Beavers and the Straight and Narrow

For cutting wood he has four powerful incisor teeth, two in each jaw, deeply planted, and curved in form, the upper ones being something more than a semicircle, and the lower ones something less. Powerful jaw muscles enable him to do his work, while extraordinary salivary glands provide the means of digesting his peculiarly dry and hard food. The tail. . .like a powerful sculling oar, makes him a successful and expert navigator, while it enables him, with the further aid of his peculiarly shaped hind legs, to sit bold upright when engaged in the work of cutting down trees. 

Halfway through that paragraph, you likely began to recognize the subject, a plain old beaver, a rodent, a pest, a fat and furry engineer who, experts tell us, isn't really as smart as he'd like us to think. Beavers don't, for instance, determine which trees will be most advantageous to their dam-building. They don't, alone or in small groups, draw up plans for which cottonwoods to fell. 

They just start, willy-nilly, and when the trees fall toward the river in question, the beavers' perceived expert management happens only because creek-side cottonwoods tend to lean in toward the waterway. Do not ascribe to them greater intellectual heft than they have or deserve, beaver experts claim. Not one beaver gained admission to MIT. 

But, as the description demonstrates, these chubby fur-ball amphibians, an opossum on land but a catfish in the water, are created marvelously for their work, as Hiram Martin Chittendon, the man who penned that description should know, himself an engineer, and Captain of the Core of Engineers. 

If the writing itself feels aged, it is. It's from his 1902 two-volume study, The American Fur Trade of the Far West: A History of the Pioneer Trading Posts and Early Fur Companies of the Missouri Valley and the Rocky Mountains and of the Overland Commerce with Santa Fe. The title alone requires a writer. Did I mention there are two volumes? 

What I didn't quote is the opening line of the passage I quoted at length, which goes like this: "With that wonderful adaptation which nature shows in all her works, the anatomical makeup of the beaver is admirably suited to his mode of life." 

Now I've been trained since boyhood to stick a red flag on a page that says things like that because it's hard not to sense the good Mr. Chittendon isn't "good" at all, that he's clearly a godless evolutionist, given to deifying Darwin instead of the Creator of Heaven and Earth. There are, after all, only two paths pilgrims take through life, and but one of them is The Straight and Narrow, or so I was taught.

A good friend and one of his good friends recently published a small book with the combative title: Jesus Loves You and Evolution is True. In the broader community in which he and I both live, there's some heavyweight pushback, as you can imagine, creating a fight in a ring I don't care to enter. 

What I know is I stumbled over that paragraph above while reading through Crittendon's century-old, two-volume study of the fur trade, at least something of which, went on in my own backyard--literally. Right here on the river Lewis and Clark named after their fallen comrade, Sgt. Floyd chances are some French Canadian fur-trapper and a Native wife or two tramped through on the lookout for fat and furry creatures who were here long before any trappers or even any Yankton Sioux were blessed to be here--and are still in raising cane in residence today.

Was that fur ball created with those teeth, or did they develop through the centuries? 

The answer to that question affects my sense of history, nor my respect for the neighbors, nor my belief in God; so I'll just honor both and make that honoring "The Straight and Narrow."