“OMG, would you look at that thing?”
“What thing, Aussie?”
“The lodge! The beavers’ lodge.”
“It sure is big, isn’t it?”
“Big? It’s a condo village! They must be adding a room a day. Just like you humans.”
“Auss, they’re beavers!”
“Yeah? A baby gets born, they add another room. Another baby beaver gets born, add another room. Judging from the size of it, they’re reproducing like rabbits.”
“How do you know it’s for new beavers?”
“You’re right, it could be for new television sets. Just like you humans , every time they get a new TV they add another room. Probably watching Leave It to Beaver.”
“I think they’re too busy to watch Leave it to Beaver, Aussie.”
“They don’t have to watch it, they do it. They’ve transformed the entire river into Beaver Pond, they’ve cut down trees and made this the Beaver Deforestation Program—just like you humans!”
“What is today, Just Like You Humans Day?”
“Didn’t you get my card? Trouble is, every day is Just Like You Humans Day. You leave your imprint everywhere all the time. Somebody gets a baby, you add an extra room. Somebody gets a new TV or computer or even a bagel—”
“I never heard of adding a new room for a bagel!”
“Do those beavers have a permit? Did they get a variance at Town Hall? Because you can bet that if I wanted to add another room to our little house just for me, I’d have to get all those things.”
“You remind me, Aussie, that one of the ways Israel makes life miserable for Palestinians is that when somebody gets married and they want to add a floor or a few rooms to their parents’ house, which is very customary in that culture, they can’t get a permit. And if they build anyway, the army came come in and destroy everything. Used to drive Bernie and me crazy.”
“Are we indulging in a little nostalgia here?”
“Sometimes I like to think back to years when I didn’t spend a lot of time talking to a dog.”
“Look at how stupid these beavers are. They cut down this tree, you could see the marks of their teeth, but did it fall on the pond like it was supposed to? It did not. It fell to the side on the ground. Now I have another thing I have to jump over.”
“That’s the thing, Aussie, they do all that hard work, but there’s no guarantee of where it’ll fall. Also, it can get caught in the branches of other trees and never come down.”
“Imagine if we all worked like that, with no guarantees.”
“We do, Aussie. We can do as much as possible, but in the end, nobody knows how things will really turn out. There are no guarantees how the tree will fall.”