By late summer or early autumn the beaver have assembled at the place where the winter is to be spent. There are patriarchs, youngsters, and those in the prime of life. Around the old home are many who set forth from it when the violets were blooming, when the grass was at its greenest, and when mated birds were building. During the summer a few perished, while others cast their lot with other established colonies. A few of the younger make a start for themselves in new scenes,--found a new colony. Again the dam is repaired and the house recovered; again the harvest home, and again a primitive home-building family are housed in a hut that willing hands have fashioned. Again the pond freezes, and again the snow falls upon a home that stands in a valley where countless generations of beaver have lived through ice-bound winters and the ever-changing happy seasons. The Original Conservationist To "work like a beaver" is an almost universal expression for energetic and intelligent persistence, but who realizes the magnitude of the beaver's works? What he has accomplished is not only monumental but useful to man. He was the original Conservationist. An interesting and valuable book could be written concerning the earth as influenced and benefited by the labors of the beaver. The beaver is intimately associated with the natural resources, soil, and water. His work is not yet done, and along the sources of innumerable streams he will ever be needed to save soil, to regulate stream-flow, and to provide pools for the fish. The beaver's conservation work is accomplished by means of the dams he constructs across streams of flowing water and the ponds that are thus formed. These dams and ponds render a number of services: first, they save soil; second, they check erosion; third, they reduce flood damage; fourth, they store water and help to sustain stream-flow; fifth, they provide water-holes for fish; and sixth, they are helpful in maintaining deep waterways by reducing the extremes of both high and low water, and also by reducing the quantity of sediment carried down into river-channels. I had enjoyed the ways of "our first engineers" before it dawned upon me that their works might be useful to man, and that the beaver through his constructive handling of the natural resources might justly be called a conservationist. One dry winter the stream through the Moraine Colony ran low and froze to the bottom, and the only trout in it that survived were those in the deep holes of beaver ponds. These ponds offer many advantages to fish multiplication. Much food acceptable to the fish is swept into these ponds. Altogether a beaver pond is an excellent local habitation for fish.