The sight gives me confidence. Because beavers remain active all winter, they need the surrounding water to be deep. They spend the cold-weather months under the ice, hauling up the leafy branches they’ve dragged into the mud all summer. With their orange teeth, they carry these lengths of wood into their lodges to eat.

When I reach the den, I cast a glance behind me, and my heart drops. It seems like I’ve barely made progress. I reach out a hand to steady myself against the mound of sticks, and as I do memory returns. Despite my prior despair and general misery, I can’t help but laugh aloud.

I am thinking of Charley Stevens and a story he once told me about his stay in a “beaver house.”

He’d once found himself fleeing through the woods. A trio of poachers had unleashed their bear-hunting dogs on him, and the hounds were hard on his heels. He thought he knew a shortcut to safety, across a stream, but he found his escape route blocked by a newly created beaver pond.

“If I’d tried swimming across, those poachers would have pot-shotted me sure,” he said.

There seemed to be nowhere to hide. Then he’d gotten an idea. Fully dressed, he plunged into the pond and swam out to the lodge. With the dogs baying behind him, he took a deep breath, and dove down into the murk until he found the underwater entrance into the den with his blind hands. He’d wormed his way inside, up onto the raised platform where a mother beaver was nursing her three kits.

“A beaver has a nasty set of choppers so you can be sure I minded my manners,” he said. “When she saw I meant no harm to her family, she calmed down. I spent the night there, listening to those frustrated hounds. The dogs could smell me among the rodents, but fortunately their owners weren’t sharp enough to put two and two together. It must’ve seemed to them that I’d drowned. I caught up with those gents later, when I had a few armed wardens behind me, and they looked at me like I was Lazarus.”

It had to be a tall tale, I concluded. Game wardens are storytellers of the highest order, and Charley ranked among their elite. Then I’d met a warden who could vouch for his account.

“Stevens came into the office stinking of mud and beaver shit,” said Warden Mack McQuarrie. “We thought for sure he’d die of beaver fever.”

Meaning giardiasis. It’s a parasitic infection of the gut, usually contracted from swallowing water in which animals have defecated.

“I did have a wicked case of the scoots afterward!” Charley admitted.