Many years ago when I taught high school in Snow Lake, Manitoba, I was invited to go dip-fishing for whitefish. We travelled by boat to the mouth of a creek, hiked up along the creek until we reached a beaver dam. We lined up along the top of the dam, played our flashlights over the water and tried to dip fish from the base of the beaver dam. That was the closest I ever got to Castor Canadensis, the Canadian beaver. The images of that evening came flooding back as I read a book called Once They Were Hats, a book exploring and explaining the past and current role of beaver, their tree cutting, their dam building and their saving of our land.

I