GREY OWL, BROWN BEAVERS

While the beaver, writ large, is central to the story of Canada, no individual beavers are better known than Jelly Roll and Rawhide. Their tale is interwoven with that of Archibald Belaney, the Englishman who called himself Grey Owl, so the facts can be slippery. The most common version says that Belaney caught the kits’ mother in his trapline. His Mohawk partner, Gertrude Bernard, persuaded him to spare the little rodents, who became pets. A 1930 National Film Board short, Beaver Family, even chronicled their lodge-building skills. Jelly Roll and Rawhide lived with Belaney and Bernard, first in Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park and then in Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan. Grey Owl is seen above, feeding one of the baby beavers from a bottle. The bark-chewing duo probably inspired the human couple’s work to conserve Canada’s national animal.