Publisher's Synopsis
With the kind of feeling generally reserved for more photogenic animals, Mills describes here the world of beavers, their unusual pacificism and vegetarianism, their engineering feats, their better-than-human conservation of natural resources. Mills estimates that there were as many as one hundred million beavers in North America at the beginning of the seventeenth century, just before the Hudson's Bay Company made capital of their pelts. He shows that no animal ever contributed more to civilization or was itself more civilized.