“Canada’s rich; there’s plenty of opportunity for everyone—everyone except us beavers” he muttered as he waddled back down the stairs. “Canada was built on the backs of beavers, but nowadays we get no respect. It’s not fair.”
He looked at me and complained. “Do you think It was easy leaving my comfortable beaver lodge in the woods? No, it wasn’t; but I moved to the university campus here, this centre of higher learning, because I’m eager to improve myself.
Luckily, they have a nice pond, and I was able to drag some trees into it and build a sturdy lodge and dam; but the campus maintenance crew were not happy. They tore it down. Their excuse was, ‘The students might get beaver fever.’
But I know better, it’s just beaver discrimination.”
I sat down on the steps beside him, I didn’t have a class for another hour, and so I asked him “What did you do then?”
“I’m nothing if not determined. So, I moved,” he said. “I now live in an unofficial Frat house, in the open field beside the pond. There are lots of us rodents living there; but it’s all very quiet, very underground.
My housemates are not a bad bunch, for a group of lazy Artsies that is; yeah, I’m the only Engineer among them.”
“They say the best place to learn is the library,” he continued earnestly. “But as soon as the librarians see me coming, they slam the door to keep me out. It’s not fair, it’s beaver profiling. They think I’ll chew on the wooden chairs or tables or something.”
The beaver sighed, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Look, all I want to do is get an education, and I am eager to learn, but somehow there is always something getting in my way.
You’ve probably realized by now that, I’m an eager beaver, a busy beaver, and nothing ever stops me for long. I found a way to get in.
I got a tail-job, reduced its size by half, and now I can pass for a marmot, or a groundhog. As long as they don’t look at my buck teeth, I’m good.”
He started waddling towards the back door of the library saying “I’m going to try again, this time with my mouth shut. I’m keen to dedicate myself to higher learning; to devour knowledge. You see I really want to become a writer.”
He paused, looked over his shoulder at me and confided, “but the only thing that worries me though, is to be a good writer you need to consume a lot of books— and I find books taste terrible.”
Author’s Note: I want to thank my friend Alice Liu for the picture. I had stopped writing postcard stories because I had run out of suitable pictures. She came to the rescue.