Good Beavening (Jul 2021)

Travis took a walk.

What else was there to do? He was on a vacation so unplanned he hadn’t known it was going to be a vacation until after he had arrived here and been informed the job he had come to setup was canceled. At least the organizer still paid him for the services he wouldn’t be doing.

Wind blew across the nearby river and spat some spray on his shoes. The wind rarely took a moment to rest, but that was fine; it wasn’t like his clothes were getting soaked. His arms and head were a bit chilly, though his pockets helped protect his hands, and his beaver mask helped protect his face. A hat kept the sun out of his eyes – when the clouds weren’t doing that – and the dog tags around his neck didn’t do much but click softly. If the bottom half of his face wasn’t covered by a cartoon beaver’s, it would have been easy to pretend he was wearing a dog collar.

His new goal this afternoon was to see how far this path went. It was a sidewalk along the river, lined with a fence on the river side and alternating between open grass and businesses on the other. Bridges arced over his head to let vehicles cross. Neither he nor the kayakers who paddled by needed to stop for traffic. Here by the river, everyone could simply relax. Travis wondered how much the river had teemed with wildlife before humans had settled the area.

Some time later, Travis sat on a bench. His feet needed a break. For an instant, he wished he was back in his hotel room. He opened the bag of jerky he had brought with him, then took the beaver mask off and folded it over his leg.

Meaty spittle got on his jacket. And the mask. He would need to remember to wash it when he got back.

A shadow fell over him.

“Hey! Young man!” a woman said. “Do you have a moment to chat?”

Travis was startled. He hadn’t heard anyone come by, unless this person was the wind or water itself.

The woman was bundled up as if it was winter, with a coat, gloves, a hat, and a thick black scarf covering everything except her face. Lines of scars ran down her cheeks and forehead, as if an eagle had raked her.

“I do,” said Travis. He scooted to make room on the bench.

She sat down and watched the water. “Are you from around here?”

“I’m not. I felt like visiting for a few days,” Travis replied. “How about you?”

“I’ve lived here longer than you’ve been alive.” The end of the sentence was drawn out. “For just as long, though, I’ve been meaning to buy a cabin in the woods and live far from here.” She twisted her head toward him. “Far from all these people.”

Travis took a bite of his jerky. “What keeps you here?”

The woman’s face hardened. “I am a bit of a teacher, you might say.”

“Neat! Do you work in the school system, then?”

“No. I can’t stand groups of people.”

“Mentoring?” Travis asked between bites. He wiped his mouth.

The skin around the woman’s jaws grew tight. “Somewhat. I do work with people. Individually.” She inched closer to Travis.

He decided it was past time to leave. He stood and brought his arm up to take one last bite of the jerky – until her hand was around his shoulder.

“Who do you think you are, mocking an animal like that?”

“Hm?” Travis pulled at his arm, then tugged harder.

The woman wouldn’t let go.

“You make a mockery of a beaver with your mask, then dare to eat the cut-up carcass of another,” she said.

“Mockery? I made this design out of respect for them. I think beavers are pretty neat animals. Sometimes, I even feel I have a bit of a connection with them.” Was beaver jerky even a thing?

The river was silent. No wind blew across its surface, no kayakers were in sight now to disrupt it. The river seemed to have become a pool of standing water.

The sun’s warmth rained from the sky, but Travis shivered. He felt alone. He felt… wrong.

The woman’s eyes bored into him. “The only connection between you and beavers is your teeth. I bet you would have draped yourself in beaver furs if you could. You’re disgusting,” she said, tightening her grip. Her head shook. “All you people do is commodify the suffering of others. Have you no shame? Have you no morals for the very creatures you share this life with?”

Nails dug into his shoulder, cold and sharp as her words.

“Get off me!” Travis pushed the woman away and ran.

A set of stairs led upward, off the path, and onto a dead street. His run degraded as he crossed. One arm hung uselessly, and the other clenched his shoulder. It hurt.

The sidewalk sloped downward. There was not another soul in sight. The buildings he passed had either no windows or no lights on.

“You think you’re so civilized!” Travis heard from out-of-sight. “Let me remind you who once ruled this earth! Who once ruled the seas and skies!”

His shoulder went numb, then his upper arm and chest. Patting the area resulted in a bristling sensation, like rubbing a pelt the wrong way.

The buildings seemed grow distant. They crawled up the sky, getting blurry. The fuzzy numbness crept down his bad arm, down his good arm, down his torso. A ghost squeezed his chest and pushed at his back. When the sensation reached his tailbone, his pants ripped; something dark had poked a hole through the back.

Travis tripped on his shoes, breaking his fall with his hands. His shoulder screamed. He screamed. Or did he? His mouth was open and his throat was on fire, but he heard nothing. He heard something? He heard his blood pump. He felt it pump, in the spaces where his tongue should have found his canine teeth. And those spaces were widening.

Why was his hand so weird? It was so hairy, with long nails, and… that wasn’t his hand, or his arm. Brown hairs coated the whole thing, it was half the length it should have been, and the hand was misshapen.

He pushed himself closer to one of the buildings. He wasn’t sure if he did it with his arms or legs. He couldn’t focus. His mouth tried to say a phrase. Something, about someone. Noise came out, and his jaws stretched forward instead of apart. Air burned around his incisors. Some were missing, but he didn’t remember falling on his teeth.

“You flee like the beasts you torture,” Travis heard. It was the woman. Where had she come from? She was just… huh… what was that dark thing at the bottom of his vision?

His pants ripped further. Some body part down there touched the ground. He wasn’t sure which.

He heard more words. He gave the dark thing a scratch. It tickled and twitched, sending a shiver up his face and into his brain.

He passed out.

Travis ached. Had he slept on a rock? Things were dark, and the ceiling was an odd color. Metallic, even.

Travis felt for the openings of his pockets. He found newspaper and hair.

Hmm?

He rolled over.

He was naked, but brown hairs hid his skin. Two webbed feet, tipped with claws, kicked the air. Between them was what in the dim light appeared to be the sole of an old shoe: dark and flat with a waffle pattern printed on it.

His shoulder hung low and forward, sloping down instead of bending at an angle. Wrapped around it was a bandage, discolored in cow-like splotches.

Travis backpedaled and met cold bars. They fenced him in, floor to ceiling. On the other side were blank walls, some shelves, curtains, a door – and two stacked cages. The top one was at eye level. What was in them? He rubbed his eyes. The best he could make out were balls of fuzz.

Blood rushed to his cheeks. His nose twitched; the smell of unwashed hair hung in the room. Saliva dripped from his too-big incisors onto the floor.

Many days, Travis had wanted nothing more than to stumble out of his human body and into a different species. He loved beavers, but he loved cows too, and coyotes, and cacti, and all the other creatures of the world, be they animal or plant, real or not.

He flexed the webbing between his toes and looked out of the cage. Seeing himself as a beaver should have brought great joy and warmth to his heart. But, now? To have it happen, only to be kept prisoner by the person who tried to carve a chunk out of his arm?

Something purred beside him. Travis looked back at the corner of the cage and froze at the face of a large cat. They looked like a house cat, but they were as large as him, and big cats were not known for being kind with their prey.

And they woke.

They tilted their head at Travis, then sniffed him. Were they a person, like him? Had they been a person, now lost to being a cat? He thought back to one photomanipulation he had made where that had been the premise. Please don’t eat me, he wanted to say, but it came out as burps and whines. He covered his muzzle with his forepaws. No speaking.

A creature below yipped. A fox? How about them; were they a person?

On the other side of the room, a bird squawked. The fox yipped louder, and the bird took it as a sign of contest. Yip! Squawk! Yip! Squawk!

Travis peeked out the cage again while the cat continued to sniff him. The bird flapped their wings at the bars of their cage. At least, he was pretty sure they were wings, brown and wide. He assumed the bird an eagle.

From the cage underneath the likely-eagle came many squeaks. The gray and brown form inside the cage scurried around, split, and reformed. How many creatures were in there?

Travis put up a forepaw and counted his digits. At least his near sight was okay. But did a beaver need more than that? It wasn’t like he was going to be maintaining a dam from afar.

The cat stopped sniffing and joined in the screaming.

Thuds sounded outside the room, each louder than the previous. The door slammed open and flooded the room with light.

“Shut up!” shouted the woman.

Everyone stopped.

“Do you really want to get me kicked out of this apartment?” she continued, quieter. “It is through my grace that you have food, water, and a place to sleep. Others in my order would just toss you to the wilds, letting you learn your lessons for the rest of your lives with how short they would end up being. Does your hatred for animals burn so bright that you would rather kill your chance to repent and earn your human forms back than learning to have even the smallest respect for those around you?”

Silence was the response.

“Now, sleep!”

The door shut, leaving the room darker than before she had entered. Soft whimpers came from below and afar. The cat in Travis’s cage stared where the woman had been. How long have you been here? Travis tried to ask, making unintelligible burps and whines instead. This could have been far from the first time the cat had heard about being a human again.

Food and water the woman had mentioned, yet there wasn’t even a water nozzle in Travis’s cage. Were the pieces of the newspaper under his feet edible?

He lay down, approximating a ball. His tail hugged the floor behind him. He nuzzled his warm gut. He smiled. That, at least, was comfortable – until his back hurt.

On his side, on his belly, or back in a ball – no matter the position, he couldn’t sleep. Every moment, his brain focused on something new: the scent of dirt coming off the cat, the creaking of a pipe, the way the fox below him breathed.

The way his heart beat.

The dull ache in his mind, like someone was probing his behaviors and memories.

The cat’s breath: whispers from a land of dreams that may or may not be about eating him.

And, strangely, the craving for something rough and flaky.

A lock clicked.

Travis’s sleep wasn’t really sleep. He would be surprised if he had gotten half an hour of it. The newspaper did nothing to soften or warm the metal floor, and it did even less to dampen the noises everyone made as they shifted around their cages.

Dehydration pressed on his head like a weighted blanket. Maybe the point was to starve him and deprive him of water so that he’d soon be too weak to do anything. What he would do to find a nice, slow-moving stream to build in—

No, and before anything, he would first need to get out.

He shook the cage bars. The cage shifted. His neighbor cat eyed him and growled. Maybe there was a chance.

He gave his shoulder a good stretch. There was soreness, but he could work through it. He tore the bandage off with his teeth, careful not to let his tongue touch and taste it.

Travis backed up to the end of the cage, shook away second thoughts, and sprinted.

He slammed into the front. Cold bars sank into his fur and resisted his flesh with a cold sting. He reeled away. After a few seconds, the pain faded, and he ran into the bars again.

The cage rattled. Travis peered between the bars. No longer could he see the top of the cage below him. Paws shuffled around, and the other victims poked their faces out of their cages.

Travis didn’t realize the cat was willing to help until he saw them copy his lead and jolt the cage forward. But now, as he watched the room move, did the floor seem so far away. The cat pummeled the cage wall again.

The cage teetered, then tipped, the cat’s weight pulling it down.

Travis held onto the back of the cage. He braced himself, but the impact was… soft?

The cat yelped. He had used the cat as a landing pillow. He rolled off, and the cat moaned. Newspaper strips sprinkled from his back and joined the rest that had fallen through the bars.

The lock had been crushed between the floor and the combined weight of Travis, the cat, and the rest of cage. A brush of a claw was enough to get the fractured tube of the lock out of the cage door’s latch. However, the door led to the floor instead of air.

Travis’s strength wasn’t enough to push the cage over. He whined to get the cat’s attention, then pointed at the now-bare floor of the cage, but the cat didn’t move from their spot.

Murmured squeaks and squawks seeped through the air. Those squawks became loud, followed by the slap of metal on wood. The eagle had fallen down, lucky enough to have their cage roll forward after landing on and breaking the lock.

The eagle opened the gate of their cage; the creak made Travis’s ears twitch. They flew in circles around Travis’s cage, then around the edges of the room. Once they had their fill of flying, they picked the other cages’ locks with a talon, freeing the fox and other critters, which Travis could now see were mice and squirrels.

Travis and the cat tumbled as the others pushed it over. The cat meowed at the top of their lungs, maybe from landing on a bruise. Were they about to be free, only to have the woman bursting in to stop them?

The eagle picked Travis’s lock, then flew to the doorknob and turned it with their foot. Travis followed behind, through the living room, as the eagle did the same thing with the door to the outside hall. Most of the animals stampeded out of the unit, though the fox and one of the squirrels checked out the other rooms. The cat limped their way to the door. Travis noticed the coat rack was empty; what a perfect time for the woman to be gone.

Someone cursed in the halls. The witch might not return in the next few minutes, but someone might come to investigate in that time. Despite what the fox and squirrel may have thought, there was no time to see if there was some trinket or such that would reverse this. Or maybe there was. Maybe the fox and squirrel knew something Travis didn’t, but he had lost the ability to ask, and they had lost the ability to answer.

Out the door and to the nearby stairs Travis went… only to be blocked by another door. Travis stood on his hind legs and stretched himself up the length of the door, but the knob was too high to reach. The eagle was nowhere to be seen, and their squawks and flaps grew distant. Travis shouted for the eagle, but he was too quiet for them to hear, and his voice cracked. His cheeks grew warm.

An elevator bell rang. Travis sprinted down the hall, around the corner, and into the shoes of someone getting out of the car.

“Oh, is that a—what on Earth?”

Don’t pick me up, don’t step on me, Travis mentally pleaded. Don’t even look at me. He scooted between the person’s legs and through the doors as they closed.

His heart beat. He had managed to get from the apartment room to here, but could he get from here to the outside? And where would he go next? Getting back to his hotel would be like walking through the eye of a needle.

Someone requested the elevator before Travis tried to reach the buttons. The elevator car clicked, and he went down.

The doors parted. Travis ran past the group coming on and bolted toward the entrance. Stairs led down to glass doors, with some space between the two for a wheelchair ramp. Travis clenched his jaws and jumped at the wheelchair button. It pressed inward, then became as hard as concrete. His paws flailed, swiping the ledge above the button and pushing it away instead of grabbing it.

The cold floor slapped the air out of Travis’s lungs. Wind blew at his ears. His mouth hung open, but his shout was silent.

Someone said something. Travis sucked in air and forced himself to his feet and out the door before it automatically closed. Through sheer force of will, he rounded the corner of the building before collapsing in the alley, out-of-sight.

His back rested against brick, his bottom against gravel. In and out he breathed, one breath for each beat of his racing little heart. Dumpster fumes wafted by, and those fumes went in his lungs.

He wanted to shut his eyes. He could get some rest and wake in his bed, safe and sound. But he knew he would instead wake in another cage, this one owned by animal control, and on his way to be either euthanized or ‘reintroduced’ to some environment far from here.

Pets, zoo animals, and livestock didn’t stress over what was expected of them; they simply existed. This, though? The indoors were not safe. The streets were not safe. Travis shivered and his belly grumbled. There were no heated habitats or meals waiting for him.

There was that park he had seen earlier, though. People wouldn’t take offense to him roaming there, and there would be opportunities for food and shelter.

Mostly recovered, he got to his feet and peeked out the alley. Nobody was near.

He headed out.

Fish floated and swam down the stream. Travis parked himself on the bank and dipped his paws in. Water flowed past his toes and loosened some of the dirt and sand from his webbing. He had tried catching some of those fish, but in the end his stomach remained empty. Even if he had been successful, beavers weren’t supposed to eat fish.

Travis dipped his head in and cleaned his face. There was a bit of something caked near his eyes that he hadn’t realized was there. It was gone now, floating down the stream. Hopefully none of the fish would choke on it.

Travis patted part of the bank with his tail to make a firm sitting area. He sat and met his face’s reflection.

When someone was being stared at, depending on who was doing the staring, they might feel as if their soul was exposed. Travis wasn’t sure what he saw in his reflection. He had represented himself many a time as a beaver, and he knew he was currently a beaver, yet there was no connection between what he saw and his concept of Travis. Those teeth, the nose, that fur – it wasn’t him. The eyes returning his stare were unfamiliar. Just an animal’s. But, it was him.

For how long?

He walked himself over to a nearby tree, water dripping from his fur. He couldn’t stop until he was right up next to it. His stomach was a magnet attracted to that texture: the roughness on his tongue, the firmness between his teeth…

Travis cocked his head and touched the tree with the tips of his teeth. You think you’re so civilized, he remembered being told. Was he? He peeled a strip off and chewed.

And he chewed some more.

It was the next best thing to meat. No plant had ever tasted this good. While softened by saliva, there was still a crunch. He swallowed. It only made him hungrier.

He ate the rest of the strip. This was no mush that revolted the tongue, and this was no carrot that required breaking teeth to eat. This was simply something that was meant to be eaten, working with the mouth, not against it.

His thoughts buzzed. Leaves, grass, and the sky seemed to be drained of their color, feeding it into the tree. The browns of the bark were a rainbow of their own, rich and full of life. Appetizing. He affixed his jaws to the wood and gnawed, taking a chunk out of the wood itself. Rolling the grain texture up and down his tongue made his mouth fill with saliva.

The tree was the only thing he saw. He needed more, and more, and more.

Travis gorged himself on that tree, eating and eating and eating until the pain in his stomach brought him back to reality.

The world spun, then stabilized. He felt like he had just woken from a dream, but the sun was near the same spot in the sky.

He wanted to eat more, but he was too full – and a bit scared. For a few minutes, he had been a different person. There had been no human; there had only been Travis the beaver, caring only about the need to eat. The need to eat trees, specifically. Trees were made for him, and he was made for trees. His purpose in life was to make use of the gifts trees gave him. Trees, trees, trees…

He shook apart the fog cloud building again in his skull. He didn’t want to lose himself to being an animal. That was always a fantasy, something he could stop thinking about anytime he wanted, something he could ride as long as it was enjoyable and disembark when it stopped being so. He very much wanted to disembark. What would his friends think, never hearing from him again, never knowing what had happened? Would he forget them entirely?

He could control himself next time. Maybe.

His full stomach dragged him down like an anchor. He needed somewhere to lie for a while, preferably where he wasn’t at risk of something or someone trying to hurt him.

Travis waddled down the edge of the stream, stifling a groan every other step. How many calories were in tree bark? His beaver body was already a bit flabby to begin with.

Downstream, he spied a patchwork of sticks and mud bulging out of the water, arranged in the shape of a spiky dome with a hole in the top. It was a beaver lodge. It was good to know he wasn’t the only beaver in the area.

Tiredness pressed on him further. He didn’t hear anything coming from the lodge other than the gentle running of water. Taking his chances, he dove under and headed inside.

The smell of old fur and marking was strong. Without the ventilation hole in the ceiling, it would have probably been too strong to stand staying inside. The floor had been smoothed by months of feet, tails, and bellies patting it down.

Travis tried to find a good sleeping position and fell asleep.

There was hissing.

Travis’s eyes shot open but saw little of anything. Weak moonlight shone through the ventilation hole and fizzled out inches away from his fur.

Something stepped closer. The hissing got louder. Travis stepped back until the sticks of the wall scratched his tail.

A nose appeared in the spotlight. Two long teeth above a quaking jaw. The form of a beaver’s head, then the rest of the body. The beaver’s tail was still, but rhythmic slapping could be heard from in front of him.

Travis’s brain curled up in a corner of his skull. Images of claws and blood drifted past. The beaver was a giant in the spotlight. What was beyond in the darkness?

His legs moved. His body was dragged with, toward the entrance, through the water, and outside, past a beaver slapping the water with their tail in alarm. Travis cut through the river, then down the bank.

It was too dark to see how far he had gone from the lodge, but it was far enough to not hear the slapping anymore. He was a foolish beaver, having tried to take residence in a place not his own.

Travis sank into the mud slightly and stared at the moon. It was a hair away from full. Not turning back ruled out the idea of having been cursed to be a werebeaver. Surely, though, if he held out longer, he would feel his fur come off in chunks, his snout retreat into his face, and his body stretch back out to size. Oh, who was he kidding? He didn’t know.

Nighttime is daytime, he thought. Much easier to move around and build things when most other creatures are asleep. But he didn’t want to build his own lodge. He wanted to be home.

The trees are my home, he thought. They had fed him; they were kind! He just needed to set his teeth upon them once more and carve out everything he needed to make a lodge of his own. Then, he wouldn’t be caught embarrassed in another beaver’s territory ever again! And maybe even a dam to make things easier.

Travis pushed himself up and scoured the area for sticks and fallen branches. His blurry vision meant this involved walking around wildly and picking up anything that happened to appear under his nose.

He dragged the pieces he could find back to his resting area by the stream. The next trip, part of his load was pieces he had dropped from the first trip. The trip after that was better as he learned how to be less clumsy with his waddling body. After a few more trips, he had built a pile about as tall as him and several times as wide.

Travis sharpened a stick with his teeth and stabbed it through the stream into the mud at the bottom. It stood tall against the current. He sharpened another stick and stuck it into the mud, this one at an angle, coming out from closer to the edge of the stream. Another stick he placed, and another.

Soon, he was panting and out of breath. He gazed at his work. There was still so much more of the river to go, and even if he had somehow managed to cover the entire width, he would have still needed to patch the holes between the sticks to actually block the water.

He must build, and build some more…

Many days later, light shone through the vent in a beaver’s lodge. Ugh, daytime. Why couldn’t it be nighttime? The beaver tried to get back to sleep, but the floor hurt this morning. Maybe a trot would shake the discomfort off.

The beaver dove out the lodge’s exit and swam to the edge of the river. The water level was high enough to tell him the dam was still holding together.

He squinted his eyes. His nose twitched. Coming from up the stream were many scents weaved together.

A thing floated down the stream. It was a crumpled wad of white that looked like it had been stained by some creature marking their territory. The beaver had to breathe through his mouth; the scent of this thing coming so close made his stomach churn.

Something else came by: like a flat, fuzzy circle, colored like grass. After that was something long and shiny that got wider and split out near the end. Then, there was another shiny thing, though this one was small enough to fit in his paw, and it had a long whisker looping through it. The ends of the whisker touched, making a hole more than large enough to swim through.

The beaver, curious, walked up the edge of the stream and sighted two humans. He hid behind a tree. They didn’t seem to see him, but they were too far away for him to tell.

One of them made noises. There was no rhythm to them. Were they greetings? Warnings, like those he could make if he slapped his tail?

The human kicked something into the water. It was a black blob about half the human’s height. The blob wobbled and fell in the stream, revealing an opening where more of the strange things spilled out.

Some smoke billowed around the other human. Both humans turned to laugh at the stream.

The beaver’s heart chilled. These creatures dared to step into his territory, filling his stream with all manner of things that made noses rot and eyes wish to look away.

The beaver leaped from behind the tree and hissed at the humans. A moment before, they had towered over him, but now, they seemed as equals. He drummed his tail against the ground. He believed that he could even fight them… and win.

The humans backed away. The first one put up his forepaws and sounded out more noises, distress in place of laughter.

They left his stream, but not before the second human chucked something toward the beaver and missed. The thing was round, like a section of a smoothed-out branch, but it was blue and had a hole at one end that smelled sweet. It was the only thing these humans had that didn’t make him want to put his nose up to a delicious-smelling tree to clean out his airways.

The beaver waddled back down to his portion of the stream. The humans’ objects were already getting caught in his dam and lodge.

One of them caught his eye. It was flat and about as thick as the webbing between his toes. The shape was like his tail, but the surface was as smooth as a leaf. On opposite ends were thin loops; one was held up by the branch, and the other waved in the stream. The beaver could fit his neck through either of them.

He flipped the object over. The other side was brown. An imitation of dark nose sat in the middle, with lines for whiskers coming out of the sides. A mouth and two teeth sat underneath.

Was this supposed to be the bottom half of an animal’s face? He thought it was meant to be one of his kind, but it was a terrible rendition of a beaver. It wasn’t going to fool any creature. No, it had to be a mockery.

The beaver tore it down, ripping the loop in two. He brought it inland, past the bank and away from any tree. Then, he dug a hole in the earth, placed the facsimile of a beaver inside, and covered it so nobody would ever find it again.

The arrogance of humans, the beaver stewed while stomping back to the stream, upset his plan to go back to sleep was replaced by clean-up work.

He was glad he wasn’t one.