Perhaps the most characteristic animal of this region was and is still the beaver, though the beaver is found all over British North America as far north as the Saskatchewan province and westwards into British Columbia.
It is curious that the Indians of central Canada had a belief (recorded by French and English pioneers) that occasionally in the dusk, or at night, they have seen an enormously large beaver in the water, so large that at first sight they have taken it for a moose. Travellers who have related this have surmised that the Indian perhaps saw a bear swimming, or a female moose, and in the dim light mistook it for a giant beaver. But as we know that there were once giant beavers (_Trogontherium_) as large as a bear, existing in England, it is just possible there may have been a gigantic type of beaver lingering in Canada before the opening up of the country by Europeans.
The beaver of North America is a very similar animal to the beaver which used to exist wild in Wales, England, France, Germany, and central Europe, and which still lingers in some parts of the Rhine valley, Poland, Russia, and Siberia; but the American form is classified as a separate species--_Castor canadensis_.
Beavers were sometimes exterminated or diminished in numbers by an epidemic disease, which, according to JAMES TANNER[10], destroyed vast quantities of them.
[Footnote 10: A remarkable eighteenth-century pioneer who joined the Indians when a boy and lived as one of them.]
"I found them dead or dying in the water, on the ice, and on the land; sometimes I found one that, having cut a tree half down, had died at its roots; sometimes one who had drawn a stick of timber halfway to his lodge was lying dead by his burthen. Many of them which I opened were red and bloody about the heart. Those in large rivers and running water suffered less; almost all of those that lived in ponds and stagnant water, died. Since that year the beaver have never been so plentiful in the country of Red River and Hudson's Bay as they used formerly to be."
The great attraction which Canada offered to France and England as a field of adventure lay in its wonderful supply of furs. The beaver skins were perhaps the commonest article of export, and were generally regarded as a unit of value, such as a shilling might be. Other skins were valued at "so many beavers," or the smaller ones at half or a quarter of a beaver each. Besides beaver skins, which were used for making hats, as well as capes and coats, the following furs and skins were formerly, or are still, exported from Canada. "Buffalo" robes--the carefully rubbed-down hides of the bison, rendered, by shaving and rubbing, so thin and supple that they could be easily folded; reindeer and musk-ox skins treated in the same way; marten or sable skins; mink (a kind of polecat); ermine (the white winter dress of the stoat); the fishing marten, or pekan; otter skins; black bear and white polar bear skins; raccoon, muskwash, squirrel, suslik, and marmot skins, and the soft white fur of the polar hare; the white skins of the Arctic fox, the skins of the blue fox, black fox, and red fox;[11] wolf skins, and the furs of the wolverene or glutton, and of the skunk--a handsome black-and-white creature of the weasel family, which emits a most disgusting smell from a gland in its body. (The skunk only comes from the south-central parts of the Canadian Dominion). At one time a good many swans' skins were exported for the sake of the down between the feathers, also the skins of grebes.