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for Ann

Early autumn, in the mountains of Colorado, a woman sits in the kitchen of her log cabin, alternately warming her hands on her mug and picking crusted mud from her worn jeans. She pulls back her thick hair, coarse and graying, and secures it in place. Through the screen door she eyes the pitchfork resting against a post.

She bows her head over her tea, inhaling the steam, asking the old question. All this tampering with nature, well. Others had begun their tampering long before she had. So was she doing the damage­­or undoing it? She pulls on her black waders and wonders what the creek will look like today. For a moment she watches sparrows flutter around the bird feeder. A hummingbird darts, drinks. Sunlight flashes on the tongs of the pitchfork, and she recalls the day she first took it up.

Walking the land as she regularly does, she had found the creek dammed. The beaver had rearranged things here again, just as they had for years on the two ponds. A community of about ten­­seven adults and perhaps three kits­­the beaver had been in the valley for decades, considerably longer than her time there. It had only been six years since she'd spent her life savings on this thirty­five­acre refuge. But over that time she had seen the birth and maturing of the kits, watched the clan's seasonal migration from one place to another on the ponds, listened to their felling of trees and gathering of stones for the dams. Even buried their bones.
She stepped to the place where one pond curved into the shape of a bulb, becoming ankle­deep. Kneeling, she deposited an offering on the narrow shore: small branches, twigs, fist­size rocks. She looked up to see three beaver drawing serpentine lines across the pond. The smallest, still a kit, veered playfully close to shore. Underbrush cracked. A wide, flat tail slapped the water, and the kit obediently retreated. The adults turned noiselessly and headed toward the shallow of the pond, where the woman squatted. She inched back, relinquishing her territory to them. Slowly, they had edged onto the shore, sniffing the air and each human­scented offering, then returned to the shallows. The woman had known that when she left they would steal away her gifts and use them, as they had many times before.

Returning to the creek, she saw the beaver had diverted the water in perhaps five places, turning parts of the nearby underbrush to bog. She'd marveled at such productivity­­each dam a monument to their instinctive creativity and determination­­and was unprepared for the lump in her throat. She'd sucked in her breath. They know exactly what they have to do in the world.

The creek that runs through her land and feeds the beaver ponds also feeds Smith Lake. At times she had managed ambivalence about the dust­raising traffic on the pitted road to the lake, about the constant stream of people who swam, sailed, and fished in it, even about the people who owned and profited from it. At other times she'd crankily scrutinized the invasion of her solitude by a world that seemed to want to name, tame, and charge admission to everything.

As she examined the first dam, she had felt a deep gnawing in her chest. This was more than a showcase of beaver ingenuity­­the new dam would likely become an obstruction to the lake. She had imagined what would happen as more dams slowly diverted the creeks feeding the lake, how the owners might go about protecting their interest in free­flowing water. As lake levels dwindled, someone would come to find out why.
She knew of a man who worked for the lake owners. Even though it had been raining on and off for a week, he had been here, exercising rights­of­way, checking levels and flows. She knew from his footprints, from awkwardly broken branches, from his residue in the light breeze. She had not been sure what kind of man he was, but certainly he would do his job.

Poison? No, probably traps. She had imagined where he might place them, hidden around the dams up and down the creek: cold, jagged, poised to strike. She'd had to sit down to calm the pounding in her stomach. She had remembered a late summer day years before, and the sight of the limp, dripping kit­­bleeding entrails and matted fur. But that trap had been gleaming canine teeth, not steel. It was she, after all, who had let her dogs run, and they had run true to their nature. She had long since found the dogs homes closer to civilization, but cautioned other visitors to the land. A weathered wooden sign, chipped and faded beneath the sun­bleached beaver skull announced, No Dogs Allowed. She had wanted to post a sign that read No People Allowed, and smiled at the thought that it might make her neighbors whisper. She's eccentric, you know. Maybe crazy.
She had made the decision, then­­for herself, for her dogs, for all the others who had never intended harm, but caused it nonetheless. And for the old beavers whose bones she had gathered in the moonlight and returned to moist, rotting earth to feed aspen roots, to become conifer limbs, to surrender to gnawing young beavers to stack in new beaver dams.

That first time, she had stepped deliberately through the thick brush, calf­high black waders alternately crunching and squishing into the dense ground cover. Eyes set downward, she had moved steadily over the earth, sometimes using the pitchfork she carried to help catapult her up inclines.

At midday she had stopped her work and leaned against the pitchfork, resting a glistening forehead on broad, gloved hands. Her chest heaved, her breath labored, she had watched the thin clouds form and quickly evaporate. She had surveyed her work­­the undoing­­and briefly wondered if they would understand. And set herself back to tearing down the dam.

The undoing: again and again she pitched into the moss­clumped mound, the heavy organic earthstew of silted quartz, feldspar, sandstone, shale, claystone; the gnawed and mud­packed aspen trunks, pine and fir branches set in layers crossways and at angles to one another. Droplets of her sweat mixed with the first slow trickle of creek water over the top of the dam. Suddenly she'd felt so light she let go her legs and fell back slowly, sinking in, euphoric, emptying her breath into waves of gurgling water and the clacking of crickets. She had just lain there, soaked under the bright October sky, sobbing.

Later, from a large rock outcropping above the valley, she'd watched the lake man as he examined the creek below. He walked it casually, stopping at several places along the bank where small logs, clumps of muddy moss and piles of twigs were strewn, not entirely haphazardly. All right, then, everything in order, maybe he'd thought. The rain had begun again, the man squinted at the sky as he turned to leave. She let out her breath slowly, but knew he would return. As she would.

She is startled by the beating of wings against the kitchen windowpane. A Stellar's jay has again mistaken the glass for sky, and she remembers to add decals to her shopping list for when she goes into town. She empties her mug and heads for her work at the creek.

Later that fall, she hears the lake man has died. She recalls the first time she had ever seen him, his red plaid shirt startling against the swaying forest. Through her binoculars she had come to know him as well as she ever would. She had often watched his small frame walking lightly through the thick brush, dwarfed by magnificent 12,000­foot peaks. Once he had crouched on his heels for a long time watching the beaver swim their casual z patterns across the ponds, and she had thought him a strangely kindred spirit. Perhaps, like her, he had seen shadows sifting through the forest of slender lodge pole pine, untamed spirits, the ancient ghosts on hind legs. Perhaps he had even heard them laughing.

Soon it will be winter, and the beaver will stay close to their communal hut. In the dormant time she will reseed the bird feeders, split wood, watch the sky for signs of snow. She will wait until the spring thaw, when the beaver are building again, to see who is sent down the dusty road from Smith Lake.

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