by P. K. Tyler
When spring came, Tis-Chik joined the other beavers inspecting and repairing the dam from the ravages of winter. Food was plentiful. The lilies and cattails were spreading; new shoots and branches were everywhere. The cries of newborns filled the air. But this spring brought more than new life and good food. This spring brought the bobcat.
After the bobcat took the first kit, the beavers held a council to discuss the problem. The beaver colony’s approach to defense against predators was to post sentries, sound the alarm, and hide. Everyone would hide and hope the bobcat took someone else.
Tis-Chik was only four, but he understood that waiting your turn to be sacrificed was a bad idea. He tried to explain that to the colony, but they were not receptive to new ideas from a no-tailed child. The traditional method of dealing with predators was to keep the kits inside the dam. The adults would watch carefully and not stray too far from the water. Eventually, the bobcat would move on.
Tis-Chik argued that many beavers were stronger than one beaver or one bobcat. The council did not agree. The kits would be sequestered and the adults would be vigilant. Three days later, the bobcat took a young female.
A group of young adults that Tis-Chik had played with the previous fall approached him. Chib was a female and the largest in the group. The males would soon outgrow her, but for now, she was the largest. “I lost my friend to the bobcat today. You think we can kill it. Tell us how.”
Tis-Chik devised a simple plan. He was the fastest on the ground, not as fast as the bobcat, but faster than any beaver. Tis-Chik would pretend to be hurt and would make loud noises of pain to attract the bobcat. He would pretend to limp as he tried to return to the pond. He would roll around on the ground. The other beavers would lie in wait to attack the bobcat in mass. Tis-Chik did not know the term, but he was creating a gauntlet for the bobcat to run.
The group set up the trap for bobcat the next day. They cleared a narrow trail through a blackberry thicket. They dug out small depressions where they could hide at almost ground level on the side of the trail. Tis-Chik scooped mud over their backs, leaving only their heads above the ground, which were screened by the blackberry foliage.
Tis-Chik positioned himself at the start of the newly cleared trail just outside the thicket. He sat on the ground and cried and moaned as loud as he could. He stood and limped around in a small circle. He fell down and rolled in the dirt.
The bobcat soon came and watched his performance. It watched for a while and began to slink into the opening where Tis-Chik continued his performance. With the confidence of a top predator, the bobcat slowly left cover and stood facing Tis-Chik. The cat pulled his ears flat back and snarled. This display usually froze his prey.
When the bobcat’s ears went back, Tis-Chik broke through the blackberry patch toward the pond. The bobcat leaped after him.
A male beaver butted the bobcat hard in the side and rolled it over. As it tumbled, it raked Tis-Chik’s haunch with one paw, leaving three deep cuts in his left buttock. Tis-Chik fell to the ground under the blow.
The bobcat hissed, regained its feet, and whirled to face the beaver who had head-butted it. Before the cat finished turning, Chib hit him with her tail. The blow broke both of the cat’s hind legs. The other beavers, whistling and chirping in fear and mutual encouragement, surrounded the cat and clubbed it to death with their tails.
The beavers covered the dead bobcat with mud and sticks. They marked the burial site with their scent glands to warn the rest of the colony to stay away.
Chib and Chee took Tis-Chik upstream to where the clear water flowed. They helped him wash his cuts and prepared a poultice of willow bark, chewing the bark to a pulp.
The wound festered and a fever set in. The beavers cleaned the claw marks and changed the willow dressing daily. Tis-Chik chewed the fresh willow bark that the females brought for him and the cuts healed and the fever passed.
The rest of the warm time went without incident. Tis-Chik stored food for the cold time. He laid in a supply of nuts, seeds, and cattails. He also collected mussels from around the pond and from upstream and downstream and placed them near his living chamber. During the cold time, insects and rodents occasionally invaded his food source. Tis-Chik didn’t mind, a little protein is always welcome.
Over the next few years, the occasional predator would range into the colony’s territory. The beavers had learned to fight together. Occasionally, a beaver was injured or lost, but the golden beaver colony was not easy prey for any animal. The carnivores learned to stay away.
Occasionally, a rogue beaver would wander in from upstream or downstream and try to move into the pond. Beavers are fiercely territorial, and the colony was no exception. Interlopers were met by a squad of angry beavers. The colony thrived. Births were up and the death rate was down. Food was plentiful.
Tis-Chik helped build lodges and dams nearby when young beavers left to start new colonies. He excelled in selecting sites that required the least labor and least material. Soon, he was making all the decisions about repairing and extending the massive dam that housed the colony’s many family lodges. When Chib and her mate decided to relocate with their extended family, Chib asked Tis-Chik to help them pick a site.
The beaver pioneers travelled overland for over a week. They passed three streams where other beavers from the main colony had already located. Once the location for Chib’s dam was selected, Tis-Chick stayed long enough to help get construction well underway.
Tis-Chik was larger and stronger than any beaver by his fourteenth year. His kept his golden hair chopped to shoulder length using broken mussel shells as clumsy knives. He had learned to throw rocks when he hunted for food. He could stun a rabbit or mouse with almost every throw. Hunger improved his aim.
He became aware that the male and female beavers paired off for their lifetimes and produced one or two young just before spring. He wondered why there was no one for him to pair off with. The female beavers had no interest in him and he felt the same way about them.
That spring, while he pretended to stand watch to help guard the colony, he was actually resting in a walnut tree. He watched two robins build a nest, thinking about how all the animals paired up with another of their kind. He had never seen another of his kind. Chee had tried to explain how the creek had delivered Tis-Chik to her, but he didn’t understand. He watched the robins as they worked and hoped there was another beaver like himself somewhere.
A new sound caught his attention. He heard clumsy footsteps tramping toward him. He lay as flat as he could on his tree branch. His dark tanned skin and mud splattered body made him virtually invisible from below.
The thing making the noises walked upright like Tis-Chik. It was covered from head to toe in the skins of dead beavers and deer. It had dead deer skin strapped on its feet. It was dragging a bunch of tree branches tied together, which had a large pile of dead skins and other things tied on top.
Tis-Chik watched while the man made camp near the pond. The man constructed an enclosure from fallen branches, which he covered with beaver skins. He packed his food supplies into another skin and hung his food in the air from a tree branch. He unpacked several shiny things from the pack. He carefully buried these things, one at a time, along the trails where the beaver left the ponds. The man attached each of the things to a tree or to a sharpened branch that he hammered deep into the ground.
Shortly, a beaver waddled from the pond and stepped onto one of the shiny things. There was a loud snap and the beaver was caught by its front paw. He rolled and struggled but could not escape the shiny thing. The man made the rounds of his traps later in the day and found the beaver trapped. From his belt, he took a stick with a sharp rock on one end. He killed and skinned the beaver. He hung the skin to dry on a frame made of branches.
After the man went to sleep, Tis-Chik retrieved the drying skin and put it on the bottom of the lake. He used large rocks to hold it down. He spent the rest of the night moving or destroying the traps. He didn’t k
now the word “trap,” but he would learn it later. He threw most of the traps into the water, but he moved two of them into the path the man took when he checked his traps. He attached them to trees, just like the man had done.
The next morning, the man was angry when he saw the hide was gone. He believed some predator, a bear or a cat, had carried it off. He stomped out to check his trap line and immediately stepped on one of his own traps. The sound of his leg breaking was louder than the sound of the trap snapping.
The man sat up and tried to open the trap and remove his foot. Tis-Chik immediately began throwing rocks at him. Hunting birds and rabbits had sharpened his aim. The man screamed and yelled, to no avail. A well-thrown rock knocked him unconscious.
Tis-Chik killed the man with his own skinning knife. He kept the knife, axe, and deer skins. The beaver skins were weighted down on the bottom of the lake. The rest of the man’s supplies were scattered. The traps were hidden inside Tis-Chik’s sleeping chamber. Such was his first experience with his own kind.
Tis-Chick practiced diligently with the knife and axe. He wore the deer skin pants that he had taken from the trapper. They gave him a way to carry the weapons while leaving his hands free to swim or climb.
This first man was only the beginning. Mankind’s demand for beaver coats and hats sent trapper after trapper into the American wilderness. Tis-Chik and his colony met them with the same violent territorial protection that kept mountain lions, bears, and rival beavers away from their home. Men learned to hunt somewhere else.
By the time Tis-Chik was fifteen, the tales of the tall golden beaver and his haunted beaver pond had spread across the society of trappers. They whispered it in taverns. They told it like a ghost story as the firelight faded in camps across the country. The warned each other about the beaver that walked like a man. Many a trapper claimed to have seen the man-like beaver and his pond. “A man can pass through his territory safely. A man can even camp for a night. But, if a man unpacks his traps, he has signed his death warrant.”
After the trappers came pioneers. Tis-Chik followed the small bands of families as they moved past his area. He would hide in the forest and watch to learn their ways and their words. The wagons and horses seemed vaguely familiar and he was sure that he knew many of the words that they spoke to each other. Mama and papa seemed familiar.
In his sixteenth summer, he found a large group of pioneers making a permanent settlement three creeks to the west of his pond. They were building their village where two creeks joined to become a river. He watched as they built houses out of logs. He thought this was very intelligent, but didn’t understand why the people didn’t use mud to hold the logs together. They built their houses too far from the water. He noticed that there were more than one kind of person. There were big people and little people. There were men and women. When he watched the women cleaning themselves in the creek, he got strange feelings inside. He didn’t understand, but it made him feel anxious and unsettled. He moved downwind and sniffed. There was no scent of the mating smells the female beavers produced when in season.
He watched through the summer. He watched through the fall. He watched as the men built a dam upstream from the camp. They used their tools and carved large rocks and carefully shaped them. They were making millstones. By winter, they had a functioning mill installed on the creek. They ground acorns and other found nuts that year. The women had cleared an area to plant grains in the coming spring.
Tis-Chick would not have placed the dam where the people built it. It was not a good place. The land was too steep behind the dam. The water backed high up the creek bed instead of spreading out into a placid pond. This narrow, but steep, dammed watercourse provided steady and strong water flow to keep the mill turning, but Tis-Chik knew that, come the spring thaw, this dam could wash away.
There was one of the people that the others called Ruth. Tis-Chik spent much of his time watching her. His colony was doing fine without him. He checked regularly and the lessons that he and Chib had learned were being taught to the new kits. No trapper or predator would dare approach the pond.
Tis-Chik learned some of the people’s words. Actually, he was remembering the words, but he didn’t know that. He took to leaving small gifts for Ruth. A shiny rock, a pile of mussels or even a beautiful collection of feathers would turn up in her path. She suspected one of the boys in the community was an admirer, but wondered at the bare footprints that she found left in the mud when an offering appeared.
Tis-Chik marked the area around each gift, but the Ruth never acknowledged his markings. She never so much as sniffed a single tree. Perhaps her nose didn’t work. He decided to show himself to her when the warm time came.
The cold time came and went. Trees were budding and grasses were sending up new shoots. The colony was filled with the cries of the newly born kits. The waters were flowing fast, fresh and clean beneath the not yet thawed ice coverings over most of the creeks and ponds. The thaw was just beginning.
The people in the village watched the creeks with concern. The creek without the mill rose steadily. It was now impassable and getting higher every day. The mill dam was still holding the other creek back, but the water level in the pond behind it was getting higher and higher. The men worked like beavers, cutting more trees and raising the height of the dam.
Tis-Chik watched their frenzied efforts. This was foolishness. The higher they raised the dam, the more water that would be trapped. The longer it took for the dam to fail—and it would fail—the worse the flood would be. Tis-Chik would have told them if he knew how to tell them, that the right thing to do was to lower the dam and let the water flow evenly, not raise the dam and increase the weight of water pushing against it.
His experience told him that this dam would not hold for another day. Whenever it broke, the rushing water would wash away the houses and people in the village. It would wash away Ruth. What was to be done? Tis-Chik would ask Chib. He would ask the beaver council.
He hurried back to his colony and barked for a council. The beaver gathered at his request and listened as he explained. At first, the beavers had no interest in helping the people. They saw people as just another predator. Chib took his side and insisted that the colony owed Tis-Chik help. “I think these are his creatures,” she said. “They smell like him. If we can help, we must. I don’t see how we can help, but we must do what we can.”
Chee, who was now almost a white beaver, said. “Remember how Tis-Chik would hold onto our fur and we would carry him around the pond? We can go to the people place and Tis-Chik will show them how to hold on to us and we can carry them across the fast waters.”
A beaver asked, “What if they won’t let us carry them to safety? They could be afraid of us.”
Tis-Chik said, “If they won’t let us help them, then they die. I have watched them in the water. Some of them can swim, but not many. Even those who can swim, swim badly. Please, let us try. There is no time to lose. The ill-placed dam they built will break today.”
The beavers agreed to try and over a hundred beavers set off toward the village. Beavers don’t move fast on land and the journey that took Tis-Chik less than an hour was a four-hour hike for the beavers. They arrived on the opposite shore of the creek from the village. The beavers lined up on the edge of the water and stood on their hind legs.
When the people noticed the beavers, they were afraid. The people knew they were trapped by the waters. They thought the beavers had come to watch them drown. They gathered on their side of the ever-widening water and pointed at the beavers and shouted at each other. They waved their arms and ran around in circles. They stopped when Tis-Chik stepped into view. The villagers watched while he and one beaver entered the water. The beaver towed Tis-Chik into the middle of the stream and back to the edge. The maneuver was repeated with a different beaver and then repeated for a third time.
Before Tis-Chik could make a fourth repetition, the first of the men who had been working on the dam ran into
the village. “The dam is going, the dam is going,” he shouted. “We have to get out.”
The people knew that the waters were already too high for them to cross. While the dam had not yet broken, it was failing and the water was flowing faster every minute. The rest of the men staggered into the village. The rising steam was carrying logs torn from the dam past them every second. The streams were too swift for anyone to swim across.
Chib pulled Tis-Chik through the fast waters. The people backed away when they came ashore. Tis-Chik said, “Mama, papa, damn fool, amen.” The people stared at him. He unwrapped a small bundle that he had kept dry, pointed to Ruth, and placed a collection of feathers, mussel shells, and shiny rocks on the ground.
She said, “Oh my! This must be the person who been leaving things like this for me all year. I do believe they are here to help us.”
“Help, help,” said Tis-Chik. He pantomimed holding the beaver’s fur one more time and then turned and motioned to the assembled beavers to cross the water. They did so.
Ruth set the example and went first. She approached Chee. Chee moved to the edge of the water and waited while Ruth took her fur in both hands. Chee quickly pulled Ruth to safety on the other side of the raging torrent. The other people, singly and in family groups, came forward to find a beaver waiting to carry them across. Tis-Chik guided several hands to proper placement on a beaver’s back. The beavers pulled every person to safety.
The dam broke and the village was washed away. No one was ever foolish enough to try and build in that location again.
Their task finished, the beavers melted into the forest and returned to their colony. Tis-Chik stayed with the people while they built shelters. Their supplies were gone, but he showed them how to find food. He learned to speak their language. The people followed the river downstream until they found the large permanent settlement that eventually became the capital of this state.
