This morning we are off to do a beaver presentation in a local Kindergarten class. Tomorrow we take some 5th graders from Amtrak around the dam and then go to a nearby preschool. It is fair to say that we are busy at the moment. I have been consumed with the critically attuned begging that asks for donations to this year’s festival. People have been very generous. So far we can count donations from Shell, Kiwanis, Folkmanis, Safari West, various artists, and Beaver Creek Winery. I’ll let you know if it gets any better! In the mean time check out this beaver snow sculpture from some students at Michigan Tech (love the tail!) and watch this astounding lecture from Rob Harmon on using the free market to restore watersheds. It should send chills down both arms when you think about what it means for beavers.
And because you deserve fantastic beaver writing every morning, I highly recommend you check out THIS COLUMN from our beaver friend in New Zealand. William Does an excellent job plugging the benefits of beavers and describing the exciting story of Three Against the Wildness by Eric Collier – which by the way if you haven’t read yet, you really should.
The Miwok tribe ranged from the north coast to the Sierra Foothills and Yosemite. They were the tribe associated with acorn grinding and if you’ve never seen a grinding rock you should stop by Chaw’se on your way to the Sierras someday and imagine all those lost conversations that must have taken place while the women worked side-by-side. Kroeber was especially interested in them because he believed they were one of the few native american tribes whose spirituality incorporated totems. We are particularly interested in them because two thirds of the tribe lived where beavers supposedly didn’t.
Yesterday I found an origin myth that I think makes a pincushion of that particular belief. It is an origin myth recorded by Edward Winslow Gifford in 1917 – 5 years before any beaver were reintroduced any where. Its the story about how the Miwok learned to make arrows for hunting. and since they were completely dependent on this adaption it is a tale of some importance.
The tale is told with a sing-song repetitive pattern in which every important idea is repeated more than once. It begins with the two brothers Dove and Prairie Falcon (how can that end well?) bemoaning their inability to hunt.
“What shall we do, brother? What shall we do? I would like to hunt. I do not know how we are to hunt. I do not know how we are to hunt. I do not know how we shall be able to hunt. I should like very much to hunt. I do not know how we can make arrows. We have nothing with which to cut. We know of nothing with which to cut. I do not know how we can hunt. We have nothing with which to cut. We do not know how to cut. I would like very much to hunt, brother. I do not know how we are to arrange it, but we will try. We have nothing with which to cut. I should like you and me to hunt together, brother. We have nothing with which to hunt.”
Wow, reading that paragraph is like sitting in a small room with an anxious asperger’s child, but I digress. It gets the point across rather vividly. The brothers had NO IDEA what to do. They NEEDED a solution. I guess the thinking is that when you fully grasp their desperation you might be more inclined to understand if not accept their solution.
“Let us throw our grandmother into the water. If she does not want to go, we will pull her in, We will throw the old woman, our grandmother, into the water. After you have thrown her into the water, pull her out quickly. Pull her out quickly. Do not keep her in the water long. Do not keep her in the water long.”
Well, that’s probably not the first thing I would have tried, but let’s see how it works.
Then Dove went. Dove went. He threw his grandmother into the water, threw her into the water. After he had thrown her into the water, be pulled her out quickly. He pulled her out quickly. His brother said to him, “Pull one of her teeth. We will make a knife of it.” Then he pulled one of her teeth, pulled one of her teeth. After they obtained the tooth, they commenced to cut, commenced to cut.
At this point I understand if you’re thinking doubtfully, hey I thought you said this was going to be about beavers! Not elder abuse. Two juvenile delinquents dismantling their grandmother for parts is hardly the basis for a creation myth. When do we getto the part about beavers?Bear with me, it’s coming. I will spare you the part where they saw a pine bough with her tooth and take out her sinew and use it for a string. She’s not exactly dead, but she’s not happy.
Their grandmother went into the water and cried and worried about herself. She said, “I did not think my boys would treat me this way.” Then the grandmother, who had turned into Beaver, said, “I will have revenge upon those boys.” She told the water to drown Prairie Falcon. The water came, while Prairie Falcon was digging, and drowned him. Dove escaped.
Whoa! Didn’t see that coming did you! Grandma turns into a beaver and she’s pretty homicidal. Dove wails and cries (that’s why he’s always in mourning, get it?) and eventually Grandma makes sure he and Prairie Falcon gets dragged about the countryside and scraped pretty badly. “Spark” brings them back to life and they begin to see the error of their ways.
Now they had no grandmother. Prairie Falcon cried because his grandmother had turned into Beaver. They both cried and cried for their grandmother. They did not know how to get back their grandmother. They went along the river. They saw Beaver In the riffle, They said, “There is Beaver.” Beaver was their grandmother. They used to take their grandmother everywhere they went, but they lost their grandmother because of the arrows. At last they abandoned the search for her and went home. Their grandmother had turned into Beaver. Everybody made arrows thereafter. Dove, cried for his grandmother. Prairie Falcon cried, but they made arrows. They lost then, grandmother because of the arrows.
So Beaver helped Miwok make arrows. Meaning they made arrows sometimes out of beaver teeth, or used beaver teeth knives to carve arrows out of other material.Meaning that they had beavers. Meaning that historically beavers had a wider a range in California than Grandmothers.
North American bows, arrows, and quivers By Otis Tufton Mason
The hero who wrote down this story nearly 100 years ago was Edward W. Gifford. He was born in Oakland and took over the native museum in Yosemite from Kroeber when he retired. In all his prodigious work documenting native customs and people I can find no mention of his heritage, but looking at that very gentle face I would argue that his ethnicity speaks for itself.
I thought I’d risk being labeled as a crazy new-age twinkie and discuss an alarming and impossible by-product of beaver research. It seems to happen in inexplicable moments and without recognizable patterns but I’ve been noticing it more of late. It is the type of data that most scientists never report because it just makes them appear too bizarre and fanciful. But you, dear readers, already know the worst so we may as well have a candid discussion of the phenomenon.
Coincidence.
Now there are typical everyday coincidences that surprise your life such as running into your principal at the gym or finding out your old boyfriend exactly drives the same make and color of car as you do. And there are rarer personally meaningful coincidences that hum in your awareness like realizing that your locker combination is actually your mom’s date of birth or finding out that you got married in exactly the same town as your best friend from the army got divorced. These things happen. We never expect them, but we are prepared for them. They are like cosmic puns and they usually make an excellent story over a pitcher of margaritas.
But then there are beaver coincidences, random violent streaks of destiny that are so truly alarming that all the hairs on your arms keep standing up even after you’ve had to sit down. I wasn’t planning to mention this at all, bit it seems the time has come. Please be assured that my ridiculous claims are completely true, and that if I had given myself license to fabricate I would have come up with something a little more believable. Our story begins with Longfellow.
Remember a few weeks back when I was talking about how reading Enos Mills pointed me to a section in the poem Hiawatha that I hadn’t paid attention to before? It was the section on Puk-Puk-Keewis who asked to be turned into a beaver so he could hide from Hiawatha in the lodge. When I read it I planned to blog on it the following day, and was excitedly looking about for graphics. It turns out there are sadly no images of turning into a beaver on the internet(s) so I nearly despaired of having the right picture to put with the story.
Then I remembered that in my living room is a very old copy of Volume ! of the Collected Works of Longfellow. I bought it ages ago because it was such a lovely tome (and yes, tome is the right word – huge, heavy, illustrated, leather raised binding ) – that I couldn’t resist. So I thought, gosh maybe there’s a drawing of puk-puk-keewis in that copy and I can scan it and put it on the website. I used the internet to find exactly where the passage was and marched in to track it down. Mind you, the 500 page book is lying opened on a book stand I picked up at a thrift shop. We don’t really use it but every now and then we turn the pages to keep it from looking too dusty.
What exact page do you suppose that book happened to be open to?
I didn’t dare post about it at the time, as it was too much even for me to explain. We slunk around the house suspiciously for hours after that, trying to think what well-read visitor to my house might have done it on purpose and struggling not to feel like some tiny cog in massive beaver machinery. In the end I decided to take it as an affirmation that I was doing the right thing, and at the very least the universe didn’t object.
Yesterday I heard from our research buddy Rick Lanman, M.D. whose working on the historic prevalence paper. He had been buried in some dusty volumes researching the fur trade for slivers of information about the west coast when he came across this magazine article from 1840. Guess what he found? Nothing startling about beavers in the sierras but something much more unexpected.
That’s pretty small print. Let me see if I can make it bigger for you.
Look who wrote the article on the history of the fur trade 171 years ago.
What a shock to run across this article written by James H. Lanman in 1840 – wonder if he’s a direct ancestor? This is a real trip. It’s not like our surname is that common! Rick
Ah Rick, I know just how you feel. Every now and then I can almost hear this low groan as the gears shift into place and I realize we are in the grip of something important, something that seems to have a life of its own. Well, in for a penny in for a pound I say. It could be worse. At the moment we’re keen on the flat-tail of some beaver sightings in Port Costa, which could theoretically be our dispersers. I’ll keep you posted. The next coincidence we can only anticipate but certainly not imagine.
This morning one of our just-barely-yearlings came back with the typical branch at 6:00. I expected him to toss it hap-hazzardly in the direction of what was once a dam as he’s been doing, but them I noticed there was an actual DAM at the secondary and I started to pay closer attention. I didn’t know if an adult had done this during the night after despairing of JR’s abilities but I didn’t expect much from the little one. They haven’t show many ‘busy as a beaver’ qualities just yet. I have an unproven theory that GQ is near by but not residing with our three, and every now and then he dumps off a bundle of willow and does some real building in the hopes that he’ll inspire some action. Looks like he succeeded.
Bob Arnebeck told me once that beavers find work ‘irresistible’, and that when one’s doing it the others are compelled to join in. I think that it might be true that another beaver working is irresistible, but also that a single beaver can find his OWN work irresisitible! So that once a beaver does it once, mudding or carrying or pulling, they are likely to do it again. That was certainly true this morning, as this pattern happened several more times with blackberries, willow, reeds and mud before he finally picked his way back up to the primary dam to sleep for the day.
With all the new willow around I figured something must have been taken during the night. A homeless man pointed me in the direction of the nearest target, one of the willow we planted behind Bulldogs BBQ. I had thought they were all gone already but the cut trees are all coppicing like crazy and there is tons of new growth. I know our three are old enough but I can’t help but wonder proudly whether one of our ‘babies’ took this down? Sniff. They grow up so fast.
It’s supposed to rain this weekend. I swear if it floods out this little dam I will personally march down there with a sump pump, an umbrella and sandbags. I guess that’s pretty extreme. They’re beavers after all. Okay, maybe not the umbrella.
The Miwok tribe ranged from the north coast to the Sierra Foothills and Yosemite. They were the tribe associated with acorn grinding and if you’ve never seen a grinding rock you should stop by Chaw’se on your way to the Sierras someday and imagine all those lost conversations that must have taken place while the women worked side-by-side. 
Kroeber was especially interested in them because he believed they were one of the few native american tribes whose spirituality incorporated totems. We are particularly interested in them because two thirds of the tribe lived where beavers supposedly didn’t.
