Chapter One
The beavers inhabiting Turtle Creek Basin had jury-rigged
a cedar-stick dam across the flow, creating a
still pond that the big man hadn't counted on. He had
to step high to avoid being splinter-pricked in the caboose,
and when he finally had navigated the beaver
dam, he then had to wade the shallow pond it had created
to get where he was going—a dam bigger than any
damn troop of beavers had ever dreamed of, if beavers
dream. His galoshes slogging through the pond exactly
matched in rhythm and cadence the thumping sound of
Bobby Beaver's flat tail. The big man peered through
stingy moonlight and eventually spied Bobby, hunched
over a cedar stump whose flesh he had gnawed into a
pencil-point peak, whose trunk had been felled for the
sake of the little beaver industry. Humph, thought the
big man tromping the pond. You wanna see a dam?
Follow me, Bobby Beaver, and I'll show you what fer.
Over the bald, dry ridge lay an attenuated coulee that
the big man had to cross to reach his destination three
miles distant. A moldy yellow moon with a toothless,
gaping sneer shed thin light across the barren mountaintops
and poured down along the coulee's granite
walls onto the flat valley f ... read full excerpt from K Falls ebook
