Move over Bambi to make room for Paddy! A few days after arriving at a pristine lake in Ontario, Lawrence stumbled across the meagre remains of a wolf kill and recognized that the prey had been a lactating female beaver. Frantic with concern over the kits who would be doomed to die with no mother to feed them, he searched and searched . . . and as with many quests, it's when you are about to give up that things begin happening. He raises the tiny creature--a true naturalist Lawrence never went anywhere without eye-droppers and powdered milk for just this sort of situation--over the course of the five months he is at the lake and by the time he leaves the beaver is re-adopted by his family, which isn't really a spoiler because this is a story that is all in the telling. Lawrence alternates information about beavers with his experiences that summer and at other times in the wild, along with that hard-earned wisdom of those who have really learned to observe thoughtfully and carefully. A wonderful book with which to begin the year. ***** ( )

This is a book by a famous naturalist about a beaver he raised, beavers in general and Canadian wilderness. He arrived in May at a lake to study wild beavers, but one of them, a nursing female, got killed by a wolf, and so he adopted the surviving kit. First he spent a long time looking for it, diving into the lake and then getting up into various beaver lodges there, because they can be accessed only from underwater. Once he nearly got stuck in one, but managed to extricate himself out of it. When he finally found the kit, he actually licked it all over with his tongue, to calm him down and make him accept him, because he said that’s what a beaver kit would expect. And then he was raising it for about 5 months, quite a time-consuming task, interfering with one's sleep, not to mention various neighborhood excursions he had planned to do. Later on this beaver got accepted back by his father and siblings, but next spring when the author came back for a few days, the beaver came to visit him on the last day, and sat at his campfire with him for a couple of hours. I greatly enjoyed reading this book. I also found out various interesting facts about beavers from this book, such as that they keep growing throughout their lives, the only mammals to do so, and lodges and dams are not the most complex things they build. Canals to feeding grounds are, made to be able to dive to safety if a predator shows up. They have to be dug in a series of steps, as the land is rising; the lowest part gets filled with water from the main lake or river, and all the others from general drainage, springs, etc. ( )