swam across the borders into New Hampshire from Maine or from Canada. By 1926, the northernmost counties once more buzzed with the sound of wood-chipping teeth. By 1940, fifty-eight of these wood choppers were reintroduced in the southern counties, where they have since flourished, oftentimes to the point of frustration for farmers, road agents, game wardens, and the competing (two-legged) lumberers. Only the beaver remain unshaken by their population explosion.
In nature’s ledger, the beaver is listed in the credit column, for she designed it to benefit and to enrich, not only other animals and birds, but all wildlife. Lining man’s pocketbook was an unforeseen by-product.
A new beaver pond is the first and the strongest link in an ever expanding, far-reaching chain of events. Even when beaver, intent on building bigger and better dams, abandon ponds, or when an entire colony is trapped out, the legacy they leave is as long-lasting as the dams they have built. A beaver pond lifts the horizons of the entire forest community. Within months, it becomes the civic center for inhabitants from miles around; a forest plaza, with varied restaurants; the most popular meeting place for animals that enjoy good food. Fish thrive and multiply. Turtles settle in rich mud. Water snakes grow thick on frogs and salamanders. Mink dart about the shores, competing with snakes for fish and lizards. Otter, who previously may have visited the barren brook but once a year, now include it on their regular itinerary. Muskrats come to eat juicy water plants and stay to build homes. They sulk when raccoon, intent on frogging and salamandering, end up trying to muscle in on the muskrat’s supply of mussels. The barred and the great horned owls watch the contest from seats in the mezzanine. Sparrow and marsh hawks hover overhead, contemplating the menu.
When the inundated coniferous trees die, many of them a foot or more in diameter, insects lay eggs under loosened bark. Soon, woodpeckers, flycatchers, and cedar waxwings flock to the water-front snack bars. The deciduous trees die and dry on the stump, furnishing the finest of firewood for any man willing to be twice warmed. Pioneer trees—gray birch, pin cherry, poplar, and swamp maple—as well as a variety of low-growing shrubs, spring up in the “chopped out” areas around the pond. New shoots begin to grow from hardwood stumps cut by beaver. The tender stems from birches, maples, and even from oaks, supply gourmet food, not only for beaver, but for deer, hare, and partridge. Wildlife runs, hops, and flies to feast on ground shrubs and their fruits. Bobcats begin to hunt the area regularly. Their yellow eyes, in “quick draw” holsters, hope to zero in on a varying hare or on an unarmed beaver kit lumbering alone on a hillside. Foxes lurk around the marsh, their noses peeled for a careless muskrat. The decaying leaves from felled trees enrich moist humus. Earthworms pop up everywhere, luring woodcocks from miles around. Waterfowl—black ducks, teal, mallards—and wood ducks bob for burr, smart, and duck w
eeds. They stay to raise broods in comparative safety. Stilt-legged bitterns and herons stalk the shores, to suddenly stand still while great, glittering eyes probe for frogs, snakes, lizards, and tadpoles. Shorebirds—the greater and lesser yellowlegs, sandpipers, and the northern water thrush—jerk along the shore seeking shallow-water insects and minute plant life. From afar, plants, foreign to the area, are introduced by migrant waterfowl. (A beaver pond in Stoddard, abandoned for a decade, harbors the only specimen of Phragmites communis, a stately tidewater plant, I have seen inland. Its graceful plumes, a dozen feet high, have learned to bend to winter winds.) As a natural bonus, scrappy, native trout await for those human fishermen who still remember how to walk.
In a beaver pond, life pulses everywhere. In spring, summer, and fall, it splashes, hums, chirps, peeps, bleats, barks, croaks, quacks, hoots, and sings. In winter, one cannot hear the pulse beats. But if one knows where to look, he can put his finger on any one of a dozen places and feel the throb of its life.
The damage beaver cause by flooding dirt roads, timber lots, and cultivated meadowlands is negligible compared to the immense contribution they make to the wildlife community. The problem lies in the fact that the injury touches man’s most sensitive nerve: the one connected to his purse strings. Some biologists claim that beaver ponds might disrupt migrations of spawning fish, but I have yet to see a beaver dam a female trout couldn’t get through.
In 1948, after the state of New Hampshire had had to pay damages for too many backed-up beaver ponds, the “powers that be” began to try to figure out how they could have their cake and eat it too. As a result, for almost twenty years, the standard technique for managing the dam builders has been through the use of ordinary, four-inch, perforated, fiber drainpipe. The initial experiment resulted in a duel of engineering talents. Two sections of pipe were extended through a dam. That stopped the flooding until the resident engineers found the open, upstream end and proceeded to plug it. Human technicians countered by suspending the pipe from hardwood posts, to which it had been tied with baling wire, after hand-plugging the upstream end with a wooden disc. The flat tails reciprocated by chewing down the posts, thus forcing the two sections apart, then filling up the break with sticks and mud. Man lunged back to replace wood with iron stakes, nailing pipe sections to reinforced couplings, always keeping the upstream end plugged. At long last, the human duelist won. The perforations in the drainpipe maintained the desired water level, and the beaver could neither remove nor sabotage the final arrangement. In some dams, barbed wire around a central pipe helps to maintain a “no-beaver’s-land.” The state of Maine uses corrugated pipe in a device called a snorkel, which allows water to run through a dam, thus preventing flooding of negotiable assets. It always hurts me to see dynamited dams.