While walking down by the James River last weekend, Sarah and I interrupted beavers working on this sculpture of a human female, identity unknown. If there was a model, she fled too.

About fourteen years ago when youngest stepdaughter Marina was seven I helped chaperone her class to an iMax movie on beavers at the Science Museum of Virginia. It was filled with lots of good underwater shots and beaver’s eye views of felling trees and such. Beavers mate for life according to this film. This may be the work of a pair of beaver artists.

Shortly after a flood, in Alice’s spryer days, she came upon a beaver recently flushed from his home, standing on the bank, pissed off. She trotted up, looked him in the eye, expecting dog, and there was this totally alien creature looking back at her with his beady eyes, a crazy tree chewing critter that lives in stick houses and slaps its tail like a gunshot going off. Alice got wide-eyed and slowly backed away. She had wild crazy dog dreams all afternoon. Whenever I need to write someone encountering monster or alien, I remember Alice and that beaver.