Bruce Grierson – on the war on beavers (English version).

Vancouver, B.C.
November 28, 2000

Dear Paul,

My brother-in-law, Dennis, has a heads-up, skeptical nature – some might call it paranoia – that I’ve come to tolerate and even respect. But I wasn’t prepared for what he said to me when I visited him and my sister, Carol, last August:

“I think the beavers are trying to do me in.”

Every single summer for the past nineteen years, the basement of Dennis and Carol’s home in the Alberta countryside has flooded. Always the water laps up to within about a thumbswidth of the top of the furnace-pad, threatening to cause an electrical short, leaving them without power, or worse.

And every year Dennis develops a more sharply focussed rage at the source of the problem. I should tell you that he is a psychologist in private practice. Rage is not in his nature. Rage isn’t rational, and it isn’t constructive – unless you happen to be fighting a war.

Dennis and Carol moved to their acre and a half to escape the frustrations and horrible mall culture of the city. To raise their kids in peace, in nature. And at first it looked like peace is what they’d found. I can remember how thrilled Dennis was to discover, on his first walk around the property, a lake – still and blue and big enough to canoe on. He actually said, “It doesn’t get much more Canadian than this.”

He was wrong. It did get more Canadian. The lake was home to beavers.

I should say at this point that the saga of my brother-in-law and the beavers has reached mythic status in our family. But until my last visit, most of us had only heard bits and pieces of it. For some reason, on this particular night, Dennis was burning to tell the whole thing. My job was to listen.

The first beaver Dennis spotted was – ominously – dead. But soon he began to see the extended family, arrowing in across the water, “just as the day was coming to twilight.”

The scene put Dennis in mind of Grey Owl, the professional Indian (who was really an Englishman), bonding with the animals in the prairie wilderness. In full Grey Owl mode, Dennis started sitting by the lake, perfectly still, giving off good vibes, until the beavers got used to him, or forgot about him, and came near. He watched their reflections in the lake. He looked at their dark eyes and stained yellow teeth from “as close as you are to me now.” He felt a little bit of awe. No thoughtful Canadian can contemplate a beaver without thinking about its place in the chain of our colonial history: this country was literally built on the beaver’s back.

“I was out there admiring them day after day,” Dennis said. “Then the water started coming into my basement.

“I began connecting the dots.” He hitched out a thumb. “Our house was in the middle of a flat field, yet there was a lake on it.” Index finger. “The lake appeared to be getting bigger, yet it hadn’t rained.” Middle finger. “The beaver population seemed to be growing.”

Sorry: I need to tell you a few things about beavers.

- A beaver can take down a poplar as thick as an ax-handle in one bite.

- Beavers are workaholics: You can destroy their dam in the evening and a new one will be there to greet you in the morning.

- Beavers are smart.

- Beavers are territorial.

- Beavers have a vestigial memory that they were here first.

Because he is a sensitive man, and because his daughter, Kerri, had made it clear no beavers were to be harmed in the making of this particular movie, Dennis decided he had to develop a way to deal with the problem that everybody could live with.

He’d read somewhere that beavers were repelled by mothballs, so he bought a big bag of them and he went to the creek. After he’d broken down the beavers’ dam, he scattered the mothballs liberally on the bank. The beavers were undeterred. They showed up for work as usual and built their dam back up. There were actually footprints on the mothballs where the beavers had trudged over them.

“So I bought a length of plastic tubing. This is something a friend who’s an animal-rights person had suggested. It’s humane and it’s supposed to be effective. You punch a hole in the dam and shove the tube in, the way a surgeon puts a drain in a wound. The water runs right through the dam. Or that’s the theory.”

“Didn’t work?” I said.

He shook his head. “The beavers built a little peninsula of mud around the pipe. They plugged it.”

Dennis called up the county for advice. It turned out the county had a beaver patrol department, and they sent a guy out with a trap.

A beaver trap is a sort of spring-loaded metal jaw that sits, cocked and open, in the predicted path of the beaver, and snaps shut as the animal swims through. The first trap the guy laid actually did catch a beaver. But it quickly became clear that the county’s approach to beaver control was laid-back at best. “They treat beavers as a sustainable resource,” Dennis said. “They never want to kill them all, because that would put them out of work. So they take a beaver here and a beaver there and then pat themselves on the back.” In truth, it’s doubtful the beaver-patrol guy could have caught many more beavers if he’d tried, because the beavers very quickly learned the ropes.

Less than twenty-four hours after the beaver-patrol guy laid his second trap, Dennis went down to the creek. The trap was gone. In its place was a fresh new dam. Dennis waded into the water and started breaking it up, “and then my shovel hit something metal.” There was the trap, gleaming between the poplar branches. The beavers had simply incorporated it into their project. Dennis dug the trap out and flung it toward the creek bank. Just as it left his fingers – “bang!” – it snapped shut. A trap designed to snap the neck of a beaver could certainly break the arm of a man; this one almost had. The implications sank in. Not only had they built the dam around the trap, they hadn’t even sprung it. “That,” said Dennis, “is when I began to get scared.”

In his counselling work, Dennis often uses stories he hears as therapeutic aids, and the tale of man against beaver – internecine, interspecies stubbornness in the Canadian North (involving the national symbol, no less) – ought to be ripe with usable metaphors. But Dennis refuses to see the symbolism. This thing is too personal.

Dennis owns a gun – a .22 rifle. Perhaps it was appropriate, even necessary, to have a gun on the farm where he grew up, but it seemed stupid and un-Canadian to own one in the city. He hadn’t used it in ages. As he walked to the creek, it felt foreign in his hands.

He tried to psych himself up for the job. “You can do this,” he said to himself. “Be the man. Be the hunter.” From a distance, he could see a beaver dutifully working on a new dam. As he walked closer, levelling the gun at the beaver, “I thought of that story of the soldier in Nazi Germany, who said, ‘The hardest to kill was the first one. After that, the hardest to kill were the next 10. After that, the hardest to kill were the next 100.’”

I asked Dennis how Kerri had responded when she learned her father had put a bullet in a beaver. “She was in tears,” he said. “She thought I was Attila the Hun,” They named the creek Kerri Creek, after their daughter’s Dian-Fossey-like defense of the animals.

Dennis stepped up his patrols after that. Rain or shine he’d be out there in his green down vest and duckboots and rifle, mosquitoes eating him alive. The only thing missing from the picture was the Elmer Fudd cap. Over time, he wore a visible path through the woods to the creek.

People who study beavers find it remarkable that they almost always manage to cut down trees within falling distance of water, since they have such poor eyesight. “They’re looking up from ground level – it’s amazing they’re that accurate,” Dennis said. “If the whole tree doesn’t fall in, at least part of it does. They never cut down trees anywhere else. Okay? Remember that when I tell you that I’m on my way to the creek, and there in the middle of the trail – nowhere near the water – three fallen trees have come down over the path.” Not onto the path, but snarled in the branches and hanging precariously, like traps set by the Viet Cong.

At this point you may be feeling a surge of sympathy for the beavers. I confess that as Dennis reached this point in the story, I was. But I also know I’d feel differently if it were my home that were threatened.

Every year, the do-no-harm position adopted by Carol and Kerri and her sister Kathleen softens. Carrying soggy boxes out of the basement and wrestling with a pump compressor will do that to you. “With Kerri, it used to be, ‘Dad, do you have no heart?’” Dennis said. “Now it’s, ‘Dad, did you kill the damn beaver yet?’ Over time, they all got converted, every one of them.”

To his credit, Dennis has himself come full-circle on the issue of non-violence. His current system of beaver management is one of early intervention. Twice a day, he walks the creek. “A beaver will float a stick down the river and then come back later and see if it’s got stuck anywhere. If it has, that’s a good place to start building. So any twig that looks like it’s been sitting there more than an hour, I scoop up.

“The whole key is to move fast. If you knock a beaver dam out within twenty-four hours, they’ll fight for that spot for a day or two, and then they’ll move away, downriver. But if you let them get a beachhead, they’ll fight you for months.”

I think it was good therapy for Dennis to talk about this. I know it was good therapy to hear it. But I must admit that, since arriving back home in Vancouver, I’ve been a little worried for the guy. As long as he and my sister live on that acreage, they will have no rest. I keep half-waiting for Dennis to tell me the beavers have been tapping his phone.

All the best,

Bruce.