Our Dream of Beavers Living on our Alaskan Homestead
As I mentioned in “Moving to the Heart of Alaska”, with all of our remodeling capabilities we weren’t able to reproduce a beaver pond. I can say that with all honesty because we spent weeks trying to replicate the pond that was promoted in our cabin’s real estate listing.
Our closest neighbor at the time, who lived 3 miles up the road, let us know that there used to be a dam on our property with many beavers who occupied it. He further explained that trappers dynamited the dam to make it easier to get to the beavers. He was unsure if they were successful in killing the beavers, but the evidence was clear that the pond had been destroyed.
 We came up with the brilliant idea that we could reconstruct the dam to rebuild the beaver’s pond. For weeks we dug in the mud, added rocks, broke sticks and chain-sawed trees to build up the dam.
 It was a labor intensive and physically demanding job, but we enjoyed every minute of it until all of our efforts were washed in the current within the minutes to hours that we had packed the materials down.
Beavers are pretty impressive creatures to be able to build such an incredible tiered infrastructure which include their lodges, canals and the dams themselves. According to the National Geographic* website’s article “How Beaver’s Became North America’s Best Firefighter”, the beaver’s infrastructure is visible from space. God created them to be finely tuned dam building engineers, which is why we had no chance of filling their webbed shoes.
Beavers gravitate to the sound of moving water. The sound drives them to either stop the flow of water or tunnel the source of flow into the pond. They’ll work on the dams whenever they find it necessary, because it’s their survival. We worked on it when it was warm out and left when we got tired.
 Since we didn’t need the pond for our survival, we stopped working on it when we realized that we weren’t making any progress. Several summers went by and then I noticed a couple of animals exploring the valley from our cabin’s window. I took our child’s tiny binoculars and squinted to see what those little critters were doing down there. It was getting dark so I didn’t feel comfortable venturing down there to see them up close. I just lost them in the brush and went about my night.
 The following day I noticed the water, by the dam that we had worked on years prior, rising. I scratched my head and started putting the incidents together. I was getting excited, but wasn’t ready to be entirely convinced. I prayed about it so I could contain myself without driving my husband bonkers. He agreed to go down with me to take a look a few days after that and we actually saw the beavers working on the dam. That was when we both broke down and praised the Lord. He blessed us with two large healthy beavers. It still brings tears to my eyes, because God heard and answered my prayers. It took him some time to do it, but he did it and that’s what matters. I don’t think that I’ll ever see beavers the same, nor God. Â
References:
*https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/beavers-firefighters-wildfires-california-oregonÂ