A Theft by a Beaver

Where to begin with perhaps the greatest and most preposterous beaver and beaverwood story of all time?

I could start with where I heard it, in front of my domicile while drinking a frosty IPA and eating fish and chips with a friend.

I could start with the two men, one chewing tobacco, the other wearing pink, who told me the story, their story, after one of them picked out a new choice cut of beaverwood for a walking staff because a beaver had stolen his beaverwood walking staff while they were fishing for trout in a pond.

Yes, let’s start with them, I already have, and let them keep going.

They had caught a mess of tout and were cleaning the fish at the cleaning station, when they heard a splash behind them. They turned around and saw something that looked like a beaver gliding away with the tobacco man’s beaverwood walking staff in its mouth. He had chosen the staff from my collection weeks ago and prized it very much. He always took it fishing with him and had placed it at the edge of a pond where a beaver lodge was in the process of being built.

In other words, a beaver building a lodge had stolen beaverwood from a human being who had been given a piece of beaverwood as a gift from a human being, me, who has amassed the greatest collection of beaverwood in the history of the world, but never actually removes wood from lodges or dams. Surely this act of theft by the crafty beaver was the first such occurrence in world history.

After the two men narrated this story and walked away, my friend and I turned to one another and laughed uproariously. It was too absurd not to be true.