I used to go out into the woods at night to see what I could see. One night, I was crouching at the edge of a pond, listening, when something made me turn and fire my flashlight to my right. I saw a big head with a tiny little red eye swimming through the water. I stood up, and she slapped her tail and went under. Then the one that was quietly working by my feet tail-slapped and I jumped about six feet in the air. They were blocking the exit from the pond, and when I came back a few years later, there was a four-foot dam with a much bigger pond behind it. There were a lot of beaver-chewed stumps around.