firmly around the middle at the moment when its head was almost against the steep high bank. The depth was no more than about three feet, and though the beating of the heavy tail, and the fierce struggles, made it anything but easy, the beaver was thrown into the boat, where a blow from an oar finished him. The captor, drenched and covered with mud, climbed triumphantly on board. Some of the meat was cooked and suggested to me beef in flavour, though it was rather tough and unappetising. The tail makes a soup which is the delight of the epicure, or was, when beaver tails were procurable, but somehow that which our cook concocted did not strike our palates favourably and we abandoned it for the regulation bacon and beans. Beaver meat was often the only food the trapper and frontiersman could obtain, and they considered it quite a good article of diet. The one we tested was doubtless too old a specimen, and we had no opportunity to secure another, for we passed on into the great Canyon of Desolation and saw beaver no more. [Illustration: Trees Cut by Beavers. From Morgan's _American Beaver_.] When at work cutting down a tree they stood on their hind legs, supported also by the tail, two working at one time on the same tree. They began eight or ten inches above the base and cut round and round, making each successive cut wider and deeper, the chips thrown off being some three inches in length by one and one-half wide, and one-quarter thick, each showing the sharp, clean strokes of the teeth, and resembling chips made with an axe. As the trees selected were always soft wood, they were easily gnawed while green. A tree of considerable size would be readily felled in two or three nights. Often they worked in pairs at a number of trees at one time, and nineteen falls, says Morgan, have been counted in a single night between the hours of seven and twelve. Cottonwoods twenty-four inches in diameter were brought down, though the more ordinary size was fourteen to sixteen inches. Father de Smet saw a stump that was thirty inches in diameter. At first glance a beaver stump looks almost as if it might have been cut by an axe in the hands of an inexperienced chopper. Pine trees were sometimes cut down, but the boughs were not used for food. Food branches were cut up into lengths of one to two feet, for convenience in handling and storing. Sometimes trees that fell with their tops in the deep water were allowed to remain this way till winter, when the branches were cut off under the ice. As the beaver was able to stay below the surface comfortably from five to ten minutes, he could accomplish his work there with ease. Both sexes possessed in two glands of the groin a musky secretion called _castoreum_, which was used in medicine and also as a bait for the animal itself. When at play they would void some of this musk upon the ground, and their favourite playgrounds were consequently called by the trappers "muskbogs."