Beavers By Moonlight

Once away from the shadow of the hill, Jim's infinite patience is rewarded with the memorable moment he has been waiting for

- Jim Crumley

BEAVERS by moonlight seemed like a good idea. A string of clear nights either side of a full moon was a gilt-edged invitation.

Moonlight gilding every corrugation in the river, gilding every ripple, layering wet flanks of beaver fur with a gilded dazzle, every newly-gilt detail of their architecture aglow even as they cemented it into place, gilt-edged cubs playing with their own moonshadows, new avalanches of woodchips at the base of a gnawed tree rendered into white-gold heaps of unburied treasure. That kind of thing.

I had in mind, the transformative effect of moonlight on so many evening shifts of peering into the tree-shrouded black river for black beaver shapes practising the black arts of their architecture in the dark.

Now, on a perfect evening, I watched the northwestern sky's purples fade to blue-blacks. Woodland darkened, the banks and the beaver canal and the pools and the dams all darkened, and I sat and watched the darkening and waited for the moon.

The evening was windless and quiet, apart from the many-voiced haverings of the river. There are worse conversationalists for a nature writer with time on his hands than a Perthshire river.

But the river only darkened.

It took longer than it should have to appreciate that only the fields to the west glimpsed through trees were in moonlight. Then I realised that the hill at my back was the source of colossal shadow.

This particular beaver territory remained moonless even on a moonlit night, but I wondered if perhaps a beaver might go curiously out into the open moonlit country, the better to see what was going on in the neighbourhood.

So I walked west into the fields until suddenly my moonshadow leapt into life and headed for the river, keeping the company of a shrub-darkened burn that oozed down the side of the field, the better to diminish my impact on the landscape to watching eyes.