It appeared that the beavers were a vacillating set of architects, as all the trees which stood near the water and leaned over it at all, were gnawed more or less, and many of them left when almost ready to fall. The position of the dam had evidently been determined by the tree which fell first. From the reckless manner in which they had slashed around with their teeth, it was pertinently suggested that this colony must have obtained from the beaver congress a government subsidy. Having been acquainted with the art of building before man mastered it, the beaver race also probably understood how to do it at little personal expense.
The beaver appears to be distributed in considerable numbers all over the western half of Kansas, although the spring floods sweep away their dams almost every season. Once afterward, when lost on the plains for a day, I came across a beaver dam. Several hours of anxious suspense in the solitude, fearing to meet man lest he should prove a savage, begot a strange feeling of companionship when I came in sight of the rude structure of logs. If not civilization, it was a close imitation of it, and I laid down and fell into a refreshing sleep, soothed, in the fantasies of Dreamland, with the whir of looms and hum of factory life.
PREPARATIONS FOR THE CHASE--THE VALLEY OF THE SALINE--QUEER 'COONS--A BISON'S GAME OF BLUFF--IN PURSUIT--ALONGSIDE THE GAME--FIRING FROM THE SADDLE--A CHARGE AND A PANIC--FALSE HISTORY AGAIN--GOING FOR AMMUNITION--THE PROFESSOR'S LETTER--DISROBING THE VICTIM.
The early dawn of Wednesday morning saw us again astir. There was the same creeping of mist out of the valley to join the darkness as it fled from the plains above, and the same revealing of thousands of shaggy forms silently feeding in the distance. This time our beasts and our bodies were both in excellent condition for the chase. Joints gain and lose stiffness quickly in such a life. One morning the hunter feels as if the mill of life, though he turn its crank ever so slowly, had broken every bone in his body; twenty-four hours later may find him elastic and buoyant, as if youth had torn away from the embrace of the dead past and was with him again in all its pristine vigor. In the present case, too, that friend of early hours and foe of sleepy eyes, the coffee bean had done its work for us grandly.