ely did they forsake a
home site once established. In the same sections, where the
homesteaders had used aspen for their fence posts, the beavers, no
doubt mistaking them for trees, cut them down. Sometimes their pluck
and persistence won them the admiration of their enemies. In most
cases they won out.

One day, far up near the headwaters of the Cache la Podre River in
Colorado, I came upon a rancher trying to drain a number of beaver
ponds to secure water for irrigation; it was a very dry season and
water was scarce. During the day he tore gaps in the dams, during the
night the beavers repaired the breaks. When after opening the dams the
rancher hurried down to his fields to regulate the flow of water, the
beavers, even in the daytime, would swarm forth and plug up the holes.

Finally in desperation, the man set traps in the gaps he had opened in
the dams. He caught a few beavers and decided that his troubles were
over. But the survivors met the emergency. They floated material down
from above and wedged it into the breaks, without going near the traps.

At this stage of the struggle an old prospector came down from the
higher mountains, driving his burros ahead of him. Hearing of the
rancher's predicament, he suggested his own panacea for all troubles,
dynamite. Enthusiastically, the rancher accepted his proposal. Soon
the dams were in ruins.

A mile below where the dams had been destroyed an irrigation ditch
tapped the river and carried a full head to the green fields. I saw
the rancher standing in the middle of the field, water flowing all
about him. He looked upstream and chuckled, then leaned triumphantly
on his shovel handle. For a long time, he leaned thus, lost in dreams
of prosperity.

Suddenly he awoke and hurried along his supply ditch. Barely a trickle
was coming down it. The beavers had dammed the intake.

I once worked for a rancher who had a homestead on the North Fork of
the St. Vrain River, which heads south of Long's Peak. He had just
finished clearing a patch of ground to raise "truck" on.

"We've got to get rid of some beaver," he told me the very first day.
He shouldered his shovel and walked down to the dam that sprawled
across the meadow for several hundred feet.

"I cut her loose," he informed me on his return. "She'll soon dry out
so we can put in the crop."

Next morning, whistling happily, he started out for the meadow. His
whistle died away as he caught sight o