By Drummond the Beaver

I want to begin by saying I did not want to do this. I want to say that clearly, for the record, and for the three hundred squirrels who will read this and assume I went looking for trouble. I did not. Mike dragged me. Mike dragged me with oranges.

For those who missed it, I learned last week that I am a rodent. Order Rodentia. Same filing cabinet as the kangaroo rat. I took it poorly. I spent a day and a half on my couch sucking oranges until my lips went numb, and then my editor showed up, ate half my oranges, and told me about Pluto.

Which is how I ended up on the west side of the ranch, sitting across from Mordecai del Greco at the Bluebonnet Animal Behavioral and Psychiatric Ranch.

Preparation

I assumed Mordecai would hand me a mushroom from the meadow and point me at a tree. I was wrong. The man has procedures.

“The meadow is for ambiance,” he said. “We don’t pick the medicine. The medicine comes from a laboratory, in a capsule, with a label. You of all people should appreciate a label.”

I did not appreciate that remark.

We met three times that first week. We talked about my mother. We talked about my first dam, which failed, and my second dam, which didn’t. We talked about what I wanted out of this. I said I wanted to stop being a rodent. Mordecai wrote something down and said, “Let’s aim for something achievable.”

Gretchen gave me a pamphlet. The pamphlet said this is not a reset button. It said some people feel better for months and some people feel better for a week and some people just have a very long, very strange afternoon. It said the real work happens afterward. I underlined that part, because I’m a professional, and because I assumed I would be the exception.

Dosing Day

They put me in a converted horse stall. I expected hay. Instead I got a bed, soft lamps, a vase of fresh bluebonnets, and a pair of noise-canceling headphones the size of hubcaps. Mordecai sat in the corner with a notebook. Gretchen sat by the door with a thermos. Somebody had to stay with me the whole time, they said. That’s the rule. Nobody goes down the river alone.

I swallowed the capsule. I lay down. Gretchen put the headphones over my ears, which took some doing, because beaver ears are not designed for headphones and Gretchen is not designed for patience.

The music started. Cellos. Something with a harp. For forty minutes, nothing happened, and I lay there composing a strongly worded letter to the scientific community.

Then the ceiling started breathing.

Not dramatically. Politely. The way a pond breathes when the wind moves across it. The bluebonnets in the vase leaned toward me like they had something to tell me, and I leaned back toward them to listen, and then there was no stall. There was only water.

The River

I was floating on my back down a river I’ve never seen, wider than the Guadalupe, warmer than bathwater, gold all the way to the bottom. And I wasn’t alone.

On both banks, as far as I could see, stood rodents. All of them. Two thousand six hundred species, lined up along the shore like a parade crowd. Squirrels in the trees. Porcupines on the rocks. A chinchilla so soft he looked out of focus. The kangaroo rat stood near the front, and I’ll tell you right now, the man has excellent legs. I have been unfair to the kangaroo rat.

None of them said anything. They just watched me float by. And every one of them was chewing something.

Then a capybara swam up beside me. Big fellow. Calm as a church. A little yellow bird sat on his head, and neither of them seemed to find this unusual.

“You’re the one who’s upset,” the capybara said.

“I’m a Water Lion,” I told him. “King of the river.”

“Sure,” he said. “Whose river?”

I looked around. The river was full of beavers. Thousands of us, floating on our backs, every one of us holding a stick. And downstream, where the river should have run off into the sea, there was a dam. The biggest dam I have ever seen. It went up into the clouds. It held back the whole sky.

“Who built that?” I asked.

“You did,” said the capybara. “All of you. Every beaver who ever chewed a tree. Took ten million years.”

“Did anybody check whether we were rodents first?”

The capybara laughed so hard the bird fell off.

The Hard Part

The pamphlet warned me there might be a difficult stretch. Mine arrived in the shape of an owl.

A shadow crossed the gold water. I looked up and saw wings. Big ones. Silent ones. I knew those wings. I work next to those wings. The shadow circled lower and lower, and every rodent on both banks went perfectly still, and I heard myself say, out loud, in the real stall, “She’s going to eat me, Mordecai.”

Mordecai’s voice came from far away. “Don’t run from it. Look at it.”

So, I looked. And the owl turned out to be Penelope, all right, but she wasn’t hunting. She had a red pencil in her talons. She was editing the river. Circling the misspellings. Fixing the commas. She landed on the dam, shook her head at a dangling modifier, and flew off.

I want to be clear that I do not know what this means. Mordecai says I don’t have to know yet. I am choosing to believe it means Penelope respects my prose.

Somewhere around hour four, Manny the lemur started shrieking in the next pen. I heard it straight through the hubcaps. In my state, it sounded like the most beautiful opera ever written. I wept. Gretchen says I told her, “He can’t carry a tune, but he carries something.” Gretchen wrote that down. I’m told it’s in my file.

Coming Back

Around hour six, the river slowed and the gold went to ordinary brown, and the stall came back into focus, one board at a time. The bluebonnets were just bluebonnets again. Gretchen poured me tea from the thermos. It was the best tea I’ve ever had, and it was Lipton.

When I sat up, I found a note slid under the stall door, in careful handwriting. Dave the bat wrote it. Dave can’t talk, but he writes beautifully.

It’s all right to be afraid of what you are, it said. I’m afraid of the dark, and I’m a bat. We make do.

I’m keeping that note.

The Next Day

Mordecai and I met the next morning for what he calls integration, which is a fancy word for “now tell me what that was about.” I told him about the river and the dam and the capybara and Penelope’s red pencil. He listened. He didn’t tell me what any of it meant. He asked what I thought it meant.

Here’s what I told him.

I spent a week furious that somebody put me on a list. But the list didn’t build anything. I built things. The rodents on the riverbank didn’t stop being squirrels and porcupines and excellent-legged kangaroo rats because somebody wrote a name next to them. The dam holds back the river whether you call the builder a rodent, a fish, or the King of Siam. The label is paperwork. The dam is the work.

Mordecai nodded. Then he reminded me, very gently, that one afternoon on a river is not a cure, and that I should come back next week, and the week after, and that he’d like to talk more about my mother.

I said fine. Kings go to therapy. Mike told me that.

Postscript

I walked back into the newsroom this morning. Bob chased me across the room twice and apologized both times. Reginald lowered his newspaper an inch, which from Reginald is a standing ovation. Penelope looked up from her desk, and I saw no hunger in it at all. Just an editor, waiting for copy.

I sat down at my desk and ate one orange. Just one. For old times’ sake.

Then I got to work.

Drummond the Beaver is Scribe Safari’s environmental correspondent, a rodent in good standing, and still, as far as he’s concerned, King of the River.