Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

May 27th, 2008

Photo, Seth Kantner. Beavers.

My daughter, China, and I are skimming past sweepers, boating upriver. Snow cliffs line the north bank, ice sheets drape the rock bar along the other shore. We’re heading up a tributary river that flows out of the mountains to the north.

Breakup swept through here just a few days ago; rafts of ice tower in contorted mounds. Pintails and widgeons paddle into the current and lift off; a kingfisher swoops and dives ahead of us.

After seven months or more of ice, we’re traveling on water. Sun shines off windy blue ripples and white ice. Up on the bank, peering out of the alders, a cow moose on a high snow drift eyes us, wondering if harm comes with the sound of this engine. She doesn’t wish to run. She’s positioning herself in a curve in the river to soon have a calf and defend it against hungry brown bears.

Two Canada geese lift off a sandy island point—doing the same thing as the moose, no doubt. Over the drone of my twenty-horsepower outboard, sparrow songs pierce the air. Spring is here. We and all these creatures have made it through another winter—although some of them wisely went south for the duration.

In the mud and willows along the shores, at waterline, the golden glint of peeled saplings catches our eyes. Up higher, poplars lean off stumps, as if an army of woodchoppers has moved up this valley. Everywhere is the sign of beaver.

In my lifetime there have always been beaver. Plenty of lodges, plenty of dams. Now the population seems to be exploding. Something is different. A few years ago I started noticing more beaver setting up homes along riverbanks. Some of my Eskimo friends—hunters—commented on the same thing.

I remember beaver living in lakes, one family with one lodge and one or more dams keeping the water at a level deep enough to not freeze to the bottom in mid-winter. Late summer and into fall the beaver families gathered food piles in front of their doors. Come spring they kicked their teenagers out to face the daunting task of swimming out to the main river, surviving boat hunters, finding an unclaimed home site, meeting a girlfriend or boyfriend, and building a home and a new food pile, all before freeze-up.

Most of that lifestyle hasn’t changed. Lately though, beavers are simply building along the banks of rivers, right out in the open, accessible to hunters and even sometimes in sight of their beaver neighbors.

Now, a brown head crosses the current in front of our boat. Far downstream one of his cousins whacks his tail on the water; we don’t see that animal, just the plume in the distance, like a .30-06 bullet hitting water.

Since I noticed this new beaver behavior, I’ve also noticed that late-season rains have raised the current in the rivers and washed away countless hard-stacked food piles—something that doesn’t happen when a lake floods. And I’ve wondered, how does a family make it through when the last thing to happen before winter is to lose all their food?

Somehow many of them do; there are a lot of beavers, an amazing number of them. Normally I’d say they are doing great. But today, here in beautiful wilderness with just my camera and dog and daughter and a sunny day stretching away forever, I think of cramped cities somewhere on this same planet, of Myanmar and Sichuan province, and I wonder: Are all these beaver really doing well, or are there just a lot of them?