BEAVER AND OTHER VILLIANS OF THE NIGHT
Honesty, being necessary prelude to any frank discussion, I must admit right up front that I’m a fishaholic. But not like I used to be. Nope. I’ve got it under control these days. Ask anyone. But, don’t ask my wife. With her it is safer not to broach the subject.
That being said, one must note that I had much less self control in my youth. In those days trout fishing occupied virtually all useful areas of my brain, leaving little room for things like Mathematics, or English or History. Biology somehow gained a foothold, though, particularly the aquatic aspects of the field.
When I passed twelve years old that broadened a bit to encompass girls. But girls never did manage to supersede trout’s hold on me, even if the distraction was occasionally responsible for a neglected back cast settling lazily along the ground behind me.
Things seem to have evolved this way due to the combination of a wildly successful first trout fishing adventure and the fact that we lived in an area devoid of trout.
The Earth can be generally classified into two broad categories: Trout country and Troutless country. The San Francisco Bay Area was troutless. Stripers and catfish provided some diversion, but only when Dad could spare the time to drive me out to the levees for an afternoon.
Now, as any reasonable psychiatrist knows, an addiction insatiated is powerful in its affect on the victim’s behavior. With me the affect was pronounced in that whenever the rare opportunity of a mountain fishing trip did present itself I approached the project with maniacal passion, allowing almost nothing to interrupt my fishing time.
I utilized virtually every second of the day, barely pausing to chew my lunch. Time lost its meaning as the day zoomed by. Bright morning sunlight quickly gave way to lengthening afternoon shadows, which soon engulfed the river and began crawling up the eastern canyon walls. Then the first coolness of the coming evening would begin wafting down from higher up, redoubling my sense of urgency and the need to fish as much as I could, while I still could.
But eventually the fading light made casting more difficult, the dimples caused by rising trout became invisible except in places where the sky’s dimming reflection still shown. Inevitably, the moment would come when I could no longer untangle my line or tie on a new fly....and it was dark.
Being born and bred a young man of the suburbs the darkened woods now presented a problem, mainly on account of spooks. The setting sun signaled the awakening of nocturnal creatures to this day only vaguely described in obscure scientific journals, by scholars with names such as Grimm and Poe. Soon I’d begin to catch fleeting glimpses of lurking trolls, and the river began burbling in tongues.
Though during the day I bravely plundered forest and stream, at night I turned a pale shade of yellow which, I was certain, increased my visibility to bears.
Now, of course, the fortunes or misfortunes of the day’s fishing would add to the mix.By this time I'd be tired, hungry and usually bug bitten. Most likely I’d be shivering in the evening coolness, my clothes anywhere from damp to drenched from various adventures while wading. And, inevitably, I’d still be a considerable distance from the car, or camp. Retracing my steps often involved at least one of those more challenging night time creek crossings.
Posing no problem in daylight, the mountain waters were clear, clean and generally wadable. But at night the water became opaque, black ink that hid the deep spots and understated the various treacheries of its course.
Sometimes I had to backtrack up or down stream, carrying a stringer full of bear bait, to a place I thought might be shallow only to discover it wasn’t....disastrously.
But eventually I’d make it back, sometimes homing in on a honking horn, or maybe a distant lantern orbited furiously by bugs. Often the nightly beacon would be my dad shouting my name with increasing urgency.
My cousin Ron was frequently in the vicinity during these adventures and I was always thankful for his calming presence. For a country boy, though, Ron had surprisingly little understanding of the terrors around him in the night, and little patience for those who did. He was always entertaining me with his ignorance.
“Shut up, you idiot!”, he’d say. “There are no aliens out here!”
I could only respond with a knowing smirk and a sad shake of the head.
But of course aliens were only the tip of the iceberg. A plethora of rustle critters inhabited those woods. Rustle critters, as you probably know, are those unseen animals whose study of applied acoustics allows even the tiniest of them to make the most worrisome noises. Once nature’s night time amplifiers are energized in the forest, rustle critter karaoke reverberates throughout the woods. And rustle critters are invisible, though they are rumored to come in all shapes and sizes, some even as big as deer.
Digressing a bit, I must say that after dark I’m not real fond of deer. They may be harmless, but at night deer can make a lot of noise in overgrown brush and thus become indistinguishable from bear or mountain lions. Deer have done irreparable harm to my nerves after dark and have occasionally been very much involved in sudden snap decisions to cross streams in bad places.
But there are other animals out there, as well, that can be very troublesome. Beaver, for example, are incurably mischievous. Beaver like to come out of their little cracks and crannies at dusk and start swimming all around without making any sound at all. And sometimes they swim pretty close! I used to think these were accidental encounters, but after much consideration of the matter I’m absolutely certain the beaver do it on purpose.
One night, as I stood thigh deep in a quiet eddy trying vainly to untangle my leader, an unnoticed beaver slapped the water with his tail in my very close proximity. Slapping the tail is something that beavers apparently get a big kick out of.
His quiet approach and the nearness of the event successfully achieved a major disturbance, involving mostly me. In the following few moments of chaos I displaced a great deal of water and remembered out loud some vocabulary items my mother once suppressed with a large bar of soap. Since then, beaver aren’t high on my favorite critter list.
All of this, of course, is purely academic, because every time we went fishing I'd find myself to be in some variation of the exact same predicament. Sometimes it was beaver or deer, sometimes the rustle of Sasquatch, but there was always something waiting for me in the woods after dark and those late evening hikes back then were rarely uneventful.
These days, while my courage in facing the demons of the night is still far from heroic, tired eyes pretty much guarantee that I won’t be able to deal with tangles or fly replacements long before darkness is completely in control.
The problem has thus, nearly, gone away.