If you’re like me, (and who still reading this website really isn’t?) you’re constantly on the look out for beaver tidbits or historic stories what can tell you something more about them. So you can imagine how excited I was to come across this issue of “Outing Magazine” from 1903.
It is set in New Brunswick on the very eastern edge of Canada and offers a surprisingly accurate account of an old trapper talking to a young man interested in an outdoor life. The illustrations are by Tappen Adney and remarkable in their own right. Just look.
I can always tell right away if a beaver illustrator is any good by checking to see if it looks like something I saw a hundred times watching our own beavers. And this I certain did. The artist has a long and fascinating life which begins in Ohio, His parent eventually divorced (which is nearly unheard of in those times) and he entered university at 13 because he was so bright.Before he could take his exams he visited a sister in New Brunswick and met an indigenous canoe maker. He became enamored of the art and the language and tossed his career aside in favor of creating his own canoe business. You can still find images if his remarkable talent at this dying art all over the internet.
Back to the story of beaver ways, which I sure hope everyone will go read for themselves, it is an accounting of beaver behavior. Not the modern use of “ways” like where beavers hang out. One of the things I love about it is that the old trapper takes a very long view indeed of beavers.
Don’t kill them all. Leave some to repopulate the race. Novel idea huh? Apparently it was. The old trapper walks through the serious of myths people have about beavers. They can’t move mud with their tails. They can’t hold their breath for an hour. They are more hard working than clever. And surprisingly for me, he gets it right.
Is it any wonder why I loved reading this?
Far too often newspapers have stories of sentimental bunk saying how WISE the old trappers are and how much they can tell us about animals. But mostly they’re ridiculous. Like the trapper in Yellow-Knife who told the reporter beavers can lunge upright by bouncing on their tails. It is lovely to read someone who really has seen the things he is claiming.
He even talks about how if a beaver bit you you could bleed to death. He would never have picked one up for a photo like the man in Belarus and he certainly wouldn’t have been surprised by the outcome. I especially enjoyed what he had to say about bank beavers. 
Ohh what a treasure to find this account. I mean I don’t need to read about him killing kits but this is truly an enjoyable account. I guess this was like a boys life magazine for adults? It ran from the late 1800’s until 1923 and was the place Jack London’s “White Fang” was first published. I guess folks were feeling a wilderness dying off and trying to grasp what the could before it disappeared, I don’t blame them.
So here are your beaver marching orders. Some time in your busy life set aside 15 minutes to read these lovely 6 pages, made even more charming by the surprising end where he tries to keep a beaver in captivity as a kind of pet. The first one chews its way out of a barrel and the second one eats thru his fencing. But he recognizes him again on the river.
You want to know how it ends? Well just go read it yourself. Oh and about that first drawing.
