Tales from McDougal Lake
W.B. Tippett first saw the beaver from the lawn chair on his back porch. He was looking out at McDougal Lake.
“Cute little feller,” said W.B. to no one in particular.
“What?” said his wife Lucette.
“Nothing,” said W.B., who never repeated himself, and was not about to begin now.
Lucette was sitting next to W.B. on a cable spool he had fashioned into a coffee table. As she was drinking her third coffee of the day, she was feeling especially alert. “Well, you said something,” she observed.
“Saw something,” W.B. revealed.
“Saw what?” asked Lucette.
“Something.”
“Are you going to tell me what you saw, or are you going to just let me sit here all day wondering what it was?” Lucette was clearly not going to let this one go.
“What it was,” said W.B., “is right over there in the reeds.”
“My goodness, you’re right,” said Lucette. “It’s a beaver. Cute little feller.”
“Cute until he dams up the whole dam’ lake,” said W.B., now rethinking his earlier observation.
“One little beaver?” asked Lucette.
“Ain’t likely to be one little beaver,” said W.B. “Little beavers come from big beavers.”
Lucette, grasping the wisdom of this, said nothing and drank her coffee. “Still a cute little feller,” she finally offered.
“Says you,” said W.B., and let the matter drop.
This was three months back, before W.B.’s dock began to go underwater. Now W.B. was sitting on a stool, oiling up his Remington SureShot 30.30. “Where you going with that?” asked Lucette, now finishing her second cup of coffee.
“Beaver stew,” said W.B., “maybe a beaver hat.”
“Oh, no you’re not,” said Lucette as though she meant it, because she did.
“Oh, yes,” said W.B. “First we lose the dock, next we lose the house.”
“Don’t be ridiculous ,” said Lucette, who thought he surely was. “You’re just looking for a chance to shoot your gun so the Bodkins next door won’t make fun of your dock.”
“This isn’t about Wade Bodkin,” said W.B. a little louder than he intended. “This is about a whole passel of beavers stopping up the lake’s natural flow into the Battenkill. It’s not natural, and I’m not going to sit by and watch it happen.”
“It’s natural for beavers,” said Lucette. “It’s what beavers naturally do.”
“Well,” said W.B., ratcheting the action on his Remington, “I’m putting a natural stop to it.”
“For two inches of water on your dock, you’re going to go wipe out a whole family of beavers,” said Lucette, “just for doing what they were put on God’s green earth to do.”
“They don’t have to do it on my lake,” said W.B.
“Actually,” said Lucette, now warming up to the discussion, “unless you can get the game warden to agree with you, you’d better put that rifle right back where you found it.”
“Now don’t go bringing the County into this,” said W.B., who didn’t much care for discussing anything, and certainly was growing tired of discussing this. “Nobody’s got a right to dam up the lake.”
“Tell that to the Good Lord. He made the beavers. And he made the lake too, for that matter.”
“And don’t go bringing God into this either. Maybe he did make the lake, but I made the dock, and no dam’ beaver is going to put it under water.”
Lucette sat there at the counter, the counter W.B. also made, and waited for her third cup of coffee to kick in. “That may not even be true, W.B. We’ve had such a rainy spring, it’s no wonder the lake is high. Why, I’ll bet you in three weeks your dock will be dry as a bone. As a bone.”
Now, later, W.B. would say it wasn’t any one thing.
But suddenly, the combined force of the rain, the warden, the Good Lord and a whole family of beavers hit W.B. where he lived. Not to mention his wife Lucette. He looked at her, sitting there at the counter, now on her fourth cup of coffee.
“Oh yeah?” he said. “What do you want to bet?”
“Why, I’ll bet,” she said in her sweetest voice, “you will be a very happy man if I am right. And you,” she said, “can hold me to that.”
And she was right and he did, and he was.
And it had nothing to do with sitting on his dock on a peach box that July, catching the largest smallmouth bass either he or Wade Bodkin had ever seen.
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