Beaver Dam Quotes

I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.

What a shame," signed the Dodecahedron. "They're so very useful. Why, did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one-foot tail?" "Where would you find a beaver that big?" grumbled the Humbug as his pencil point snapped. "I'm sure I don't know," he replied, "but if you did, you'd certainly know what to do with him." "That's absurd," objected Milo, whose head was spinning from all the numbers and questions. "That may be true," he acknowledged, "but it's completely accurate, and as long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong? If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself.

Why, did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one-foot tail?" "Where would you find a beaver that big?" grumbled the Humbug as his pencil point snapped. "I'm sure I don't know," he replied, "but if you did, you'd certainly know what to do with him.

A lot of the time I'd get that feeling like I was in the middle of a huge black ocean, or in deep space, but not in the fascinating way. It's just that everything was incredibly far away from me. It was worst at night. I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.

We don't use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English, but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something o the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set – or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set: say, a statue. If he is clever enough carver he may make a statue which is very like man indeed. But, of course, it is not a ream man; it only looks like one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive. Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Son's of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.

A forest is a living thing like a human body...each part dependent on all the other parts. A forest needs its birds, its beaver...all its animals and plants. The forest gives shelter to the birds, but they repay the debt with the insects they eat, the droppings they leave, the seeds they carry off to plant elsewhere. The beaver builds dams for himself, but the dams keep water on the land, and although the beaver cut trees to use and to eat, their ponds provide water for the trees during the hot, dry months....Listen, and you can hear the forest breath.

Hey, when two beavers walk into the house, the first one always tells the other one, “Hey, shut the dam door!

I have been seeing dragons again. Last night, hunched on a beaver dam, one held a body like a badly held cocktail; his tail, keeping the beat of a waltz, sent a morse of ripples to my canoe. They are not richly bright but muted like dawns or the vague sheen on a fly's wing. Their old flesh drags in folds as they drop into grey pools, strain behind a tree. Finally the others saw one today, trapped, tangled in our badminton net. The minute eyes shuddered deep in the creased face while his throat, strangely fierce, stretched to release an extinct burning inside: pathetic loud whispers as four of us and the excited spaniel surrounded him.

Sometimes ideas flow from my mind in a raging river of stringed sentences; I can scarcely scribble on the page fast enough to keep up with the mental current. Sometimes, however, beavers move in and dam the whole thing up.

Young people," McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out." "Yes, sir," Andrews said. "Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you--that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old." "No," Andrews said. A vague terror crept from the darkness that surrounded them, and tightened his voice. "That's not the way it is." "You ain't learned, then," McDonald said. "You ain't learned yet....look. You spend nearly a year of your life and sweat, because you have faith in the dream of a fool. And what have you got? Nothing. You kill three, four thousand buffalo, and stack their skins neat; and the buffalo will rot wherever you left them, and the rats will nest in the skins. What have you got to show? A year gone out of your life, a busted wagon that a beaver might use to make a dam with, some calluses on your hands, and the memory of a dead man." "No," Andrew said. "That's not all. That's not all I have." "Then what? What have you got?" Andrews was silent. "You can't answer. Look at Miller. Knows the country he was in as well as any man alive, and had faith in what he believed was true. What good did it do him? And Charley Hoge with his Bible and his whisky. Did that make your winter any easier, or save your hides? And Schneider. What about Schneider? Was that his name? "That was his name," Andrews said. "And that's all that's left of him," McDonald said. "His name. And he didn't even come out of it with that for himself." McDonald nodded, not looking at Andrews. "Sure, I know. I came out of it with nothing, too. Because I forgot what I learned a long time ago. I let the lies come back. I had a dream, too, and because it was different from yours and Miller's, I let myself think it wasn't a dream. But now I know, boy. And you don't. And that makes all the difference.

I don’t know why we keep building these fucking dams,” Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. “Not only do they cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, where they’ve all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They’re going to build another eighty of them. It’s just balmy. We must have beaver genes or something. . . . There’s just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out.

I’m no strumpet, you idiot. I was a virgin when you took me at the beaver dam.

The beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam: No, I didn't build it myself, but it's based on an idea of mine

an understatement ranked right up there with saying that a beaver might have a little trouble building a dam in the middle of a typhoon.

They also noticed that he now had a sort of modest expression on his face--the sort of look people have when you are visiting a garden they’ve made or reading a story they’ve written. So it was only common politeness when Susan said, “What a lovely dam!” And Ms. Beaver didn’t say “Hush” this time but “Merely a trifle! Merely a trifle! And it isn’t really finished!

Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Space ship? Of course. Were they built by naturally-evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?" I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. "You know what I mean." "It's a meaningless question. Get your head out of the Twentieth Century.

The beaver dam had been constructed on the ruins of a man-made one, built by the CCC back in the thirties and later dynamited by an irate Finn who'd objected to the government's meddling with nature.

We usually think of beavers as sweet little creatures who build dams, but that’s not how a constipated Renaissance man would view them; a constipated Renaissance man would view them as his relief and his cure. You see, the beaver has two sacs in his groin that contain a noxious and utterly disgusting oil that acts as a very effective laxative. This very valuable liquid was known as castor oil. The

When I hear that kind of thing,” he responded, “it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.

Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Spaceship? Of course. Were they built by naturally evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?

Then it was cooler and there was rain in the woods, the smell of leaf mold and mushrooms. The refreshed river hissed. He looked up at a sky that seemed set with rondels of thick glass. He found the brothers tearing out a beaver dam near their old hut on the Rivière des Fourres. Both brothers, muddy and glad to leave the beaver dam for a reunion, were in fair health though Toussaint’s beard showed white side streaks and Fernand groaned when he straightened up.

Kilby displayed his awshucks humility. “When I hear that kind of thing,” he responded, “it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.

Once that whole valley was sage scrub. Nothing more. Until one little beaver dammed a small stream.” Silence. Wind rustles through autumn grasses. “A small act,” he says quietly, “that reshaped the future.” He looks at Ash. “The past doesn’t always have to write the future.

Of all the odors of a camp, the smell of bacon reaches farthest in the forest. It needs no wind. It drifts on its own wings. On a still night a fox will sniff it a mile away—twice that far if the air is moving in the right direction. It was this smell of bacon that came to Baree where he lay in his hollow on top of the beaver dam.

Beavers will invent a new way of building dams before architects accept a new method or a new style in their art (23 August 1854).

Beavers give a dam

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere. A woman is not property, and husbands who think otherwise are living in a dreamworld. The second best thing about space travel is that the distances involved make war very difficult, usually impractical, and almost always unnecessary. This is probably a loss for most people, since war is our race’s most popular diversion, one which gives purpose and color to dull and stupid lives. But it is a great boon to the intelligent man who fights only when he must—never for sport. A zygote is a gamete’s way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe. There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who “love Nature” while deploring the “artificialities” with which “Man has spoiled ‘Nature.’ ” The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of “Nature”—but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers’ purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the “Naturist” reveals his hatred for his own race—i.e., his own self-hatred. In the case of “Naturists” such self-hatred is understandable; they are such a sorry lot. But hatred is too strong an emotion to feel toward them; pity and contempt are the most they rate. As for me, willy-nilly I am a man, not a beaver, and H. sapiens is the only race I have or can have. Fortunately for me, I like being part of a race made up of men and women—it strikes me as a fine arrangement and perfectly “natural.” Believe it or not, there were “Naturists” who opposed the first flight to old Earth’s Moon as being “unnatural” and a “despoiling of Nature.

I started inventing things, and then I couldn’t stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it’s because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn’t constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That’s how my brain was.

If two beavers working on the same dam have different genes for dam height, the resulting extended phenotype will reflect the interaction between the genes, in the same way as bodies reflect gene interactions.

What do you consider the most interesting man-made structure in the galaxy? The dam they are building at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse. Though perhaps '“baffling'” would be a better word. Dams almost never do what they were intended to do, but create devastation beyond belief. And yet we keep on building them, and I can'’t help but wonder why. I'’m convinced that if we go back far enough in the history of the human species, we will find some beaver genes creeping in there somewhere. It'’s the only explanation that makes sense.

Just below them a dam had been built across this river; and when they saw it everyone suddenly remembered that of course beavers are always making dams and felt quite sure that Mr. Beaver had made this one. They also noticed that he now had a sort of modest expression on his face--the sort of look people have when you are visiting a garden they’ve made or reading a story they’ve written. So it was only common politeness when Susan said, “What a lovely dam!” And Mr. Beaver didn’t say “Hush” this time but “Merely a trifle! Merely a trifle! And it isn’t really finished!

If two beavers working on the same dam have different genes for dam height, the resulting extended phenotype will reflect the interaction between genes, in the same way as bodies reflect the gene interactions. There could be extended genetic analogues of epistasis, of modifier genes, even of dominance and recessiveness.

One of the reasons concealment is so important is because animals live in the woods and humans only visit the wild. Animals make their homes throughout the woods. Just like I’m alert to someone pulling up in my driveway or walking through my yard, wild animals are highly sensitive to trespassers. During one scouting trip at a beaver pond on Phil’s property, I saw the biggest beaver hut I’d ever seen. It was probably thirty feet tall! It wasn’t a very cool day, and I was kind of hot from all the walking. For whatever reason, I decided I was going to crawl into the beaver hut to see what was inside of it. I started trying to nudge my way into a bunch of different holes in the beaver dam, and I finally found one that was big enough for me on the back side of it. I was amazed at how the inside of the beaver hut looked. Compared to the chaos on the outside, it was like it was furnished on the inside. As I was breaking limbs, punching holes, and digging into it, I heard something growling! I turned around and there was a thirty-pound beaver standing about three feet from me. It was on its hind legs in the kill position. I remember thinking, Man, I’ve got to get out of here! Fortunately, I escaped from the beaver before it could get its teeth into me. It was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done.

That story, of course, isn’t unique to California, or to beavers. Europeans began despoiling North American ecosystems the moment they set boots on the stony shore of the New World. You’re probably familiar with most of the colonists’ original environmental sins: They wielded an ax against every tree, lowered a net to catch every fish, turned livestock onto every pasture, churned the prairie to dust. In California’s Sierra Nevada, nineteenth-century gold miners displaced so much sediment that the sludge could have filled the Panama Canal eight times.14 We are not accustomed to discussing the fur trade in the same breath as those earth-changing industries, but perhaps we should. The disappearance of beavers dried up wetlands and meadows, hastened erosion, altered the course of countless streams, and imperiled water-loving fish, fowl, and amphibians—an aquatic Dust Bowl. Centuries before the Glen Canyon Dam plugged up the Colorado and the Cuyahoga burst into flame, fur trappers were razing stream ecosystems. “[Beavers’] systematic and widespread removal,” wrote Sharon Brown and Suzanne Fouty in 2011, “represents the first large-scale Euro-American alteration of watersheds.

In 1995, the gray wolf was reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after a seventy-year hiatus. Scientists expected an ecological ripple effect, but the size and scope of the trophic cascade took them by surprise.7 Wolves are predators that kill certain species of animals, but they indirectly give life to others. When the wolves reentered the ecological equation, it radically changed the behavioral patterns of other wildlife. As the wolves began killing coyotes, the rabbit and mouse populations increased, thereby attracting more hawks, weasels, foxes, and badgers. In the absence of predators, deer had overpopulated the park and overgrazed parts of Yellowstone. Their new traffic patterns, however, allowed the flora and fauna to regenerate. The berries on those regenerated shrubs caused a spike in the bear population. In six years’ time, the trees in overgrazed parts of the park had quintupled in height. Bare valleys were reforested with aspen, willow, and cottonwood trees. And as soon as that happened, songbirds started nesting in the trees. Then beavers started chewing them down. Beavers are ecosystem engineers, building dams that create natural habitats for otters, muskrats, and ducks, as well as fish, reptiles, and amphibians. One last ripple effect. The wolves even changed the behavior of rivers—they meandered less because of less soil erosion. The channels narrowed and pools formed as the regenerated forests stabilized the riverbanks. My point? We need wolves! When you take the wolf out of the equation, there are unintended consequences. In the absence of danger, a sheep remains a sheep. And the same is true of men. The way we play the man is by overcoming overwhelming obstacles, by meeting daunting challenges. We may fear the wolf, but we also crave it. It’s what we want. It’s what we need. Picture a cage fight between a sheep and a wolf. The sheep doesn’t stand a chance, right? Unless there is a Shepherd. And I wonder if that’s why we play it safe instead of playing the man—we don’t trust the Shepherd. Playing the man starts there! Ecologists recently coined a wonderful new word. Invented in 2011, rewilding has a multiplicity of meanings. It’s resisting the urge to control nature. It’s the restoration of wilderness. It’s the reintroduction of animals back into their natural habitat. It’s an ecological term, but rewilding has spiritual implications. As I look at the Gospels, rewilding seems to be a subplot. The Pharisees were so civilized—too civilized. Their religion was nothing more than a stage play. They were wolves in sheep’s clothing.8 But Jesus taught a very different brand of spirituality. “Foxes have dens and birds have nests,” said Jesus, “but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”9 So Jesus spent the better part of three years camping, fishing, and hiking with His disciples. It seems to me Jesus was rewilding them. Jesus didn’t just teach them how to be fishers of men. Jesus taught them how to play the man! That was my goal with the Year of Discipleship,

Subsequently, the Nevada road beaver has adapted to the lack of rivers in Nevada by damming roads instead. Then, once a car stops for the dam, the beavers viciously savage whoever gets out of it, steal all their stuff, hijack the car, and drive it to a place that has an undammed river and non-radioactive air, like, say, Canada, then spend the stolen money on piña coladas that they then happily drink in the warm Canadian sun.

Almost since the beginning of recorded history, humans have seen themselves as separate from the natural world. We divide the planet into two categories: things influenced by human action and things that are untouched. The distinction is false. On a global scale we can see that the constant progress of industry has had a dramatic effect on the climate. The humanizing influence of our carbon footprint affects everything. The year that I’m writing this, 2016, is set to be the hottest ever recorded, expected to top the 10 record-breaking years before it. The scale of the problem indicates that humanity and the environment are intrinsically linked. But does that mean we’re making the world more human? Or does it mean that humanity has been part of nature all along? The tiny muscles around your arteries have one unambiguous answer to that question. Despite everything that we try to do to separate ourselves from the world around us, humans are still indisputably part of nature. As byproducts of evolution, the skyscrapers, plastics, and automobiles we manufacture are no less “natural” than a termite mound, a honeycomb, or a beaver dam. Yes, the actions that humans make may be significantly more destructive or ambitious or awe-inspiring or futile, but they are all part of a greater system of causes and effects. We are still animals. Just very smart ones.

When I arrived at the river, I sat on the bank for a while just looking at the water level and considering my options. I could camp on the riverbank and wait for the level to drop, which would take a least one day; I could walk down to the highway and back up to the opposite bank—a 15-mile detour; or I could find another place to cross. I scouted up and down the river for a while, looking for a better place to cross, and secondarily, for a nice campsite. In the end, I came back to the crossing and sat there for a while, looking at the beaver dam which people normally walk on to cross this river. One third of the dam had washed out completely and the river was pouring through here faster than the section that was overflowing the dam outright. None of this was good.

One of Haldeman's methods of operation, the reporters knew, was 'deniability.' This was the device of insulating himself from controversial decisions by implementing them through others so that, later, he could deny involvement... Deniability was the rule in the White House staff system; the bosses stood behind an impenetrable beaver dam. If Haldeman stood behind Watergate, it was unlikely he had left tracks.

Nature is harsh. It doesn’t give crowns to those who create the best but to the ones who can destroy the most. Beavers can build dams as much as they want, but bears will always rule the forest.

long-ago memory. It was spring. I was eight years old. Bulldozers had recently cleared a patch of forest behind our house in the suburbs of Olympia to make room for a new subdivision. Maxine and I were forbidden to play in the tangle of felled trees, but of course we did. What kids wouldn’t? It was a gigantic fort full of nooks and crannies and passageways. We nicknamed it the Beaver Dam. One afternoon Max and I had been

Furthermore, man is, by his instincts and his inherited dispositions, predestined to a social existence beyond the intimate family circle. Society must be conceived, therefore, as a part of nature, like a beaver's dam or the nests of birds.

As Jasper, Major Craven, and Old Tug skirt the pond toward the beaver dam, Becky says to me, “I must be a better cook than I thought!” I blink. “It must be from all the practice.” I step forward to grab the table, just like I’ve done hundreds of times, but I stop short, laughing. “What’s so funny?” Becky asks. “I was about to put the table away in the wagon. Then I remembered we don’t have a wagon anymore.” She grins.

stayed busier than a beaver during dam season,

Have you ever had a “worst mom ever” day? Take heart, so have we all. Take my friend’s advice. Apologize to your children. Ask God for forgiveness. Get over it and stop letting Satan drag you down. Spend time with the Lord getting a new attitude, and He’ll help you leave the dams to the beavers!

Beavers hate the sound of running water; that’s partly why they build dams

There you are at last, girl,” said Great Aunt Sullana. “Your hair looks as though beavers had abandoned a dam there. Your face is smudged. Did you spend the morning rolling in dust? Never mind, Zavaedi Abiono is doing us the great honor of a visit. Comb your hair and wash your face before you join us. This is a kitchen, not a den of bears.

By felling poplars and willows to build dams, beavers single-handedly transform temperate forests into wetlands, which then attract and support a remarkable array of neighbors: pileated woodpeckers drilling nesting cavities into dead trees; wood ducks and Canada geese settling in abandoned beaver lodges; herons and kingfishers and swallows enjoying the benefits of the “artificial” pond, along with frogs, lizards, and other slow-water species like dragonflies, mussels, and aquatic beetles. As do those underwater colonies of coral, the beaver creates a platform that sustains an amazingly diverse assemblage of life.

And the beavers. They lived in big dams like brownstones or Tudors in Boston or New York. Whole cities of them, gathering up twigs, mixing mortar, patting it down with their tails, all split up into little groups of labor. Smart animals, the beavers. Some of them grew to five feet tall, but they've all been killed off already, the first to go when the white hunters arrived. Well

Other than showing up in white tie and tails for the lavish awards ceremonies—the event is so fancy that even the traffic cops outside wear tuxedos, and the sterling silver laid out for the ensuing banquet is never used for any other function—a Nobel laureate’s only unavoidable duty during prize week is to deliver a lecture. Jack Kilby’s Nobel lecture in physics took place in a classically Scandinavian lecture hall, all blond wood and sleek modern furniture, on the campus of Stockholm University. Jack was introduced by a Swedish physicist who noted that “Dr. Kilby’s” invention had launched the global digital revolution, making possible calculators, computers, digital cameras, pacemakers, the Internet, etc., etc. Naturally, Jack wasn’t going to let that go unanswered. “When I hear that kind of thing,” he said, “it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.’” Everybody liked that joke, so Jack quickly added that he had borrowed the story from Charles H. Townes, an American who won the physics prize in 1964.

The term “niche construction,” first used widely by biologist Richard Lewontin, the Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, represents the process by which an organism alters its own (or another species’) environment to help increase its chances of survival. A beaver building a dam and a spider spinning a web are examples of niche construction. So is a bird building its nest or a rabbit burrowing a hole. When animals migrate, they are seeking a favorable niche within which to flourish. Each of these activities assists the organism in achieving its basic needs—gathering food, protecting offspring, keeping clear of prey, seeking shelter from inclement weather—and thus raising the likelihood that it will pass its genes on to the next generation. Scientists are just beginning to appreciate that niche construction may be as important to evolution as natural selection. In the book Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution, Oxford lecturer F. John Odling-Smee and his colleagues write, “Niche construction should be regarded, after natural selection, as a second major participant in evolution. Rather than acting as an ‘enforcer’ of natural selection through the standard physically static elements of, for example, temperature, humidity, or salinity, because of the actions of organisms, the environment will be viewed here as changing and coevolving with the organisms on which it acts selectively.”17 What this can mean for neurodiverse individuals is that instead of always having to adapt to a static, fixed, or “normal” environment, it’s possible for them (and their caregivers) to alter the environment to match the needs of their own unique brains. In this way, they can be more of who they really are.

At the start of the seemingly enchanted, ink-blotched forest, light leaked through the treetops as rays, like tiny streams of water through a beaver dam. He would, on occasion, stop and stare through the opening to remind himself what the sky looked like. Unfortunately, where Holt found himself further, whatever leaked through the analogous dam that existed previously, had been patched up. He could not see rays, but only mere photons clinging to the rough surface of tree bark and the tips of pine needles. The bright specks resembled what he imagined fairies to look like, their wings somewhere hidden in the blurry light bubble that surrounded them. His slight astigmatism made the creature’s detail much more amorphous.

education C.S. Lewis makes many references to education in his fiction. Experiment House*, for instance, in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”*, embodies his dislike of modern educational methods. In his opinion Mark Studdock*, in That Hideous Strength*, is characteristic of many of Lewis’s contemporary intelligensia – uneducated by classical standards. Judged only by his satire, however, Lewis would seem intensely prejudiced. This is misleading. His powerful essay The Abolition of Man* suggested that anti-human values were being unwittingly embodied in some typical school textbooks of his time. Lewis nowhere more clearly put forward his vision of education than in his early essay “Our English Syllabus” in Rehabilitations and Other Essays*. He confesses: “Human life means to me the life of beings for whom the leisured activities of thought, art, literature, conversation are the end, and the preservation and propagation of life merely the means. That is why education seems to me so important: it actualizes that potentiality for leisure, if you like for amateurishness, which is man’s prerogative... Man is the only amateur animal; all the others are professionals… The lion cannot stop hunting, nor the beaver building dams… When God made the beasts dumb He saved the world from infinite boredom…

Yet beavers are as balletic in water as they are clumsy out of it. They can hold their breath for up to fifteen minutes, and their underwater gymnastics are powered by webbed hind feet. Transparent eyelids allow them to see below the surface, while a second set of fur-lined lips close behind their teeth, permitting them to chew and drag wood without drowning. Building dams expands the extent of beavers’ watery domains, submerges lodge entrances to repel predators, and gives them a place to stash their food caches. Ponds also serve to irrigate water-loving trees like willow, allowing beavers to operate as rotational farmers: They’ll chew down vegetation in one corner of their compound while cultivating their next crop in another.

What does “beaver dammed” even mean?” “The female version of cockblocked, and seeing as you’re Canadian, I thought beaver was doubly appropriate.

He used to tell me stories while we fished. Ones he made up, I guess, I’m not sure. One year, a beaver family dammed the brook and built a lodge. He made up stories about them, very 'Wind in the Willows' stuff. He used to tell me that the fish were water spirits, or lost mermaids, or nixies; it was always something different. So, we always threw the fish back. He said it would bring us luck.

When Michigan officials say, “No building without a permit,” they mean it. That’s what Stephen Tvedten found out when he received a letter from state officials demanding that he “cease and desist” the construction of two dams on his property. Trouble was, it wasn’t Tvedten building the dams—it was a family of beavers. Fortunately, the state dropped its concerns once an investigator examined the situation more closely. “It probably would have been a good idea to do the inspection before we sent the notice,” one official said.