The trappers in trapping for the beaver have to use great precaution in approaching the place where they intend to set the traps, often getting into the stream above or below and wading for some distance. If they walked upon the bank the beaver would scent them from the footprints. Beavers, like all other wild animals, dread the sight or scent of man more than anything else. In setting the traps the trappers invariably choose as deep water as they can find, so that when a beaver is caught he will drown himself in his struggles to get free from the trap; for if this does not occur, he has often been known to cut off, with the sharp chisel used in cutting timber, the foot that is caught in the trap, so that it is not infrequent when the trapper comes in the morning to find a foot of the beaver instead of the beaver himself, and often he catches a beaver with only three feet. The beaver, considered as an engineer, is a remarkable animal. He can run a tunnel as direct as the best engineer could do with his instruments to guide him. I have seen where they have built a dam across a stream, and not having a sufficient head of water to keep their pond full, they would cross to a stream higher up the side of the mountain, and cut a ditch from the upper stream and connect it with the pond of the lower, and do it as neatly as an engineer with his tools could possibly do it. I have often said that the buck beaver in the Rocky Mountains had more engineering skill than the entire corps of engineers who were connected with General Grant's army when he besieged Vicksburg on the banks of the Mississippi. The beaver would never have attempted to turn the Mississippi into a canal to change its channel without first making a dam across the channel below the point of starting the canal. The beaver, as I have said, rivals and sometimes even excels the ingenuity of man. Another of the peculiarities of the beaver is the great sharpness of its teeth, remaining for many years as sharp as the best edged tool. The mechanic with the finest steel can not make a tool that will not in a short time become so blunt and so dulled as to require renewed sharpening, and this, with the beaver, would have to be repeated hundreds of times in order to do service with it during the whole of its lifetime, which is from ten to fifteen years if it is permitted to live the allotted years of a beaver.