Asakiyume mita

Perhaps you're in the mood for a change of pace?

We went for a walk through a landscape transformed by beavers. It's always been marshy; they have turned it into their own habitat. There are frogs in here, and red-winged blackbirds flying over the reedy parts, and redstarts singing in the skunk-cabbage parts.





We saw a great tree, SO TALL, that will soon be down:



Evidence (pond-facing side):



Some extra gnawing (trail-facing side):



Again, that tree is TALL:



So think of beavers. There was no pond before but there is a pond now.

wakanomori and I went on a New Year's walk yesterday, and we saw signs of beavers



And out in the lake was the beaver lodge:



"What do you think it's like on the inside of the beaver lodge?" Wakanomori asked last night, when we were heading to bed.

"Well, I'm sure there's a sewing machine," I said.

More broadly, something like this. Excuse the blurring on the left--I scanned this Pauline Baynes illustration from my copy of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe



Here, courtesy of the University of Vermont, is what it's more likely to look like:



(More pictures here.)

And here's a diagram from liviniginthewetlands.pbworks.com:


... If people lived in beaver lodges, then C.S. Lewis's imagination would be perfect. But for beavers themselves, the lodge as it is is cozy and just right. Imagine beaver stories that conceive of humans as beaver-pomorphized creatures, still living in dry-land houses, yes, but with moats all around them so the humano-beavers can get in swimming, because what kind of life doesn't have swimming, and of course humano-beavers will eat like beaver-beavers, a diet of the soft bits of trees like willows and aspens, as well as water plants like cattails--but not fish. (Sorry, C.S. Lewis; beavers don't fish or eat fish.) Humano-beavers, like beaver-beavers, will, in beaver children's tales, mate for life, and both parents will devotedly raise their offspring.