The boy woke while it was still dark outside, before there was even a smear of light on the eastern horizon. He did not go back to sleep, though. He was too excited. It was Christmas day! He threw off his blankets and dressed quickly all in wool. He pulled on thick wool socks, long johns, pants, shirt and sweater.

When he was dressed from head to toe in warm wool, he tiptoed quietly out of his room and into the hall, past his little sister’s room, past his parent’s room, and into the living room, which was lit only by the hundreds of tiny colored lights on the Christmas tree. Presents had been arrayed under the fragrant tree, each wrapped in colorful holiday paper and tied with red and green and gold bows. Four bulging Christmas stockings hung heavily from hooks in the wall next to the woodstove. The boy grinned and for a minute or two enjoyed looking at the beautiful sight before padding into the kitchen for a quick glass of orange juice and a doughnut. He took one last look at the twinkling lights on the tree before removing his .22 rifle from the gun rack. First checking to be sure that it was unloaded, he leaned it in the corner by the door. He struggled into his rubber hip boots, grabbed his waterproof gloves, tugged a wool hat over his tousled brown hair, pulled on his heavy red-checked wool coat, picked up the rifle from the corner, and quietly left the house.

 
Finally, a thin, pale yellow line thickened on the eastern horizon, and higher up in the clear sky he watched the stars disappear one by one. It would be some time yet till sunrise, but the boy could see without a flashlight. His breath formed clouds as he walked through thin snow on his way to the woodland stream beyond the back field. He was heading for his trap line. The boy was in a hurry. He wanted to be home before his parents and sister opened their presents.

Winter had been warmer than usual so far, and there was only about an inch of snow on the ground. Soon the boy reached the stream. Everyone called it a stream but really it was a small river. Aspen and birch and beech trees grew on both banks. Here and there, sharp-pointed stumps showed where beaver had felled trees for their winter food stores. Thin ice sheathed shoreline eddies, but black water flowed freely in the main stream channel. The boy reached his first set, a trap placed in the water near a path often used by muskrat. Nothing. The boy walked downstream and checked the next several sets. All were empty. Soon he would be finished—there were only a couple more sets, both on a beaver pond a short walk upstream.

The boy was not unhappy to find his traps empty this morning. He didn’t really like trapping. In summer, for his fourteenth birthday, his dad had given him some traps and the rifle, saying it would do him good to run a trap line, just as he had done when he was a boy. His dad said that the money made selling the animal skins would teach him responsibility and show him how to manage his cash. The boy loved his father and wanted to please him. As autumn passed and winter approached, the boy’s father taught him how to safely handle his rifle, how to make sets for muskrat, and how to prepare their skins for sale. The trap line was to be the boy’s responsibility, and his alone. After the first couple of times when his dad went along, the boy checked his traps each morning alone.

The boy had never needed to use his rifle to shoot a trapped animal, because the muskrats had always drowned before he got to his traps. As he pulled their small, stiff bodies from the water, he tried hard not to think of what it must feel like to die underwater. Only once did he think about the hopeless struggle for life in the cold, black water. He hadn’t trapped many muskrat so far, and he wasn’t unhappy about that. He hadn’t yet told his father how he felt. He was a little ashamed about it and didn’t want his dad to think he was a sissy. But as he walked to the beaver pond, the boy hoped that these sets, too, would be empty.

There wasn’t much ice on the pond, and the beaver lodge rose from grey water near the center. Fingers of steam curled and pointed toward the cold pre-dawn sky. The second to last set was empty. The last set was near the beaver dam. Once more the boy breathed a silent prayer there wouldn’t be a muskrat in it. He looked forward to getting back home for Christmas morning with his family, back to a place of light and happiness and warmth.

As he got closer to the dam, the boy noticed a large, dark shape moving in the water not far from his last trap. As he got closer still, he noticed another dark shape under the water. He moved reluctantly to the pond’s edge, feeling sick to his stomach and dreading what he’d see. He had a beaver in his trap. Just as he reached the shore, the second beaver struck the water with its broad, flat tail, and dove beneath the surface. Seconds later, its head popped up again near the lodge.

The boy had no way of knowing it, but the second beaver was a female, and the beaver caught in the trap was her mate. He was the father of the babies she carried inside her body, and she was to give birth to them in late winter. When the steel jaws of the trap had closed on her mate’s front foot, he fought to free himself, pulling on the trap and struggling toward the water’s surface. His mate had swum down to him as he fought for life, frantically biting and tugging on the chain which anchored the trap to the bottom of the pond. Her mate was strong and the set was placed in shallow water. By using all his strength, he could just push his nose above the surface from time to time and breathe, but he was tiring fast. Soon he would drown.

The beavers had been together for only a few months. They were each just over two years old. When they formed their partnership in springtime, they traveled downstream from their parents’ lodges and found this pond. They moved into an abandoned lodge, and worked together to patch it up and make it livable again. They worked together to reinforce the dam. Together they put in many long hours over many weeks to build up their underwater pantries of winter food. Most of their food consisted of aspen—branches and the trunks of trees they felled together. When the cold, short days of winter came, the beaver couple felt secure. They had a warm home and knew they had enough food to carry them through the cold months ahead. When the time came, as it always does, that ice covered the pond and make it impossible to go ashore to harvest more food, they’d leave their lodge through tunnels in the floor and swim to their pantries to bring branches into the lodge where they’d eat. When the babies were born in March, their mother would be fat and healthy, and capable of giving them all the rich, warm milk they could drink.

But now the father beaver was trapped and drowning. Very soon now, he would die in the water of the pond which had been so good to them both. The mother beaver would face the winter alone. She would not have her mate to warm her in her when she slept. She would give birth to his babies alone, without his comforting presence. She would have to bring food into the lodge alone from their winter stores, and there would be no one to help her teach the little beavers the lessons they must learn to survive. There would be no one to help her protect her family. The odds of survival would be stacked against them.

The mother beaver watched the boy pulling her mate from the water. She was powerless and could do nothing but swim frantically back and forth along the shore where her mate was captured in the trap. She splashed her tail repeatedly in impotent warning. At last she stopped near the lodge and watched as the boy bent down to lift her mate’s body out of the water. She was filled with dread and fear.

 
The boy dragged the beaver out of the cold water. The beaver’s front leg was caught in the jaws of the trap, and he was limp and motionless, but he was not yet cold and stiff. The boy forced open the jaws of the trap, and was astonished to see the beaver’s leg move away from the frigid steel. The boy was shocked to see that the beaver was not dead. He sat down on the frozen ground and lifted the beaver’s head. The exhausted beaver opened his pain-filled eyes and looked into the eyes of the boy. The beaver alive, but he was weak and the boy was afraid he was very near death. The boy was nearly out of his mind with grief. He had forgotten the Christmas tree and the presents waiting for him back at his house. He could only think of one thing. The beaver was still alive. He would have to kill it. He would have to shoot the beaver.

He stood, loaded the rifle, and put the butt against his shoulder. He pointed the muzzle at the beaver’s head. But he couldn’t pull the trigger. He heard the other beaver slapping its tail again, right over there, not far away. The barrel began to swing from side to side. He and the beaver stared at each other for what seemed a very long time. The boy’s eyes filled with tears. He lowered his rifle, carefully unloaded it, and then set it down on the snow. He took off his thick wool coat, and sat down again on the frozen ground. The boy draped the coat over his legs, pulled the heavy beaver onto the warm wool, and wrapped the coat around the beaver. He hugged the wool-wrapped bundle to him. The beaver began to warm up. The beaver’s forefoot was painful and swollen, but it wasn’t broken. Without thinking, the boy began to hum Silent Night as he rocked the wool-wrapped beaver and pulled him even closer against his body. Out on the pond, not far away, the injured beaver’s mate swam back and forth, but she had stopped slapping her tail. Somehow, she knew that the danger to her mate had passed. The sun’s pallid disk rose above the line of the horizon and turned the treetops around the pond a lemony hue.

 
He had no idea how long he’d been holding the beaver. Then the boy heard footsteps approaching. He looked up briefly and saw his father coming out of the woods toward him. His father was suddenly very afraid when he saw his son hunched and rocking with the rifle in the snow beside him. Fearing the worst, he ran toward his son.

The boy again turned his tear-streaked face to his father. The father looked at his son, saw the wool-clad bundle in his arms, saw the beaver’s bright, unblinking eyes looking back at him, and knelt in the snow beside the pair. He removed his own coat and covered his shivering son’s shoulders. The boy stammered out an explanation, trying to tell his father why he’d been unable to kill the beaver he now held in his arms. His father said nothing, but he put his arm around the boy who tried so hard to be a man. The female beaver swam closer to the shore and watched the boy, the man, and the wool-wrapped bundle that was her mate. She slapped her tail, more gently this time, and her mate stirred, turning his head toward the water. The boy told his father that he could not kill the beaver, and that he wanted to let him go. He waited for angry words that he was sure would follow. To his surprise, his father had no angry words. Instead he took the beaver’s paw gently in his hand. The beaver struggled but the man was firm and strong. He felt the bone, and then told the boy that he thought the leg would be all right, that the swelling would probably go away in time.

Together, the boy and his father unwrapped the coat from around the struggling beaver and placed him at he edge of the pond. Together, the boy and his father watched the beaver limp to the water and slip in. Together, they watched the beaver swim away from shore to rejoin his mate. The two beavers swam around each other with what could only be joy to be once again in one another’s company. They swam together to the lodge and slipped under the water to enter their home through the underwater tunnel.

The father and his son turned away. Together they gathered up all the traps and carried them back to the house. They put to traps into a wooden crate, and put the crate under the workbench in the garage. Together they entered the kitchen, where the boy’s mother tightly hugged her men and sat down with them to Christmas breakfast. When she asked her son if he had found anything in his traps, he looked quickly over at his father and then said no, he hadn’t had any luck, and that he guessed that he really wasn’t a very good trapper. And that was all he said. Neither he nor his father ever said anything about that morning to anyone, not even to each other, ever again.

 
The years passed and the boy grew up. He met a girl whom he loved and who loved him and together the two of them built a log house in a clearing on a hill overlooking the beaver pond. From their living room the young couple could see the whole pond. They spent many mornings and evenings watching the creatures who came to drink and wash and play in the water. They saw deer, and ducks, and herons, and all kinds of songbirds. Every year a pair of ospreys nested in a large, dead white pine across the pond from their cabin. And they watched the beavers, who came out of their lodge at sunset and went about their work, tending the dam, eating water lily roots, and, in the fall, gathering saplings and small trees for winter food. There were young beavers on the pond every year, newborn kits and their older brothers and sisters. When the older kits were two years old, they left to find mates and make lives for themselves on other streams and ponds. The two oldest beavers, one of whom walked with slight limp when ashore, stayed in the lodge on the pond.

The man and his wife had children of their own, and, in the summer, they would take their children down to the pond in the evening to watch the yearling beavers play with their younger brothers and sisters.

On the couple’s first Christmas together snow blanketed the hills and the beaver lodge looked like an igloo rising above the dark waters skimmed with ice. The man’s wife was surprised when he rose before dawn. He thought he hadn’t wakened her, but she knew and watched as he left their warm home in the half-light of pre-dawn. She watched as he walked to the beaver dam, to a spot where ice never formed because of a spring bubbling up. She was mystified to see him leave an armful of freshly cut aspen branches next to the open water. When he came back, she asked him why he had gone out so early on such a cold morning. He had only smiled and mumbled something about a Christmas beaver. Every year on Christmas morning he did the same thing. And he kept doing it all the while they lived in the cabin by the pond.

 
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Snow piles deep, but a community of small mammals isn’t deterred. Some of us are hindered by the snow, while for others snow provides protection and warmth. During a quick warm-up, the deep snow which had blanketed the lawn melts down, exposing a network of tunnels engineered by shews, voles, and mice. A deep ridge of snow under the eaves didn’t hinder the small burrowers, either—one foot of four feet, no matter, just dig and you’ll punch through. The large bare places in the photo mark where a pair of cottontail rabbits raced across the snow two days earlier.

 
The more temperate parts of the country might be warmer at this time of year than it is in the northern border region, but nights are long, nonetheless. Sunday marked the solstice, but it will take the sun a long time to make the return migration north. Until sometime in March, we’re all in the dark for much of the time.

Barney in Texas has been doing a bit of solo tent camping recently, and made the discovery that there’s a long dark span between setting up camp and going to sleep. When he’s at home in Comfort Castle, he spends those hours updating his blog, taking notes on his laptop, and pottering around with inside chores. But when away from a power point, what is a camper to do? How do you fill those dark hours in camp? That depends. Folks who are camping in company find numerous ways to entertain themselves, from playing cards and board games (small, portable games are available from big box retailers and mail order companies), to cooking and eating around the campfire, to talking and singing.

Solo campers often just set up camp, eat, then sleep the long night away. People who can’t manage to sleep that many hours wear a headlamp or hang a small lantern in the tent so they can read, while others plot their route for the next day.

Other ways to keep busy include making music with a portable instrument. Passive entertainment can be had by carrying a radio or MP3 player—listen to music, podcasts, or talking books in the warmth of your sleeping bag. And then there’s the possibility of watching DVDs on a small portable player of the kind travelers take for themselves or their kids on plane and road trips. That and a selection of DVDs would fill quite a few hours.

Many campers (present company included) keep trip journals to chronicle the day’s events. I’m talking about pen and paper here. My favorite bound journals come from my days as a field geologist. They’re books of water-resistant paper, hard-bound, and just the right size to fit into a pack pocket.

I’ve recently become a digital girl, though, and in recent years many new gadgets have come on the market to allow electronic journal keeping, complete with the capability of downloading digital photos. On a cross-country bus trip a couple years ago I used a PocketMail Composer® to keep notes. When I could get to a public phone, I sent my notes to my home email address using PocketMail’s toll-free number. PocketMail is a dated technology—it doesn’t have the capability to load and download images, nor can it access the web—and while it’s still a useful subscription service, its limitations have me looking for other ways to keep an electronic journal. I’d like to be able to file articles and manage the website when camping, touring, and on the road. More research is needed, as scientists are wont to say.

 
The upshot? Solo winter campers don’t necessarily have to go into torpor for the 15 hours or so of darkness that embraces camp before the sun rises again. When camping by myself, I’ll take a good headlamp, an entertaining book, a small radio or music-maker, and a stock of spare batteries. These and a paper or an electronic journal will keep this writer busy before Sandman arrives to carry me off to the land of nod.