by John Kulish
During winter, at mealtime, beaver leave the lodge via an underwater tunnel, swim over to the pantry, cut themselves a stake, and swim back up into the dining room to eat it. The food supply, cut and stored by mid-November, stands in water throughout December, January, February, and on into March. The bark begins to sour. It smells and tastes unpleasant, like food we may keep in the refrigerator too long. It doesn’t make one sick; it’s just difficult to swallow. Weeks before the vernal equinox balances the heavens, beaver are dreaming of fresh bark.
By mid-March, in our area, snow lies heavy and packed on the ground. Nights are cold, but already the sun is high. Somewhere around the edges of most beaver ponds, a spring has bubbled away the winter under ice. Long daylight hours with a waxing sun melt its thinly frozen lid. Soon, a hole appears. Then, the spring is free. Beaver, waiting for a door big enough to squeeze through, break out of prison to clamber ashore. Pure air, fresh food, and if it’s the right time of the month, a full moon. Perhaps, desire overcoming caution, one might venture out during daylight hours, but I happen to have seen only those taking moonlight walks. Waddling over snow-covered ice, they head for the woods. After cutting down a fresh sandwich that is usually small enough to handle in one piece, they drag it back to the spring hole. If it won’t fit through intact, they cut it up into bite-size pieces, shove them through, then swim back to the lodge to feast. Tempted as they might be, they do not eat their sandwiches on land. Bobcats are rutting. One cat is a risk; a pair can be a catastrophe.
Beaver are sanitary as well as civil engineers. I have never found their scat inside or near a lodge. They defecate in a particular part of a pond, always using the same area. It is usually well away from the house. As you would suppose, their scat resembles pressed wood. Because it disintegrates so readily, it is not easily discernible, even in shallow water.
Besides dams and lodges, beaver design and build logging roads and cargo canals. When the immediate perimeters of a pond have been lumbered off, and scouting reveals desirable food in the “out-back,” these engineers lay out and dig waterways. The channels are deep enough for them to swim in without touching bottom. The longest one I have seen was engineered 150 feet to a pond. When trees growing in the canal are not the right flavor, beaver don’t cut them down; they sever the roots, so these do not interfere with timber being conveyed down a “chute.” New Hampshire is not good canal-digging country. Whenever a little knoll six or seven feet high interrupts a water channel, the trail continues overland, and thence back into the canal. I have yet to see a tunnel dug under such a rise of ground. After a few hundred more generations of evolution, we may find lock chambers in all beaver canals.
A few miles from my cabin, a colony of beaver have built a series of baffle dams, two to four feet high, on a tiny brook which is the outlet to a large pond the colony established five years ago. The beaver still live in the mother pond, but, each night, they travel downstream to work on the new construction site. The brook’s flowage was so meager that swimming was impossible. Top engineering brains were picked. Following expert advice, the builders resolved the problem by digging out the center of the tricklet, piling the stones and gravel onto either side, and thereby forming a channel deep enough for even a great-grandpa to swim in without scraping his toes. I have yet to see a better job of dredging.
Wherever waterways are not feasible, beaver build logging roads. If a surveyed route is blocked by a stump or by a fallen tree, a right-of-way is cut that inevitably results in the shortest, straightest distance possible to the pond. I have seen such rights-of-way cut through hurricane-felled pine trees, two feet in diameter. The beaver chewed them through, then, like bulldozers, they pushed and shoved the huge sections out of the way. Many times, I have walked down their heavily traveled log roads three hundred feet to reach the pond.
Dedicated drudges that they usually are, even beaver get spring fever. Mature males emerge from a rough winter under ice with lackadaisical hearts. Shingling the roof and reputtying the windows is the last thing on their minds. Mrs. Beaver, preparing for her confinement, is poor company. An uneasy, inner restlessness, a mate’s ill temper, and the stirring chant of peepers, quickens the beaver’s resolve. Open brooks and rushing rivers look tempting. It is vacation time in the colony. Some males spend it cruising up and down a river for a week. Others will not return for a month, while a few adventurers will be gone until frosts remind them that, back home, there is work to be done. Those beaver who have reached marrying age leave, some never to return. They go to establish a dynasty elsewhere.
Truant beaver communicate with one another as human vagabonds often do, by building cairns. Wherever a projection from a ledge, a large flat stone, or a big log sticks out above water, a roving engineer comes ashore bearing mud, leaves, and sticks. From the debris he fashions a cairn. The finished landmark, usually eight to ten inches high, and as much as a foot across, is crowned with a dab of personal perfume, castoreum, the most precious of a beaver’s possessions.
A few days later, another itinerant swims up the river. When he sees the cairn he goes ashore to look it over. “Ye Gods,” he exclaims, “Uncle Joe was here a few days ago. I haven’t seen him in years. He must be upstream.”
Meanwhile, back at the lodge, Mrs. Beaver has delivered her young. She nurses her kits for about a month. Within a few days after birth, the babies take their first swim. They need no urging, but go on their shakedown cruise like old salts. Within a few weeks, the yearlings, banished during the delivery, are allowed to return to the lodge. Soon, father, refreshed and as light-hearted as a beaver knows how to be, returns, full of stories about adventures while abroad—stories to be shared with wide-eyed progeny in the leisurely summer months.
To me, the most remarkable characteristic of this remarkable animal is the fact that the kits remain with the parents for two full years, before filial ties are severed. It is not difficult to understand nature’s logic. What would happen if Mrs. Beaver, like Mrs. Bobcat, Mrs. Fox, or Mrs. Mink, ousted her young after a few months? How would beaver learn to build houses snug enough to withstand New England winters, or how to store food, or how to construct dams, or how to dig canals, or how to fell trees? A complex society demands a complicated education, or is it the other way around?
The young stay with father and mother for the same reasons that aspiring engineers matriculate at technical schools. The civil engineering curriculum of the apprentice beaver includes courses in Introductory Tree Identification, Advanced Selective Cutting, The Natural Philosophy of Water Pressures and Currents, Scientific Erosion Control, Tunnel- and Canal-building, Sluicing of Logs, Types of Mud and Clay, and Stream Flow Characteristics. In addition, “city” beaver must take graduate courses in Trap Identification and the Utilization of Metals in Dam Structures.
The beaver’s ingenuity was demonstrated to me one season when I was running a trapline about fourteen miles long. Each day, on snowshoes, I covered a route consisting of a series of isolated beaver ponds. Trapping these animals involves using one’s snowshoe as a shovel to clear away snow, then chopping a hole in the ice with a steel chisel. After rolling shirt sleeves and long underwear above the elbow, one reaches into the cold water to set a trap. Because it was not waterproof, I wore my wristwatch fastened to my shirt collar by running the leather strap through the topmost buttonhole and buckling it. One day, well after dark, returning to my little truck, I reached up for my watch. It was gone! Perhaps I had forgotten to attach it to my collar that morning? Trouser and shirt pockets were pulled inside out. I must have lost it, no doubt oh some beaver pond while lying on my stomach, looking down into the hole I had chopped. It was a valuable watch. For twenty years, we had shared every moment. Besides, it had taken two years of scrimping during the depression to save up enough money to buy it. I wanted to find it. It was too late that evening, but at daybreak I was back. Until dark, I retraced the fourteen-mile circuit. There was no time to tend traps. Every likely looking hole in the snow where it might hav
e fallen was scrutinized. The watch was gone for good. Dejected, I gave up my search and tried to forget about it.
The following June, I made it a point to fish the same string of beaver ponds for trout. I noticed that beaver were lumbering across the pond. My new watch said it was exactly 6:00 A.M. when the logging operation ceased. Across the pond came seven beaver. Swimming in single file, they followed a leader whose head was twice the size of any of the others on the work crew. Upon reaching the lodge, they submerged, one after another.
Trout do not rise for flies during the day, so I, too, took a siesta on a sunny bank. I wanted to make sure I would be there for the evening rise. An hour before sunset I began to cast again. At exactly seven o’clock a stately head emerged in front of the lodge, followed by six successive heads of various dimensions. Purposefully, they swam toward the farther shore, to disappear into the twilight. Within moments, the night shift had resumed logging.
As I dismantled my rod, I began thinking . . . 6:00 A.M. to the minute . . . 7:00 P.M. on the dot . . . The boss beaver must be wearing my watch.
14. Otter Observed: Best Hearts, Best Brains
A wet black torpedo exploded, spraying water and slush. A hundred yards from shore, nature’s own pop artist hung in midair, drops of water rolling from the curved whiskers, the thick forelegs held flush against the belly. The wide mouth gripped a struggling fish. Bobbing its tapered head in a series of gleeful jerks, the otter spun the fish around until the head pointed “down the hatch.” Breaking it up with loud crunches, it swallowed its catch and disappeared under the slush without a sound. Within minutes it burst up again, fifty feet away, with another fish. Each time it repeated the spinning ritual before swallowing. That otter popped up all over the cove. It did this with such zest for the very art of living, I still can’t decide whether it most enjoyed the fishing, the spinning, the eating, or the popping.
After thousands of hours spent studying the river otter, observing them in their natural habitat still thrills me. This was one of my most delightful observations. It occurred after a heavy, early-winter snowstorm had covered a big cove in a primitive pond with slush ice. Approaching through a spruce thicket, I saw dark, round holes scattered about in the floating white mush. The cove looked as though a dozen giant doughnuts had been cut from it. At once I knew that an otter was there, that it was fishing, and that it was leaping up through the soft slush to eat its dinner. I sat down behind a heavy screen of conifers to watch the ballet through my binoculars. Never have I observed a more bewitching exhibition of choreography!
Knowledge and understanding seldom come easily or hand in hand, whether one is studying medicine, law, or nature. It has taken me nearly half a century to learn what I know about the river otter, and I learned most of it by trapping them.
What I now have in my head and in my heart was well worth the chilled fingers, the bloody feet, and the tightened belt. Brave and alert adversaries, otter lost only because I learned to think like them.
I learned to respect their intelligence, then to admire them for their character, and finally to love them for the rare and noble creatures that they are.
As a man, I would like to be the kind of man an otter is as an animal. To him, life is an adventure. He is rarely foolish, but neither does caution dull his high spirits. He doesn’t try to be something he isn’t. He respects himself, his wife, his children, his friends, and his professional ability. He even respects his relatives. He is loving and not afraid to show it. He is never afraid to learn something new. He is invariably good-natured and enjoys at least one belly laugh each day. He hates no one, even if they don’t know how to swim or like to eat fish. A peace-loving animal, he fights only when his freedom is threatened, and then he is willing to die, fighting for what he believes in.
Many years ago I was trapping muskrat on a branch of the Millers River. At that time, I knew nothing about otter. Neither did almost anyone else, except that their dark pelts sold for upward of sixty dollars apiece.
It was mid-November and a light snow had fallen during the night. I approached a broken-down dam, where a hundred years ago, a gristmill had stood. Unfamiliar tracks went up and around it. A drag mark, from eight to ten inches wide, and three to four inches deep, with an occasional, blurred footprint on either edge, confounded me. It looked like the kind of track an alligator would have made. But this was north central Massachusetts! These were the first otter tracks I had ever seen.
I didn’t know where this animal had come from, or where it was going, or why, or how. I realized it wasn’t satisfied with one pond as the muskrat or the beaver are. This new animal was here; then suddenly it was not.
To a boy whose struggling parents disapproved of his interest in animals, bringing home a sixty-dollar pelt might help to relieve some of the parental pressure. Perhaps he could remain both in their good graces and in the woods. During the ensuing winter I learned all I could. The encyclopedias told me its genus, size, color, and physical characteristics, but nothing about its character or behavior. What makes an otter an otter? I could not ask any other trappers, even though they were twice my thirteen years. They knew less than I did. Only the otter could teach me what I aimed to know.
Without realizing it, I then dedicated myself to a lifetime of finding out everything I could about these enigmatic creatures. I have learned much. In many ways they still baffle me, as they baffled Henry David Thoreau. In the 1850’s he wrote, “Here is an animal the size of a human infant that lives on the Sudbury River, and no one knows anything about it.”
I did not take otter from their environment into mine; rather, I took myself into theirs. If I had studied one in captivity, I would have learned only how it responded to a human being in his home. How did otter treat otter in theirs?
The average adult weighs approximately nineteen pounds. For years I weighed each one. The heaviest tipped the scales at thirty-two pounds and stretched six and a half feet from nose to tail. The smallest weighed less than eight pounds. The length of an average adult is about fifty inches.
Shaped like a torpedo, the otter has a streamlined, flexible body with a tapered tail which makes up one-third of the animal’s overall length. Unlike any other animal’s, that appendage is triangular at the base of the spine, and tapers to a blunt point. Its shape indicates its function not only as a rudder, but as an auxiliary engine when fast pickup and power steering are needed. The skin stretches taut over a muscular body, kept trim despite a prodigious appetite. Even though the animal eats constantly, its activity is even more continual. It is always on the go, definitely no kin of the “chaise lounge” set.
Hyperactive as they are, otter require little rest, seldom sleeping more than an hour at a time. Actually, it may be even less. During summer and fall, if they are in true wilderness, they will occasionally “make a nest” on the bank of a pond, lake, or river which commands an open view in all directions. There, in the decaying vegetable matter, under a spruce or a hemlock thicket, they will scratch out a hollow and curl up in a ball for a few minutes, knowing they can slip back into the water with one silent movement.
Before the ice comes, they sometimes pick a secluded spot on a marshy deadwater, tear up sedge grass with their paws, pile it into a stack until it forms a mound, then curl up on top for an otter nap. Other times, they catch a few winks in a bank beaver’s burrow, or in any natural den with an underwater entrance. In winter, otter often curl up in an abandoned beaver lodge. I am convinced they even like to visit active ones. I suspect it’s a one-sided pleasure. They must get the kind of reception a fundamentalist preacher would give a hell-raising, unsaved cousin.
To those naturalists, trappers, and nature writers who claim the beaver’s greatest natural enemy is the otter, I say, “Show me.” I am sure no man living has examined more otter scat than I have, nor analyzed it more knowingly. Occasionally, I have found muskrat fur, never that of a beaver. From what I have observed in a quarter-century, these two diverse water animals respect each othe
r completely. Neither is a meat eater. Otter enjoy shore dinners; beaver are vegetarians. What is there to fight about? Only humans fight over ideas. If an otter were starving, of course it would attack and eat a beaver; but otter have an endless food supply. When would a civilized man eat another man?
Too often, we humans tend to assume that all wild creatures spend their lives hating, coveting, and killing as we do. Nature is neither vicious nor sentimental; she is honest. Whenever I hear a parent or a teacher denounce behavior by comparing it to that “of an animal,” I sigh. If only we did behave like animals!
Because of its shape, an otter’s head appears small, sloping back from the black nose to the diminutive, streamlined ears, set well to the side of the skull. Its coat-button nose sticks out beyond the underslung, sharklike mouth. Like the shark, it must rely on speed for its food. The large nostrils are situated on either side in such a way that, when “making knots” straight ahead, frontal pressure cannot build up. Its eyes are small, almond-shaped, and set far apart. I am convinced that, like a beaver, it has transparent eyelids. Many of the otter I have examined had died with their eyes open. Clearly visible was a half-closed, transparent eyelid, stretching across the eyeball. The enchanting whiskers are long, coarse, and silver gray.
The otter’s short, stout legs also taper from the body to the webbed toes. Because of their unusual shape and strength, it takes a powerful trap to hold them. Unlike those of a beaver, the front, as well as the hind feet, are used for swimming, always keeping the forelegs well aft of the head and neck. Because its feet are on the side of the body, not underneath it, it swims with all four of them, aided by a powerful tail, in the same way a crocodile does. When the otter comes ashore, its neck reaches shallow water first.
The otter has strong, sharp teeth embedded in powerful jaws. Its four canine teeth are like a dog’s, only much sharper; its molars so strong that, across seventy-five feet of water, I have heard them grinding up the bones and gills of coarse fish. They cannot eat underwater. Although I have never seen an otter in the wild hold a fish in its front paws to eat, I am sure they do. However, I have often watched them eat fish that lay on ice.