Abundance by Karen Lloyd

Author:Karen Lloyd [Lloyd, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472989093
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

At the end of August, I returned to Bamff. It wouldn’t do just to have seen the beaverlands on the estate without any beavers. An evening was required, an evening with good light and preferably without rain. I was to rendezvous with Paul where the track to the house crosses the two areas of beaver-worked land. Or water. I was in the open, looking upstream, then down. At 8pm, Paul appeared, walking away from the direction of the house and towards me. I waved and turned back to look over the fields. I turned back to the pool, and not a metre and a half away, heading straight towards me, was a beaver. Intense evening light caught the way the water beaded along the animal’s back and how the fur divided into fine furrows, the blue-lit water spooling over the nut-brown, gold-brown fur. The beaver was lighter coloured than I’d thought, the animal itself lithe in the water. I don’t know if, from that range, the beaver had seen me; beavers have poor eyesight, but their sense of smell is strong. The beaver flipped underwater.

Paul arrived. He had already spotted another beaver, one of this year’s kits out on a grassy meadow among the wetlands. And what else was it doing but eating grass? We watched for a while, then moved further along the track. Another beaver, an adult, swam through the water, the light lower, the blueness replaced by amber and lead. Like a broad-notched arrow, the beaver was aiming for the dam. It climbed out of the water and over the top and was gone. We followed, and there it was in the next pool, the furry tea-cosy head and the line of the body and tail behind. The beaver flipped, and I saw how the tail is a rudder for moving the body allowing the beaver to investigate the water as it manoeuvres itself under the surface.

Further on, another kit, eating more grass, its leathery tail laid out behind. Further still, another beaver – the big male. The sun had disappeared below the treeline of the far hill, and the water was pewter and glass. The male swam underneath a fallen tree, where it became lost to us in the tangle of branches. Paul pointed, saying that the main lodge was hidden somewhere underneath. There was a series of beavery grunts as if the beaver were saying: ‘I’m home!’

There were dams that were narrow across the top and some that were wider, plugged with sedge grass and branches. There were half-constructed dams, and others where the beavers had judged that the water level in the upper pool had reached the required point and had subsequently dug small side channels through which the water poured softly. There were yet more beaver lawns, and a vast larch tree toppled at the edge of the pool. Across the water was the abandoned house I remembered from my previous visit. As we stopped to survey the water, a barn owl morphed

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