Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  Early on the fourth day following their liberation, I stepped out of the door to fill the two water pails at the irrigation ditch. The water in the irrigation dam had remained at a fairly constant level that summer. The ditch itself was deep and broad enough to hold most of the flow coming into the dam, and we usually left the water in it from early spring until well along in the fall, since the ditch was only a few yards from the cabin door, and this saved us packing the water buckets to the creek whenever they needed filling.

  The pails slipped from my hands when I reached the ditch. I stood motionless, staring at it, mouth stupidly gaping. Last night the ditch had been full of water, but now there wasn’t even a muddy puddle there. It took all of ten seconds for realization to dawn on me as to why the ditch was now dry. When it did, I hurried back into the cabin and announced excitedly, “They’ve plugged the irrigation ditch. Let’s go up to the dam just to make sure.”

  As fast as we could, Lillian, Veasy and I followed the ditch to the dam. Its intake was tightly plugged with sticks, weeds and mud.

  “Look over there.” Veasy suddenly broke the silence. “It’s a beaver.” And a beaver it was, fifty feet out from the dam, swimming high in the water, a six-foot length of willow gripped in its mouth and trailing along behind it.

  Wetting a finger, I held it above my head. “Wind’s coming toward us,” I said. “Drop out of sight in the ditch and maybe he won’t see us.” So we scrambled into the irrigation ditch and dropped to our knees.

  In broad daylight a beaver’s vision is as poor as his nose is good. If downwind from a coyote, he can scent the predator at a distance of two hundred yards or more, and he can scent the presence of a person at perhaps a greater distance. But if one is downwind from a beaver and remains perfectly still, the beaver will sit combing his fur, or peeling the bark from a cottonwood stick, a dozen feet from the watcher without knowing he is there.

  We were only fifteen feet from the plugged intake of the ditch when the beaver arrived with his stick and waddled out of the water. Now he gripped the willow in his forepaws, his flat scaly tail toward us. He slid the willow over the top of the dam, butt downstream, and to the noise of a series of soft grunts, rammed the butt firmly against the wall of the ditch. In a few moments I was to try and free the willow from its anchorage, but so securely had it been placed there, it was only with great effort that I was able to do so. And with that stick laid so firmly in place perhaps rests the answer as to how a beaver dam remains intact despite the pressure of water that sometimes comes against it.

  Two more sticks were floated in from the pond and pushed into position. Then the beaver shot out into the pond and upended in a floating bed of pondweed. Suddenly the wind switched and the beaver smelled us. The pondweed was abandoned. There was a resounding splash as his tail thumped down on the water. His dark body went down into the depths to surface again a dozen feet out from the ditch. He swam furiously to and fro, whiskers twitching. Then his tail drubbed the water once more and gracefully he dived, and we were able to follow his course upstream by the broad V on the water.

  “At least we know that one is still here,” I said with relief. And a couple of days later we were quite sure there were two. By that time a round structure of sticks had begun taking shape above the water. A beaver lodge was in the process of construction. Early in the morning and at sundown, one of us, either Lillian, Veasy or I, cached ourselves among the brush at water’s edge and sat patiently, watching the lodge. Finally Veasy was rewarded by seeing two beavers hauling in material for the house at the same time. So one pair had reconciled themselves to their new quarters; not for another two weeks were we to know what had happened to the others.

  We followed the dams downstream for evidence of their presence but found nothing of them there. Then we searched upstream to the head of the watershed with similar result. We next covered the entire shoreline of Meldrum Lake and there found a clue. We found three cottonwood trees that had recently been felled by beavers. But little of their bark was eaten, none of the wood skidded into the water. Beavers too had apparently inspected that shoreline, but, as if not liking what they found, had moved on elsewhere.

  A small spring-fed brook dribbled into the lake from the west, such an unpromising trickle of water that it hardly seemed worth investigating. Yet explore it we had to, riding our saddle horses through the timber on the west side of the lake and following a game trail that crossed the brook a half-mile above the lake. When we arrived at the crossing we found that now there was no water in the stream, its bed bone dry. And that was funny, for only once before had we seen the stream altogether dry, and that was nine years ago.

  We tied our horses and walked up the stream bed. A little farther up, the brook wound its way through a small meadow hemmed by aspens. As the meadow came in sight, the riddle of the dry watercourse below was instantly solved. Now the meadow was under water, and where the stream flowed away from it there was now a dam, four feet high and some twenty-five feet long.

  It looked as if someone had surely gone berserk with an axe in the surrounding aspens, chopping them down senselessly. Many of the trees were lodged, unable to fall to earth; others had toppled over into the water and been trimmed of their every branch. But many had fallen on land, and lay as they had fallen, as if those who had been responsible for their felling wanted no part of them now that they were down.

  There was no doubt about the identity of the woodcutter. His house told us of his presence, even if the evidence of his teeth were not sufficient. And the lodge was too large to have been thrown up in such short order by any one beaver. A pair must have followed the stream up from Meldrum Lake and decided that the meadow was the place for them. So, not only had the beavers returned to Meldrum Creek, but apparently they were here to stay.

  This seemingly reckless destruction of their food supply—the cutting down of trees for no apparent reason whatsoever—was a puzzle we were quite some time in solving. When we went around the shoreline of the irrigation dam, we saw that in places the aspens had been felled by the score, yet not one in ten had been made use of.

  “Why all the waste?” I pondered aloud.

  “There’s a reason for it, no doubt,” Lillian said.

  “There’s a reason for almost everything that goes on in these woods,” I grunted. “But some of them are darned obscure.”

  “You mean we’re too stupid to understand,” she laughed.

  Veasy was examining one of a pile of chips scattered around the stumps. Tossing the chips away he contributed his bit to the discussion by saying, “Maybe they don’t like the taste of the bark. Maybe it’s sour or something.”

  “Then why cut it down?” I was quick to come back.

  He said, “We’ll know why someday.” And one day of course we did.

  By freeze-up, both beaver lodges were cemented over with twelve inches of mud. Enough food was cached down in the water in front of the lodges to last their occupants all winter and until the ice went out the following spring. But for quite some time after most of the ponds were iced over, the beavers somehow kept the water open around the entrance to their houses. Then early in December, when the mercury fell to fifteen below zero, the leads of open water to the lodges froze over. Not until the following April were we to see our beavers again.

  It was mid-May. One more winter behind us, another summer ahead. Mid-May, and the garden plot plowed and harrowed and fertilized with squawfish. The stench of the decomposing fish still came out of the soil as we worked it, but we didn’t mind that. There are worse smells than rotting fish. And in a few days’ time the smell would all be gone, the seeds sprouting and thin lines of green showing where now there was only dark, smelly soil.

  It didn’t take long to plant the seed once the ground was ready for it. I went along with the hoe, making the drills. Veasy came next, spilling the seed into them. Then came Lillian in a wide-brimmed straw hat, yellowish with age, shielding her head and face from the bold stare of the sun, rak
ing the dirt back into the drills and padding it down with her feet. By “It’s time to go cook supper” the last row of seeds was planted, and I relaxed on the handle of the hoe and said, “Okay. You go cook supper and Veasy and I’ll make the ditches for the water.” And as she started off for the cabin, I watched her retreating figure and murmured to Veasy, “What a wonderful woman! I don’t know what the heck we’d do here without your mother.”

  “Think you’d stay here without Mother?” Veasy asked. I made no answer because I doubted very much that I would. Without Lillian, none of it all would make sense.

  I glanced at Veasy, studying him thoughtfully. How the boy was shooting up! Be thirteen come July, I thought. I ought to buy him a real rifle for his birthday. I could get a real good one for ninety dollars, new too. Ninety dollars for a rifle. More cash than we had to our name when we first rode our wagon into the wilderness. We had come a long way. Not that Veasy didn’t make good use of the .22. He killed a buck with it last fall, about as big as bucks come. I saw the track in a skiff of snow, half a mile from the cabin. For a little while I thought of getting the .303 and hunting the critter myself. But when I came to the cabin I’d changed my mind. I told Veasy to take the .22 and a dozen long rifle shells and track the buck until he jumped it, and then circle the tracks, watching real close. “You’ll have to get him in a vital spot with a light gun like that,” I told him. “Don’t shoot at all unless you can line the sights on its heart or lungs.” In a couple of hours he was back, blood all over his clothes. He’d jumped the buck, and circled it, and got within sixty feet of it before touching off the trigger and plugging it right through the heart. Yes, it was time I got the boy a real gun, and it would fit nicely into his approaching birthday. I’d get him a 30-30; there was a gun he could kill almost anything with if he held the sights right.

  How the boy was growing, mentally as well as physically. Does he ever find it lonely back here? If so he never says anything about it. But once in a while he stares off into space as if far beyond the horizon there’s something he’s thinking mighty hard about. Wonder what it is? Maybe someday he’ll get up and start out for that horizon, and he’ll not come back until he finds what lies on the other side. And maybe he won’t come back to the woods then at all. I shoved such thoughts from my mind. They weren’t too pleasant anyway.

  By the time Lillian sang out, “Supper!” the irrigation marks were scuffed out neat and straight alongside the rows of seeds. There had been no rains since the snows melted, so we’d have to irrigate right away and soak the dry soil.

  First thing in the morning, while Lillian was getting breakfast, I went to the head of the ditch and turned a stream of water into it. Breakfast over, and the dishes washed, the three of us went to the garden and began distributing the water down the irrigation marks. We had the water on about half of the garden when suddenly it seemed that we didn’t have enough water for what was left. I scratched my head and said, “That’s strange. Where’s it all going to?”

  Lillian walked over to the main ditch, looked at it and sang out, “There’s hardly any water in the ditch.”

  “Then where’s it gone to?” There’d been lots there twenty minutes ago.

  “The beavers must have shut it off.” And with that Lillian burst out laughing.

  “That’s a fine kettle of fish,” I grumbled. “By golly, they can’t do that to us. We’ve got to have irrigating water or we’ll have no garden or hay.”

  But the beavers were as determined to stop water from escaping down the irrigation ditch as were we to get it to the garden and hayfield.

  A beaver knows nothing about irrigation. His every concept of water conservation is based on the principle that nowhere along his entire dam must the water be allowed to escape in one concentrated channel. Providing the escape of water is spread evenly over the whole of the dam, the beavers don’t seem too perturbed. But should the water start to cut a channel in any one place, whether over the top of the dam or around it, instantly the cut must be dammed.

  As soon as the two beavers in the dam realized that spring that they were losing the water, and in the one spot, they soon remedied the situation by neatly and quickly plugging the mouth of the ditch.

  Eventually the problem was solved by an arrangement satisfactory to us both. Taking sly advantage of the fact that a beaver is mostly nocturnal, working at his dam by night or in the first hours of daylight and sleeping through the day, we were able to turn water into the ditch and irrigate from shortly after sunup until sundown. But as quickly as the sun set, the beavers floated down from the lodge and plugged the ditch tight. Or if we turned it down too early in the morning, when they were still active, they shut it instantly.

  The plugging of the irrigation ditch at night resulted in a greater flow of water running away over the top of the dam, and it soon became obvious that the beavers weren’t going to stand for that. And no healthy beaver will for long tolerate a situation that can be quickly remedied by application of a little labour on his part. In this case, perhaps working without break the whole night long, the pair in the irrigation dam went to the chore of raising the height of the entire dam. And therein lay a hazard.

  The irrigation dam differed from all others we had repaired in this respect: in the creek channel proper, no boughs were used as re-enforcement. There, for a span of thirty-odd feet, the dam consisted of a straight dirt fill, and its top had been held at least twelve inches higher than the remainder of the dam. The line of reasoning that prompted us to dispense with boughs in the fill was that if it were held to a certain height well above the remainder, no water could possibly spill over it and hew out a channel. Elsewhere, of course, the dam was strongly re-enforced with boughs, and there the water could run over the top without doing any harm.

  But as inch by inch the beavers raised the level of the remainder of the dam, the water correspondingly inched its way higher up the dirt fill until only some three inches of dirt was showing above the level of the water.

  Then calamity struck, swiftly and decisively. A three-hour downpour in early September resulted in near-flood conditions on the creek. Far more water was feeding the irrigation dam than could possibly get out unless somewhere it was able to find a weak spot where it could hew itself out a channel. It found that point of weakness at the dirt fill.

  Overnight the water in the dam rose until it was spilling over the top of the fill, nibbling away at the dirt. In a matter of minutes a channel was cut, and into this channel raced the freshets swelling the creek. The breach widened, became deeper, and the strength of the water surging through it was so great that when I stepped into my hip boots and waded out into the torrent to see what might be done to save what was left of the fill, I had to fight not to be swept off my feet and carried downstream.

  With the help of Lillian and Veasy, large boulders were rolled out onto the dam and skidded into the cut, in hopes that they might provide some sort of cribbing against which dirt could be dumped. But the wild strength of the water swept the rocks over the brink of the dam as if they were made of paper and we stood there, watching the fill disintegrate before our eyes, not knowing what to do, reconciling ourselves to the fact that the entire fill would go out and the pond go dry. But we were reckoning without the beavers.

  A violent splash from the vicinity of the beaver lodge reminded us of their presence. The water rippled, and a form took shape, lining straight for the dam. The beaver approached to a half-dozen feet of the fill. He turned, swimming parallel to the dam, then coming swiftly around, floated almost into the current sluicing through the fill.

  The presence of the beaver gave me a sudden idea. “Run back to the cabin and get an axe,” I bade Veasy. And when he returned with the axe, I said, “I’m going to chop a few spruce trees down and lop off their limbs. And we’ll dump the limbs in the water a little way from the cut and maybe—”

  “You’re crazy,” cut in Lillian, reading my mind. “No two beavers can possibly shut that force of water
off.”

  “They can maybe try, can’t they?” I retorted. “One thing is certain: it’s no use us trying to do anything until the dam drains out.”

  So I had my way, and we packed bundles of limbs along the dam and piled them about twenty yards from the breach. Then went back to the cabin to await what might happen.

  At nightfall the water was still rushing through the cut. Now the channel was four feet deep by fifteen wide. Nothing but a bulldozer with a heavy blade could possibly shut that flow off—at least, so we thought.

  Early the next morning I stepped outside the door, listening. Last night the roar of water rushing through the breach was so loud that we almost had to shout to make one another heard, but now all was quiet and still, even the customary murmur of the creek below the dam muted. Carefully I followed the irrigation ditch up to its source and stepped out onto the dam. I looked at the spot where we’d dumped the spruce boughs. Not a limb was to be seen. And where yesterday there had been a miniature canal scarring the fill, now there was a dark, tamped surface of shiny mud. And beneath the mud were the spruce boughs, weighted down with rocks, which ranged in size from small pebbles to some as large as a football. Thus had a single pair of beavers, in a single night, shut off a head of water that man could have shut off only with heavy earth-moving equipment.

  The evening patrol showed up about a half-hour after sunset, and was as regular as the sunset itself. But never was there more than one beaver in the patrol. Sometimes the buck, sometimes his mate—for now we well knew male from female, but never saw the two together. From our hiding place in the irrigation ditch, and if the wind was in our favour, we could see the beaver surface shortly after leaving the house via an underwater exit and watch as he or she swam leisurely down to the dam, head lifted slightly above the water. But the patrol never moved right into the dam, at least not when we were spectators, but instead stayed off from it some ten feet, swimming ever so slowly parallel to it until one end was reached. Then the sole member of the maintenance crew pivoted around and floated gently back until the other side was reached. Following this ritual, and if all was well with the dam, the patrol moved away and moments later we heard the chatter of teeth as an aspen stick was peeled of its bark among the flooded willows out from the shore of the pond.