Secret Sharers

The other night I went to close the the chicken house door , and saw a skunk in there eating sunflower seeds from the feeder.

At first he (or she) didn't pay any attention to me . Skunks don't have to fear much of anything not on wheels, and they can't see beyond a few feet anyway.
When I spoke to him about how he might possibly leave for the night, the skunk only hid behind the feeder, so I went back to the Ark, giving him a chance to disappear.
He didn't go far. He (or she) has been around since early Spring, and has had a few mild encounters with the dogs, so they don't bother him anymore.

The next morning when I was hosing back the roosters so the hens could get out and forage, our skunk walked through the flock like just another fancy-tail chicken. The dogs pretended not to see him.
I guess I can live with him here if the dogs and chickens can.
I wouldn't even know how to kill a skunk. Because If a chicken can run around with his head cut off (and he can because i have seen it) wouldn't a skunk still be able to shoot at me after I shot it?
We can spare the sunflower seeds. I'm not forgetting that skunks are a large member of the generally viscous weasel family, that they do have a taste for small birds, and that occasionally one will kill a larger bird and bite off its head to drink its blood. Those vampire skunks must be the exception. I think mostly skunks eat seeds and grubs, and you can't blame them for being opportunists when it comes to naked little, grub-like baby animals.

That was the day before yesterday.
Yesterday evening I went out a little late to shut the rooster's door, carrying a flash light and walking slowly in case of a skunk.
And a big skunk at the feeder jumped straight up into the air when the light came on him.
I backed off and went to the house to tell Davey I hadn't forgotten to close the door, but was just going to leave it open until the skunk was out of there.

It wasn't my idea for him to go down there with his camera. But he did.
He didn't get sprayed for his intrusion, but he got pictures of, not one big, but two little skunks which pottered about and then went into a hole right there in the rooster room which goes under the main quarters of the hens..
So that answers the question as to wether the big skunk was a male or a female. And she lives with her family, not just near by, but with the chicken's floor being her ceiling.
Davey tells me we might as well keep the skunks on as guard animals.
What can I say to that?
I guess that will have to be alright until a coyote applies for the job.

The Most Frequently Asked Question

So, who and or what were my biological parents?
Where and how did I live until the Warren's dog dragged me in? Was I a child of some unspeakable conjunction, kept in a root cellar until I howled, and was then put out in the woods to die or to be raised by wolves or dwarfs?
As I said here a while back, Daddy Ernie tried to trace me to my source before moving the family to Ithaca, but the original question was never settled, and to tell the truth, it matters more to other people than it does to me.
I might as well have been born the day I showed up in the Warren's garden.
I remember that day mostly from having been told about it so many times, and I have no memory at all from Pre Warren time.
And no, although I have lived with beavers, I can't even imagine that beavers raised me, because not only would beavers have no inclination to adopt a human child bigger than themselves, I would have starved on their diet of assorted wood products.
And it wasn't wolves like most of the feral children in the books Alan Pike brought me on that subject when I was living in the library attic. It's all pure folk lore if you ask me. Wolves anywhere are too smart and wary of getting involved with humans. It would be impossible in my case anyway, since during my youth, we had neither wolves, nor even coywolves in this part of the country.

Bears would be far more likely to try such a thing.
Bears often lose their wariness, because of gluttony due to nut crop failures in their normal range and their need to put on weight for the winter....... besides which they have a tendency toward sentimentality and inappropriate attachments a lot like you find in people, but not in wolves.
Now I'm not saying that I was raised by bears or that it is even likely, ..... but when I was twenty something.....a man in years, but still small as I happen to be, and living in the wild again, I was actually kidnapped by a bear.

At the time, I was still living in that first converted beaver lodge back on the Fort Drum reservation.
As I inherited it, the lodge stood there in the meadow which had been a pond bottom, and where Herb, Davey, and I had found the artillery dud some years before. The old entrance door was now in the open air. Beavers need the entrance underwater to keep out Fishers and Bobcats and Coons that would eat them or the kits, but I felt safe because those smaller predators would stay out when my human scent was in the place, and a bear wouldn't fit through the beaver- sized entrance. I didn't even bother to block it off, except in cold weather.

The year after I dug the floor down for more headroom and sawed a small window with a saber saw, I made a larger hole in the very top of the lodge so I could have a fire inside without being choked by the smoke..
Cutting the holes was a hell of a job .
You might picture a beaver lodge as a hollow shell of sticks, but the lodge wall is thicker than the air space it contains. This is partly because beaver engineering is rough and approximate, but it is also appropriate for their needs. A lodge that is thin and elegant like a Fuller dome, would be vulnerable to anything that wanted to break in. As they are, so thick and interlaced, dynamite or chain saws are generally required.
Sometimes young fool bears will try to tear into beaver lodges, but they always give up and go find something less troublesome , like a bee tree, to raid. That is unless the bear is a big, berieved mother and the lodge has already been opened at the top like a coconut for a straw.
It was late Summer and I had only had an occasional cooking fire there. No fire at all that day.
All summer long, I had been sleeping there rolled up in a sheet of plastic , just as I do when out in the open, whatever the weather. A sheet of plastic is all I really need for a tent, and even in mild or dry weather, it serves to keep off the mosquitoes and black flies, which of course were coming into the lodge through the smoke hole. Bugs don't like me all that much, but I don't like the bugs much either.


I was woken up by a stink so awful it seemed to have come right through my plastic wrap. I heard a snuffling at entrance, and knew by the deep throatiness that it was a bear After a few minutes, the bear gave up at the beaver door and, then must have got my scent from the smoke hole. To tell you truth, I don't see how it could smell anything other than itself . Bears generally smell like their food, or like something they have been rolling in.... garbage bears smell like garbage, grass bears like clover. This bear had been rolling in something that made it smell like a dead bear. The funk poured down on me from the smoke hole.
And then, with a big thump , a puff of ash, and a blast of bad air , she landed in the fire pit.
I didn't have time to unroll from the plastic and scat out of there, but just lay like a bear burrito in my plastic wrap.
She stuck her head right in the end of the tube and snuffed up a big whiff of my air, and then she rolled me over a few times.
Like a hot dog on a grill, I thought.
After a few minutes of this, she sat back and coughed a few times, then pushed me to the exit and stuffed me halfway through the hole. I tried to wiggle the rest of the way out, but tubed up.....I couldn't get anywhere..
She went back up and out, came down and got a hold of the loose plastic with her teeth and pulled me the rest of the way through. I shrank back in the tube as far as i could. Through the two or three layers of plastic, and in the dark, I couldn't see much of anything as I was dragged across the meadow and up over a saddle , thinking as I slid along ....... bumping over rocks and lumps.......that a plastic tube like mine would be a good device for pulling a dead body out of the woods. Anyway, she seemed to be taking care, so as not to bruise the meal I thought, and it didn't t hurt me a lot more than it would hurt a dead person.
Bears don't usually take their food home, but just gorge on the kill and then lay around in the bush nearby until hunger returns, so I was thinking, as I bumped along, that maybe she was taking me home to feed to her cub or cubs.

After what seemed like an hour, but was probably ten minutes and maybe half a mile, she stopped a moment, then she gave me a couple extra tugs and it got darker, as she drew me into her lair......just a blow down brush pile, as I would see later. .
She lay there panting for a few minutes, and then went back out, I held my own breath and heard no other breathing in there with me. Though the scent was still stong.
So she had no cubs, or maybe she had one and lost it. Maybe it was the dead cub she had been rolling in. This was not an normal bear. This was a deranged bear. Maybe she had gone back out to hunt up some grubs for me. I imagined the years ahead of me as slave child.
As soon as she had been gone five minutes I wormed out of the plastic, rolled it up, and took off with it heading for the dawning light in the direction of Lake Bonaparte.

This brought me back to my lodge within a few minutes.
The bear would be able to find me there again even more easily than the first time, if she wanted to insist, and I thought she might not be so gentle the second time, so I picked up the few things I had at the lodge, then went to the Bonaparte shore and swam the channel to Round Island. I set up camp on the East point where . I figured I would wait there a couple of days to give her a chance to return to the lodge if she was going to, and not find me there.
In bear country I usually hang my food in a net hammock strung between trees I keep for that, but this time, Just in case she was a very determined bear, I wrapped my food , boots and the few clothes I wasn't wearing in the plastic on the ground , then strung the hammock high up the fork of a birch to sleep in.
And sure enough, she showed up again that night. And she was either more fooled than I had wanted her to be, or else she had a hankering for a pair of boots and some potatoes, because she dragged off the tube with my stuff in it.
Any how, the bear now had all my camp stuff, so I didn't see any choice but to hitch down to Ithaca for the winter, where I had my city legs and other stuff stowed in the mausoleum.

My next lodge would be out of the range of that bear, and on the side of the lake with a quicker access to roads out. I never will forget that mother bear though. Not just the smell. Actually, it makes me a little sad to think about her. I have never felt so wanted before or after.
But as for my actual upbringing, it was by the Warrens mostly, and I have nothing to complain about there, except for their eagerness at the beginning to get rid of me, and their general tendency to forget me.
So how so you forget your own child or brother, blood kin or not? That's the question I myself ask most frequently, even though I know the answer.
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Invasion of the Coywolves

I found only one morel mushroom this year, probably because it didn't rain at the right time, but a few weeks ago I walked up a wooded gully near here looking for more, this time without the dogs, on the alternate theory that, so far, the dogs had frightened the mushrooms into hiding every time we approached. If you don't ever allow for the unlikely, there will be few surprises, and nothing learned.
Stepping carefully, and sweeping the ground with my gaze, I came up the creek bed to within fifteen or twenty yards of a mother fox standing on a log, back to me, totally occupied with trying keep track of the six or nine kits all over the gully slope above her, chasing their tails and each other and each other's tails, or just jumping into the air like fleas.
After a few minutes of this fine entertainment, I turned to go, but something alerted the vixen, she barked three times, and the pups all disappeared instantly, like vanishing morels.

I saw no morels on that walk, and if I had brought the dogs, I would never have seen the foxes either, but the red foxes are all around us, more common than dogs and feeding mosty on mice, though they will eat most anything, probably including sour grapes, morels, and dog food, if you feed your dog outside, or have a pet door.

There are gray foxes around here too. Last year we had a gray fox den under the tool shed and I didn't even know about it until I heard a shriek one day and saw our pit-lab Tano, his jaws clamped on the vixen's neck, shaking her like a chew rope. I yelled at him, he let go, and she slunk off under the shed. I looked under there later and found her dead, with two kits latched onto her nipples.
She had a pretty face, brown and black and gray, like a hawk.
I took her out and buried her. Davey gave the pups milk and grapes and bananas, bread and peanut butter and whatever he had in the refrigerator. They hung around for a few days, then went off to forage and multiply.
The grays are a little bigger than the reds, and you might mistake them for coyotes, especially if your idea of a coyote is one of the unevolved western variety.
Our coys are much larger.
Recently I was out with the dogs in the hickory woods at the head of one of the little gorges behind the farm . The dogs Deerdra and Tano were ranging out of sight ahead of me, when a redish brown critter, .... big as a small deer..... came streaking by me, not bounding in high arcs like a deer; but running flat out, persued by Tano, who was no more than ten yards behind.


I called Tano, and he came right back, brushed past me, to follow Deerdra back toward home. Just a few seconds behind Tano , came the r coyote. It stopped a few yards away and stared at the dogs, through me ....I looked down at my hand, to see if I was there.
That animal was not much like the twenty pound California coyotes that raid garbage cans and try, without much success, to carry off small children. After freezing his prey with those yellow eyes just like the ones in wolf paintings on velvet, this animal would be able to carry off a middle schooler or a small housewife. Or me.
After a few seconds, the critter turned and trotted away.

Coyotes are not native to the eastern U.S. The the large coy animals now thriving in our woods are the descendants of coyotes which have been moving eastward form the Rocky mountains and mating with wolves along the way. D.N.A. tests have established that. People here sometimes call them coydogs, and coyotes will mate with dogs, but would as soon kill them, or both, and when they do mate, dogs contribute a gene which causes the hybrids to produce litters not just in the Spring, when they will have plenty of time to mature before winter, but any old time, so that they don't survive well in nature.
Coywolves drink at our ponds, leave their furry turds on the chicken runs, stalk neighbors who walk their dogs on leash, and they have family picnics with group howls in the near woods.
It may have been A coywolf a few months ago that snatched the roosters off the deck rail here and then set them free without their tail feathers. Coyotes eat probably half the fawns born around here each year. Deer are over abundant most everywhere in the East and adapt to fawn mortality and abundant food by birthing twins or triplets, so the coys don't have much effect there, but they also eat most of the Ring Necked Pheasants stocked here by the state, and for that offense, they are chased by organized packs of hunters. Some kind of active hostility is probably a good idea, because if you yield the woods to the coys, they will take your yard, your duck, your dog, and your cannairy. Years ago, when every country boy carried a rifle, coyotes and wolves were not know to attack people. They are loosing respect.
Watch dogs are not not usually enough to keep the coyotes away from homesteads, particularly in thickly settled areas where dogs no longer run free. The Dog's Plot dogs bark constantly on nights when the coyotes howl near, and will not go more than a hundred yards from home anytime, unless a human is with them, and then they are foolishly unafraid. They have probably heard the stories of coyotes luring dogs with playful bows, bounds, and dashes, further and further away from home, to where the pack waits.
The coyote which wandered into Central Park and into the news lately, may been an exception for the island of Manhattan, , but there are coyotes living in the city of Ithaca glens and cemeteries , and they are probably in your town too.
Sitting In your home, working in your yard, or searching the park woods for fern fiddleheads , if you don't see any kind of wild canine, it is because you have been seen and are being watched from cover.

The coy ones may be sitting out in the dark watching your television through the window right now. They are very aware of you, your children and pets, your livestock, your waste stream, the limits of our perception and of your tolerance.
Don't feed them. Don't trust them. Scare them if you can.

Sleeps With Beavers

I've remodeled and inhabited a few abandoned beaver lodges, but I actually lived with beavers in their unimproved lodges only on and off for a few years, and never for a whole winter. Even so, my short time as the so called "Beaver Boy" will probably always be my main claim to fame, and I've mentioned it so often here that a lot of you have asked me to tell about it before I choke on a stick and die.........or as is more likely, before I have the Ark hauled down the hill to Cayuga Lake and head North to the Barge canal and the Great Lakes, never to be heard from again.
Fair enough then, and thank you for asking.

The beavers were only just beginning to return by the nineteen fifties when I was a kid paging through the old New York State Conservationist magazines by the fireplace at Loon Island.
There I learned that the last beavers in New York State had been trapped out of the upper Oswegatche in the late nineteenth century by Cannadian Algonquins on contract.
I had still never even seen a beaver lodge or dam before the day Herb, Davey, our dog Binker, and I went across the lake to put out trot lines for bullheads in Hidden pond.
Hidden pond is out of sight, but less than a hundred yards from the West shore of Bonaparte. That shore is the border of the Fort Drum military reservation, then called Pine Camp: a huge wilderness, most of which is not used by the military, although the shore line was posted with signs saying,
"Danger Duds
Impact Area
Do Not Enter"


Up on the curving, cirque-like bluff just behind the pond, there is an old mica mine. It's just an open pit which was probably not worked for more than a season, but Grandpa Failing or Daddy Ernie would lead a family expedition up there once a summer so that we could bring back a few more chunks of mica for the flower bed border and mantel piece.
Old Irv Priest, who ran the store and informal post office at his marina, had a little printing press on which he produced a series of booklets on the lake history, and also local post cards , one of which was a simple map he drew of the lake and surroundings, including Hidden Pond with an X on the west shore and one on the northwest, which were both labeled "mica mine."
Herb and Davey had noticed the second X on the post card but nobody seemed to know anything about the second mine.
So Herb and Davey decided that while our set lines were fishing for bullheads, we would just mosey over to that second X and check out the other mine.
Those woods had burned over in the eighteen nineties, leaving some low places nearly untouched and burning the trees and soil right off of the long granite ridges, so by the nineteen fifties, the slopes were coming up with thick second growth but the ridge tops were still like broad and bare or mossy roads which suddenly dive into swamps and bogs. It was an easy mistake to follow these false roads, and even on our adult guided trips to the known mine, we sometimes got disoriented. Usually, all we had to do then was listen for an outboard motor or just get up high enough that we could see a piece of the lake..
As you've already guessed, we boys didn't find the lost mine, and we very soon lost ourselves. We realized it ourselves when Herb e found a fishing lure which he didn't know
he had dropped.
Either there were no boats on the lake, or we were out of range of motor sounds. The day was overcast, with no sun to give us a sense of direction, moss grrows on all sides of trees, and Herb the Boy Scout was not prepared with a compass.
We tried to walk straight by following the false roads of the burnt ridge tops but were frustrated when the roads ended suddenly in swamps.
They sent me up a ridge back pine e to look for the lake, but the largest pine up there , rooted in moss on the rock, was no thicker in the trunk than me, and so bushy I could hardly see out of it, no matter how much the brothers shouted at me from below. It was cool up there though and I stayed until they got mad and told me never to come down.

Each time we came down into the flats with nothing to follow or to force us one way or another, so that we could try to follow Herb's nose, we proceeded in unconscious circles, diverted now and then by deeper swamps and ponds.
We saw no beavers that day but where there was a narrow neck between swamps, there was usually a small beaver dam ponding the former swamp. and domed, stick- built beaver lodges in the open water, just like in the magazines. The ponds were ringed by the stumps of Aspens which appeared to have been cut by cub scouts with stone axes.
Some of the dams were in disrepair and the ponds had become meadows, their bottom level raised by the accumulation of forest silt and pond debris grown over with grass, with shrubs growing on the abandoned lodges. To me, this was better than finding ten lost mica mines.
We found Burnt Pond, which we had visited in other years on family blueberry expeditions, but it seemed to be in a different place that day; we found Indian Lake, which we had never seen before and is long way from Bonaparte, and then, three hours into our wanderings, an hour or so after the first time we found Burnt Pond, we were coming down another false highway, ramping down into a large meadow of tall grass and ferns.
From the ridge, we could see at the center of the meadow, a beaver lodge, so big that even Herb probably could have stood up inside. The meadow would have been a pond maybe three or four years previously. Here and there we could see a silver bend of the brook winding through it. We could have walked right up to the lodge on dry ground.
Despite being lost and desperate, we came down the ridge and headed right for the beaver lodge as if it were home.
But the grass and Ostrich ferns were so high that as soon as we were in the meadow, we couldn't see the beaver house any more.
And we didn't see it again that day.
We were no more than a few yards out into the meadow when a deer exploded from the grass right in front of us, and then it was gone......as if it really had exploded.
But about where the deer had been was what seemed to be a Giant Bullet ,as if somewhere there was a Giant Six Gun and a Giant Cowboy.
The effect was to blind us all to the obvious fact that this was simply an unexploded artillery shell, like we had been warned about......a thing to be touched at risk of life and limb. Danger Duds, etc.
.
I myself was not as intrigued by the magic bullet as by my after image of the big beaver house which I still wanted to explore, but Herb and Davey were so inspired by the dud that they forgot about the beaver lodge, forgot they ever had been lost, forgot they hadn't just stepped away from hidden pond to fetch this magic bullet.
Herb picked it up and set off y as if he knew where he was going and, though it wasn't exactly a bee line, we did march more or less straight to Burnt Pond, which of course was not the goal, but once we were there again, Herb was even more sure of his directions. He handed the dud to Davey, said to follow him, then five minutes later Davey handed it to me, and within another hour we were back at Bonaparte's shore.
Herb set the dud in the boat and we all walked right into Bonaparte and drank from it like dogs, including the dog, who would never again get into the boat with any of us, and who died in Ithaca the next summer.
Davey wrote and published a wandering story about the danger dud and his grandfather and what he called the Rhinoceros Hills where we were lost. If you read his exagerations in a magazine or went to his father's memorial service where he read it aloud, you will remember that we were halfway across the lake on our way home and just about over the second shoal when sister Delight met us in the other boat, having been sent by the worried parents, because we had been gone for six hours and were already late for dinner.
And you might remember how she pointed out that what my brothers were calling " the Giant Bullet" was actually a dangerous explosive, as in Danger Duds, etc. and she convinced us to dump it overboard which we did.
But in reality, as opposed to Davey's version, the thing did not then explode under the presusre of the lake depths, killing the huge Walleyed Pike Davey found on the beach a few days later - the giant Walleye which had broken Grempa Failing's line near his boat earlier that summer........ and so on: A cracking good yarn maybe, but a dud is a dud.

And as long as that story was, it fell pretty far short of the whole truth, seeing as I , who carried the dud for the last hour of the struggle out, was totally left out of the whole account.
So, how do you forget your own brother?
This is a question I have often asked myself, but it has happened to me repeatedly, and I have decided that the answer is simple: it is easy, if you only want to. You don't even need to try.
But that doesn't matter in my memory and neither does the dud stuff. For me, the big discovery that day was the land of hills and flows dotted with beaver lodges, and particularly that one big green meadow with a brook curling through it and the big lodge in the middle.. Walking down the moss road into that vision was like discovering a place I had dreamed of. Once in a lullaby or something.

Although I didn't get back there that summer, I had decided before we had even found ourselves back at Lake Bonaparte after being lost, that some day I would live in that meadow, in that lodge, and that winter in the bath tub, I dreamed it again and again.



The next summer, I had my first contact with beavers and it was right at Lake Bonaparte.
I liked to go swimming out on my own, without my short-winded Warren brothers, and without a boat....who needs a boat to swim? But Momma Dot and Daddy Ernie insisted that I always dive near the anchored row boat or the canoe so that I would not be run over by motor boats, especially as this was the early water ski era when people operating the towing boats were likely as not looking backwards. The folks also wanted me to use the snorkel with a flag on it, but I don't need a snorkel and I usually left it in the boat if I was far enough away that they wouldn't know. .
Mostly I took the canoe, which suits my body better than a row boat. With the row boat, I had nothing near enough to brace my feet against, but in the canoe, I could stand where others had to kneel to get the best leverage. I can out paddle any fool who just sits there using nothing but his arms.
I liked to head out for the west shore in the morning before the wind was up, and I usually took along a creel full of of raw potatoes to eat like apples. My taste for raw potatoes isn't something I share with many other people, but it turned out to be one I share with beavers.
I was swimming off the canoe near Plow Point, when all of a sudden the water began errupting around me as if someone were throwing boulders, or as if the Pine Camp artillery, which had been known to hit a barn and kill a cow, was wildly off again.
I got back into the canoe in a big hurry and was about to paddle off as fast as I could, when I noticed the two beavers circling the canoe.
Beavers!
I knew that they probably wouldn't harm me, and I had wanted for a long time to make contact with the creatures, but my unconsidered reaction was to start bombarding them with potatoes.
Each of the thrown potatoes plunged and then rose slowly to the surface to bob gently until one of the beavers appeared and blasted it with his tail. This happened again and again until one of the beavers bit into one.
I don't know if the first bite was an attack or a taste test, but the tail slapping stopped completely and before the potatoes were half eaten, the beavers began diving with them, swimming off underwater toward the near shore, and then returning for more.
There was no beaver house near.....there were none at all on the lake shore at that time, so it was a mystery to me just where they were going with the potatoes or where they lodged.
When I was out of potatoes, the beavers did a few more turns around me, then dove and were gone.

I returned the next day with more potatoes, anchored in the same place, and began chunking quartered spuds into the water. Before long the beavers appeared and I actually saw one as it exited an underwater opening in the rocky shore. One of the many caves, large and small in the Adirondack borderlands , where acid waters off the pine lands had disolved veins of limestone.

By the end of the day, I was swimming with the beavers, trailing a mesh bag nearly out of potato chunks.
Later that week, I entered their cave and got as far as the second air chamber, but not to any living quarters. it was completely dark and stony.... not really where I wanted to be. Anyway, I had discovered the potato way to the hearts of the beavers.

Many days that summer when I was thought to be swimming from the canoe, I was actually tromping pond to pond on the reservation flow lands. It didn't take long for me to learn my way around back in there well enough that the distances seemed a lot shorter than they had on day of wandering lost with the boys. Bearing potatoes, I found and befriended two active beaver colonies. I made my way back to the big abandoned lodge in the dreamy meadow of tall grass, and sat there on top of the lodge for hours at a time whistling and singing non-tunes. I built a few little dams in the brook that wound through the rich bottom and I excavated the floor of the lodge to gain another foot and a half or so of overhead. I brought along a hack saw and spent a day cutting a small window on the east and glazed it with a clear glass mixing bowl.
I told noone about the beavers and my back country wanderings, not even Aunt Sammy.



It wasn't until several years later, after I had been to Florida and Alaska, and the family had gotten used to not knowing where I was days or nights, and to not thinking of me as living with them, in fact to more or less forgetting about me for lengthening periods of time, that I really moved in with one of the beaver colonies, spent day and night with them, and got to be accepted as a member of the household , if not exactly as a beaver.
I got to know the beavers as individuals, and I can assure you that they have personalities as various as chickens, dogs, or people, and I could write a book about them (as some people have suggested I do) but I will be damned if I am going to. I would sooner build twenty dams across the Oswegatchie River than write a book. It would be too damn much work with a lot less result. That much I figured out from just doing this blog.
But those of you have written to prod me into these recollections, were curious about some very specific aspects of my life with beavers....and I will be happy enough to answer briefly your most frequently asked questions:

1.) Did I take a beaver wife?
2.)Did I have sex with beavers?
3.) Did I sleep with beavers?
4.) Where did I go to the bathroom?
5.) How did I keep dry and warm?
6.) Did I eat beaver food?
7.) How did I first meet and become accepted by the beavers?
8.) Was I originally raised by beavers?
9.) Can I tell one beaver from another?
10.) Do I still have friends among the beavers?

I think I have already fully answered question number seven, about how I met the beavers, and, from the way the first three questions were asked, I interptet them to be all essentially all the same purient inquiry, posed with different degrees of delicacy.
The short answer is, No,

However, I did literally sleep with beavers.
Until there began to be a certain amount of attempted juvenile screwing around which lead to the annual expulsion of adolescents, at age two or three , there was not much that goes on in a beaver lodge other than eating, playing, and sleeping.
Of course it is not that other people would want to sleep with beavers, or that it is a real option for you regular, long-legged people, but sleeping with the beavers is the best, cheapest, and greenest way I can think of to keep warm in winter.
A sleep group of beavers makes an electric blanket seem to me about as appealing as an electric chair. And it sure would beat sleeping in a pile of sticky humans....... like the rural peasantry in medieval times who often slept through the winter in communal heaps, and got up only occasionally to eat and defficate. That is true. I know about it because I found it on the internet. On the internet you can even find groups of people who claim to be interested in joining human sleep piles. Not for me.
But sleeping through cold weather with the beavers, besides the furry comfort of it, saved me a lot of calories which I would have otherwise expended foraging when there wasn't much to be found.
In sleep season my metabolism slowed way down and my body clock was reset to about a three day schedule. Ordinarily each beaver, as needed, would leave the lodge by the two underwater entrance/exits, to shit, piss, on about the same three day rotation as me. If it was remotely warm or sunny, the beavers would exit the pond through a hole kept in the ice . Out there they would chew winter buds I guess, but if they didn't go out and about they would maybe pull some aspen stock or lily roots from the underwater storage area pile to carry back to the lodge so they could eat a bit.
Although I am something of a bark eater myself, and am known for my iron stomach, I haven't quite got the gut for digesting straight cellulose.
I like the yellow jelly that forms on spring cut birch stumps, I like cattail stalk hearts and root, and I can deal with fresh cambium, but you can have your aspen twigs and raw lilly roots; I meat and potatoes are what get me through winter. Beavers have something in their guts that ferments the wood. They fart a lot from that , and the smell is kind of like bread rising, not too bad actually. I bet you could run an engine on beaver farts. Beavers are pure herbivores, and there aren't many herbivores in the North Woods.....not chipmunks and not humming birds.....it's generally not a good way to sustain yourself up there, but beavers have their special guts, plus a sophisticated agricultural business plan they work hard at, and that gets them through.
The trouble with my own food supplements is that is the beavers would immediately eat any potatoes I tried to store in our quarters and if I were to try keeping meat anywhere in the lodge or nearby, they would drag it away and bury it like a dead realtive.
About the only thing I was able to keep for my own use was a metal canteen holding a kind of gravy I made I made from milk, vegetable oil, and mashed potato, flour, or bread crumbs, all borrowed from camp cupboards and refrigerators. I can't say I liked it, but I needed it.

Contrary to what you might expect, I myself slept naked in cold weather. Otherwise my wet clothes would freeze on me or dry very slowly in the beaver pile, which would annoy the beavers.
My skin got all greasy from the oil which waterproofs their fur. This in itself was insulating. The oil comes from a gland near the base of the beaver's tail and I sometimes used my hands to extract a bit to apply , and at other times some Big Mothers would groom me, but in all of this close contact, I never once got bitten by a beaver, at least not so as to break the skin. I was slapped a few times, and often enough clacked or snapped at, but never really hurt.




My three years spent mostly with the beavers was all with one colony back on the reservation. It was a large family with an uncle and two aunts (which I don't think is typical) in a bigger than average lodge , but since a few new kits were born each season, a few of the older ones had to move on each Spring.
I mostly ran around with the adolescents, making superfluous little dams and individual mud piles which the beavers marked with their sent, while I modled my mud piles to resemble something I didn't consciously intend as mud women, but which I found myself humping like a dog. Maybe the resulting mud puppies are running around back there now.

And for the information of the person who asked ( and those who just wondered) : no I did not suck beaver milk. It is too rich for my taste and would have been too much of a drain on the resources.

Drain, strain, or not, after I had been more or less a constant presence for those three years, the big Buck, father of most in the colony, began to snap and slap at me, as he did the others who had been around that long, which was the message that we had to go out into the world to make our fortunes in a new valley.

Any way, I am just not a beaver. Greased up or not, hairless quadraped that I am, I could not go out in the open air and wander about in winter like my beaver companions , so in the depths of winter I found it easier , like the raccoons, to move closer to civilization and live in its border areas and off its excess ....in fact, I lived with the raccoons at times, particularly at Bridge house later on. But that's another story.
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After the expulsion, some more wandering, and my stint in Alaska, I lived often in abandoned lodges. The first was that same grand lodge on the Fort Drum reservation we found on our day lost. Then I moved to one handier to a road , in the Bonaparte Cave State Forest, and later on I fixed up a lodge on the mid reaches of Cascadilla Creek above Ithaca.
In all of those places I banked soil against the lodges and grew potatoes and squash, Indian tobacco, sometimes broccoli , and always peas or beans up over the lodge, protecting it all with a stockade of bramble canes or buck thorn brush. I got the best crops down in Ithaca were the summer was a little longer and the soil sweeter.

I am sure that the pleistocene aboriginies who lived with the four hundred pound beavers of that era had similiar operations. It seems like a lot better system than the more modern Iroquois practice of burning woodlands to create openings in which to plant and then posting women and dogs to sleep by the crops in order to protect them from predators. In the old way, beavers do the clearing, the pond fertilizes and build loose tillable soil, and the abandoned lodges provide housing on site.
I was never so happy as I was alone in my green valleys, and I would have stayed a lot longer if it weren't for women. I got a couple to visit, but none wanted to live there.

Stuck here on Davey's farm for now, I am no longer farming beaver meadows. My old lodges are no longer kept up, and none of the beavers I knew in the old days are living now .
Beavers in general have changed. Now days beavers are more likely to move in with us, In fact they seem to be everywhere now. They have built a lodge right in the Loon Island boathouse, which is o.k. since the boat house has been pushed off its cribbing by the ice and is beyond repair. But I have not been feeding these beavers or attempting to befriend them. There are enough beavers now that, though their hides are not worth a whole lot anymore, people are trapping them again, and there are those who would not be above dispatching one with an oar or a gun if it came around panhandling. So you should please not feed the beavers.

Big Brown Put Down

Suddenly it's hot, so I have been sleeping out on the deck of the Ark while the two Domminiker hens I am now protecting there (the lame Olive Oil and her broody sister) stay inside, where it is too hot for them too, but the Rooster which Davey called " Big Brown" was after them too much.
Big Brown had looked like he was wearing big baggy pants until he was plucked off the deck rail and lost his tail and most of his pants to the mystery predator. The feathers grew back, but post trauma, Brown was suspicious of everything including me , and meanly aggressive with the hens, finding a way into the Ark when I barely left it cracked open for cooling.
Down at the hen house, while Dot and Lefty would try to chat up the foraging hens and to interest them in one thing or another they were tossing around, Brown would dart out of the bushes to ambush the hens without a how do you do, pulling out a lot of feathers when he mounted them.
Mostly, he sat on or by the Ark all day.
When I took Olive Oil, the lame hen out for a walk, I'd always go far enough away so Big Brown didn't follow us.
Olive Oil is just about over her game leg, which I was not sure was going to happen. So that's good, but as I returned with her to the Ark yesterday, Big Brown lunged out of the Bishop weeds and did his best to tear a chunk out of my foot.
Davey's two nieces had been walking here just hours before, and I knew he was expecting another couple of young visitors later on.
He has never killed one of his birds, but has often said that he would never tolerate an attack rooster.

I went in the house and found Davey asleep in the easy chair, an empty porter bottle beside him, the computer in his lap repeating the animated loop of Wunderground weather map, which showed the usual scattered thunder storms passing us by, over and over.
I didn't disturb him but went to the closet and got the little Winchester twenty-two.
The first two shots missed Brown completely, so he ran away. Davey has let the gun get rusty and out of practice.

Fifteen minutes later, Big Brown came back as if nothing had happened; but something had to happen.
If he had run away and come back a day later with a new attitude, maybe that would have been sufficient. But no.

I shot big brown in the head. He flopped around some, but didn't run around like they do when you cut their heads off. It would have been better to kill him out of sight of Dot and the other two uptown roosters , but they go where I go.
They closed in on the flopping Big Brown and got agitated and bloodied.
Pretty soon all the roosters up and down knew about it . They raised a ruckus as I carried Big Brown off.
I fed him to a pear tree like I knew Davey would.
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The roosters were all quiet and had gone up to their roost or retired to the bushes whene I came back just a few minutes later.

Davey had slept through it all, and stayed that way when came through to put the gun back.
He will know about Big Brown when he reads this.
No sense disturbing him. He is already grieving the probable death of his truck which gave up the ghost, or at least its transmission, after he had made it only fifty miles on his way to Lake Bonaparte the day before yesterday. Well, Lake Bonaparte probably doesn't need him.
Life goes on. Or it doesn't.

Bonaparte's Victrola

Call me Boney if you want to......Bonaparte is my middle name, Boney I am; and I'm the one who retrieved Bonaparte's victrola.

When I was what passed for a human child, but before it seemed to the family that I would comprehend historical explanations, I understood the Lake Bonapate name to mean "bones-apart", and imagined the lake bottom littered with the bones of long-ago drowning victims. Actually, this wasn't far from the truth, in view of the soapified corpses discovered by Davey's grandfather Failing, and which Davey so eloquently wrote about, substituting my experience for his.

Never mind that for now; the lake was named after Bonaparte the man - not Napoleaon, but his older brother Joseph, a restless romantic who came and built a series of residences, but didn't stay around long enough to litter the lake bottom with his bones.
Stay with me now as I go back in time, across the sea, and through the net of truth and illusions to the wonderful land of Wiki. We will be back soon and get down to the victrola....

Installed by Napolean as King of Spain, Joseph had kindly put an end to the Spanish Inquisition, but being a foreigner in Spain, he was poorly appreciated for that, and when he and the rest of his family were routed , he left his castle in Spain, but took a good many of the crown jewels, buried half of them in Switzerland, and, traveling as the Commte de Suvilliers, took the rest of the jewels with him to Philadelphia, where he had a friend in Ben Franklin.

He lived there for a short time, but Ben Franklin was mostly in Paris and probably wasn't that close a friend anyway, besides which Philadelphia was all taken up, and practically old world already: too international and dangerous for a Bonaparte at the time. So Joseph went to Point Breeze, New Jersey where there was a little more room yet and the wind presumably blew free.
There he developed an estate with an artificial lake, a cottage for his daughter, an underground escape route to the river, and everything else that might make him comfortable........ except that it was, after all, just a suburban estate, not his own nation state, or even a castle in Spain.
The French emigerees around him owned a lot of land in North Western New York State, which was quite wild yet because the Adirondack mountains blocked the westward movement of settlers, so Joseph sent his assistant back to Switzerland for the other half of the crown jewels, with which he bought a Luxombourg sized chunk of the Adirondack foothills, sight unseen, most of the present day town of Diana, in Lewis County
He built a house in the village of Natural Bridge, just about in what would later be the back yard of the house where I myself first appeared to the world of Warrens.
Joseph stayed at Natural Bridge long enough to lay out the streets, and build a rail way to the center of his territory.....to the head of the lake he called Diana and which we of course call Bonaparte,.
There he built a courtly hunting lodge he called "The Hermitage", where it is unlikely that he was ever alone.
The hunting was fine, the music and the company was good,.....he had brought in a gondala or two and plenty of friends, but man does not live on meat and music and embezled jewlery alone. There has to be some kind of enterprise, with an agricultural base. The long term plan for nation building, was to find a fertile tableland, which would serve as his bread basket.
He proceeded to the outlet of the lake to the site still called by his vlllage name Alpina, though there is nothing Alpine about it. He sawed lumber and got a good start on yet another house......but he never occupied the house, of which not a board remains, and the thirty acres he cleared there have been taken over by pine and oak .... because when he finally got around to scoiuting about for a suitable table land to plow and crop, it very quickly became clear that in this land of swamps, bare-back ridges, and thin, acid soil, there was no such thing as tillable tableland.
Oh, easy to say, he should have looked first before he built thrice. But anyway, the mosquitoes, the black flies, and the no-see-ums were god awful, so he he retreated to New Jersey, and eventually to Naples where he had some claim on being king.

I believe he is buried there, all in one piece, though I never heard how the king thing worked out, but by the time I was maybe twelve or fourteen I was aware of the colorful elemets of the Bonaparte legend, which are probably the purely mythical ones : the sheet metal bullet proofing of the house in Natural Bridge and the escape tunnel to the caverns (why not....he had one at Point Breeze) , the lost lovers and hidden remnants of the Spanish treasure in Bonaperate Cave, the musical gondola expeditions.

Or maybe they were real gondala expeditions, floating music across the still waters, in which case there were no doubt real musicians.
But I imagined the gondolas, not with poles but with oars, because the poles would have needed to be twenty to sixty feet long in most of the lake, and not with two or three or four fiddling and fluting musicians at the bow, but with a big horned, anachronistic victrola, and the reason for that was that I found it.

It was one of those cold wet summers we get, or used to get, when somebody complains about the weather and then people say, yeah well, this is the Adirondacks, that is what it is supposed to be like in the Adirondacks,
When it wasn't raining, the mists and fog were so thick the lake just seemed to be rolling into the air, so water and air were becoming one. Anything you said, any noise you made, went swimming through the air, and sometimes got lost before it made it to the other end of the boat.
But the mists were no problem for the mosquitoes and black flies which could fly between the drops and through your button holes or up your nose, or for the naturally fly- repellant type like myself, or for obsessed fishermen like brother Davey and his friend Wally Harrington who was up at the island for a week that summer.

They were determined , no matter what the weather, to go out at dawn down the flooded outlet halfway to the dam at Alpina, to fish in Mud Lake, a shallow-water, deep-mud wide place in the flow where large mouth bass fed near the shore line at dawn and dusk.
The boys could have gone out at any time between six a.m. and noon that day and it would have seemed like dawn for all one could tell by the light. I would say it was about eight oclock already when they left. I was in the boat house when they were getting it together.

I very seldom slept indoors at the lake. There was an old wall tent set up in front of the camp where I had some comic books and a sleeping bag, but more often I stayed in the little wave cave down by the pump house, or in the prow of the plywood runabout where I kept a few blankets and my swim fins. I liked to sleep there with my face half an inch from the water.
I didn't show myself when the boys were rigging up, and loading into the fishing boat, but I could hear them debating the pros and cons of borrowing the new- fangled spinning rod up on pegs there, with the spider- like reel and gossimer line . It belonged to Davey's new brother in law, who had brought it back from his G.I. service in Germany. The pro's one..... Wally's uncle had a similiar rig and Wally said he had learned how to handle it.

They went off into the mists.
And were back in about an hour.... looking for me.
They had anchored in the deepest part of Mud Lake, not very deep in water, but deep in mud, from the false bottom on down.
In his entusiasm and the fog of fishing, Wally had overlooked a loose reel- to- rod connection and had cast the reel right off the rod into the lake......

They had tried to pull it up by the line, .but the line had not been tied to the spool. So now they wanted me to dive for it, being as I am, like they say, a regular fish. This is what I was good for, and there I was sitting in the runabout when they returned, so I agreed to it.
I had the fins right there. Davey went to camp and got some cookies, and then we went right back out.

We anchored where the reel was cast off and I dove.
I poked around but I found no sign or feel of the reel. It was a pretty dense object and was obviously deep in the mud. It still is.
I widened my search circle and felt around some more.
Every once in a while a bullhead would shoot out of the mud in front of my face.
Then I found....felt a handle.... a crank handle. If it were the handle of a spinning reel, the reel would be large enough to rig on a flag pole.
I couldn't do more than just budge it by myself, but I went up and got the other end of the anchor rope....there being plenty rope, since we were in only ten feet of water there. I dove, tied it to the crank, and the boys hauled, trailing clouds of mud, to the surface......you already know what.
Davey knew what it was, and said it as the thing lay on the bottom of the boat, mud slowly flowing from the horn: Bonaparte's Victrola.
It was a portable with a case about the size of a bread box, but the sound horn was big enough to cover a watermellon.

With that, Davey and Wally forgot all about the spinning reel. If you want to go looking, it is probably still there, right at the outlet of Mud lake.

Back at the island, the boys took the gramaphone to the pump house work shop. I tagged along uninvited and watched as they struggled to get the crank working, but it had been under for a good long time, if not since the time of Joseph and the gondolas, and it would not turn.
So then they took the whole thing apart. They got the horn seperated from the box and took turns blowing on it, which Walley could not do with anything but a windy effect, but Davey could, because he had taken a month of trumpet lessons before one day hiding in a closet and refusing to go.
After passing it back and forth a few times, the boys went up to get more cookies and a proper breakrfast, leaving me with the horn.

I took it to the wave cave there in front of the pump house, and blew my heart out.
At first it was just wind, then rain....... then thunder, and very soon I was as proficient with it as I would ever be, blasting out notes which dropped to the lake surface and, despite fog and mists, bowled across the lake and bounced back off the granite hills, rebounded all over the lake and back to me over and over again...... until I dropped the horn, exhausted, and the essential me seemed to peal through the air with the sound. And maybe I did, but when I returned to my body my shorts, which had already been wet anyway, were wet and warm.

And that was the beginning and the high point of my barbaric musical career, rolling over the water and reverberating in the Rhinoceros hills. I returned to the cave and blew it often the rest of the summer. Always removing my shorts first.
My cave music created some amusement and curiosity on the island and around the bay, so I had to bring the horn out and show it off, but I would not let it out of my hands. Little Boy Blue, Moma Dot called me then. Then I returned the horn to the cave.

I kept it there in the cave until the end of summer when it was time to return to Ithaca and I tried to bring it with me, but there just wasn't room with the kids and dog and Davey's budgie , so Father Warren brought it back to the island and put it in the pump house.
It was not there when we returned the next summer .
All I have now is this harmonica which can easily be replaced if lost or clogged, and, in fact it has been replaced many times, but hardly ever does it get me more than a few feet off the ground and the sound of it has never made anybody wet their pants.

Death and the Dominikers

A dead Dominker rooster in the back yard yesterday morning. Looks like he was killed by a few strokes to the neck with a fairly dull tool , so it was either done by the other roosters, or by a hateful little man with a tiny machete. Not me. I have a normal machete, but when I kill a chicken, I do it by hand, with a flick of the wrist.
I informed Davey, and he put the bird out on the range for the vultures. Yesterday he paid nine dollars for a barbecued chicken from the fire department. That is a lot to pay, but he says its for protection and that he can't afford his own chickens. This is a person with a B.A. in philosophy .
The dead Dominiker was one of two banished roosters. One lost his tail and all his confidence when he was carried off in the mouth of the neighbor's dog.
He showed up back here the next day. but the others wouldn't accept him without his tail.
He went under the house, and had not come out since, until the lowest ranking rooster of the uptown, outside bunch chased him out yesterday. I thought it might be just as well at the time that he be outed.
The second outcast Dominiker was plucked of his tail feathers and driven out of the chicken house by his roost mates a few months ago.. He hung back by the lower pond where the pheasant couple are nesting. . I would go out there with corn for him and the pheasants and he always came out talking to me. But now that I have let the hens out some, he had been closing in on the hen house. Yesterday there was no sight or sound of either bird.
Usually the pheasant cock is out there crowing and beating his wings in response to the roosters, but today there is no sound of him either, nor of the mallard pair.
Also Deerdra the dog has been holed up under the house where the traumatized Dominker had been staying. No need to look at chicken entrails or the weather map to see that the critters are expecting thunderstorms.
Too bad about the low status of Dominikers. After the South American Aracunas, they are the original American chickens and they do well on the range, despite the boggle of weasels who live here and the coyotes who are always sneaking around intimidating the dogs with their huge furry scat piles. The worst enemy of roosters is all other roosters, especially roosters of a different feather. There is one Dominker cock left in the lower flock and also two Dominiker hens, both of them up here in the Ark for their own protection, and because I like their company even if I don't need the warmth any more. They are the best smelling hens. Like bread in the oven.
Roosters can smell a hen as far away as they can sense a thunder storm, and they won't be ranging far until later on when the hens are out and around. At this time of year the roosters are so horny that they watch me like hawks to see when I am going to the hen house. They mob the door before the hens can get out, and if I let them in, the hens won't come off their perches. They were o.k. together until the hens retired for the winter and I had to separate them. Now they are like fundamentalist adolescents who all want the same thirty virgins, here and now.
Standing at the door with the hose turned on them, I can keep the cocks back ten or fifteen yards so the hens can graze between the hen house and their pond.....not much range......but it is increasing.
One of the Dominiker hens I am keeping in the Ark has gone broody and won't come off her nest, gets all bristly when I suggest it....but the eggs under her are not fertile. Her sister Olive, who is lame, asks to get out and will sometimes hop out on her own if I leave the roof up a bit, and she even offers herself to a rooster or two, but this brings on all the roosters, even the ones from down below, so I carry her through the orchard and on down the hedge row beyond the range of the roosters and sit down near a pheasant wallow, where she dusts her feathers then grazes around with the dogs, while I play the harmonica, or chew on grass myself. Not both, because I have screwed up too many harmonicas getting food in the reeds. Olive and the dogs both eat grass, but the dogs don't eat bugs and worms like she does. It is not true that dogs eat grass only if they are sick. It's part of a healthy diet, and sometimes bugs to but not worms. I don't see why, as the dogs are certainly carnivors and, if you haven't tried bugs or worms, they are are very good food, al dente or not.
Incidentally both the chickens and the dogs love spaghetti, though i don't know that it does them much good. Its the vermicelli effect I guess, but strangely enough you can't force it on the bass in Davey's ponds. They spit out the spaghetti like a lady spiting a worm and won't be fooled again. There is probably some accounting for taste, but don't ask me. Nutritional value might have something to do with it sometimes.
The hens love clover, particularly the white sweet clover which is a foot and a half high now and will be six feet high when it flowers. Seeing as the hens get out so little yet, I harvest it to scatter in the hen house. The plants are still quite tender. It makes their egg yolks almost orange. Davey contributes grated carrots.
Too bad about the murdered Dominiker, but this morning I heard a crowing from under the house and went to see that the rooster from down under has again been saved from the jaws of death.
Now there are twelve hens and fifteen roosters. Still too many roosters. Iit might be just as well if a bunch of them marched off to see the world and fight the war against the foreign invading coyotes. But the coyotes here, except for being creepy and scaring the shit out of the dogs, have been well behaved so far. That isn't to be expected, seeing as they have been snatching children in California