I know you read this website every day, but you’re probably thinking, wait, there aren’t enough folktales or origin myths about beavers being the beginning of everything. Heidi should write about the big stories once in a while. And I agree! So we’re grateful Frances Backhouse shared this.

The Hero of the Dene

Long ago, giant beasts roamed the Earth and people were lawless, and the Dene of the Northwest Territories tell of two brothers who set the world straight. “Many old medicine stories talk about giant animals—bats, dinosaurs, beavers, monkeys—which once roamed the earth,” wrote the late Dene elder George Blondin in his book Yamoria: The Lawmaker. “Storytellers say we came from animals and long ago there were many half-animal/half-human life forms. It seems during this period that genetic forces as we know them today were out of control.” People were starving and ate each other, he writes of this “terrible period.” But Yamoria and Yamozha came from the west to be humankind’s salvation.

People were lawless? Well, that I believe. How do beavers come into the story?

“My grandfather says, as the story goes, that people were really, really scared when they paddled, because at any time they could encounter a beaver,” says Sangris. “And beavers, they don’t have any natural enemies. They’d come to anything that’s moving on water and if they feel threatened and if they don’t feel comfortable, they’ll capsize the canoes and break the canoes. So the Dene here, the Yellowknives Dene were afraid of them. They were afraid of the beavers so they’d paddle right on the shoreline as quietly as they could go. And they would tell the children not to make any noise.”

Shhhh watch out for beavers!

Sangris says no one knows what happened to them after the fight, but perhaps where they ended up is not as important as the legacy they left behind. “It’s always said that Atachuukaii corrected things. He made things better,” Elle says. For ridding the world of giant animals, Sangris says the two brothers are heroes to the Dene. “The Dene were free after that. There were no giant beavers swimming around anymore and no big birds flew in the sky and no big animals walked on the earth that could harm them anymore.”

Well, I might be scared of a 300 lb beaver too.

Giant beavers (Castoroides ohioensis), the key antagonists in many Yamoria legends, actually existed in the swamps and lakes of the North around the time humans first arrived, between 40,000 and 16,000 years ago. And like the legends say, they may not have been all that easy to deal with.

The North of that time was host to a wide diversity of large mammals, including horses, camels and woolly mammoths. But around the end of the last glacial period, about 12,000 years ago, the giant species began disappearing.

But were the giant beavers hunted? Were they around the same time as the humans?

Theories of over-hunting by humans would back up stories of Yamoria shrinking or killing off many of the giant mammals that threatened humans at the time, but Grant Zazula, a paleontologist with the Yukon government, has his doubts, saying there’s little evidence of over hunting and no evidence that humans preyed on giant beavers at all. 

“A beaver the size of a bear with eight-inch teeth. I don’t know. If I was a hunter back then I would probably go with the horse or a bison.”

So how did giant beavers make their way into Dene stories? Zazula’s theory came to him the first time he did field work in Old Crow, in Northern Yukon.“If you go along the Old Crow River in the summer, and you float down in a canoe, there’s piles of bones of ice age animals on the riverbanks. They’re just all over the place.” 

So the beavers themselves might not have been around, but their bones were. Native saw those bones and came up with some pretty exciting stories to keep their grandchildren warm at night.

I remember the first time I saw a castorides skull my eyes grew bright, I immediately conjured a fantasy of sitting at a city council meeting with that giant head in my lap.

Wouldn’t that be awesome?