We were lying in the twilight round our fire, when we heard a long way up the valley the hoot of an owl, and at the same time saw a large very white bird flying along the dark precipice. We all seized our rifles to bring it down, when it settled on a projecting rock opposite to us. None of us had ever seen a bird like it before. Several of my comrades ran up nearer to it, and fired simultaneously; it swung itself in the air, however, with a loud flapping of wings, and circled round our camp, flying no great distance above me. I had more luck than my friends, for I tumbled it over with a broken wing. It was a snow white owl of extraordinary size, and with such beautiful plumage that I kept its skin to stuff. I therefore killed it, hung it up, and on the next morning skinned it, and prepared the skin for carriage. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XXII. BEAVER HUNTERS. We left our camp at a rather early hour, and soon found below it numerous signs of beaver trees, a foot and a half in diameter, lay with a great number of smaller ones along the banks of the stream, and farther in the wood we saw trees glistening whose bark had been peeled off several feet above the ground. Any one unacquainted with these animals and their habits would surely have believed that new settlers had been busy here, and cut down wood for their block houses. The splinters lay in heaps round the bitten-through trees, as if we had been in a carpenter's shop, and many of the felled trees had been stripped of their branches. These most interesting animals generally settle on the smaller streams and brooks, and their families at first consist of but few members. On such a stream they cautiously select a spot where several tall soft-wooded trees, such as poplars, aspens, ashes, maples, &c. stand on both sides of it, then proceed together to one of the trunks, stand on their hind legs, and follow each other slowly round it, tearing out of the tree at each bite great bits of wood, as if they had been hewn out with an axe. They cut away more wood on the side of the tree turned to the river than on the opposite side, so that it becomes overbalanced and falls over into the water. Thus they fell one tree after the other across the stream, nibble off the branches, and carry other bits of wood between and under these trunks down to the river bed, while they fill up the interstices with twigs. After this is finished, they fetch on their broad flat tails mud and earth from the bank, and plaster the wooden dam, till it becomes so tight that the water rises before it, and overflows on both sides frequently for miles.