The Beaver By: Tomson Highway

There is nothing quite like the experience of sitting on the deck of your summer cottage, the lake at your feet mirror-smooth and flawless stretching off into infinity (and if not into infinity then at least across the lake to that stand of sugar maples a half kilometre from where you are sitting) and the silence is so perfect that you swear you can hear the movement of ants in that little pile of sand not ten yards off. And you're sitting there and thinking how fortunate you are to have been born in a land so awesome when, all of a sudden, you hear a splash. And your gaze is pulled to the ripple that has broken the glass-smooth surface that is Trout Lake—or Bear Lake or Lake Misty Maskimoot—and you realize, again (because this, of course, has happened a thousand times before) that it's your beaver playing silly games with you, slapping its fat tail in the water and then diving under, forever in search of that scrumptious shoot, that tasty morsel. And then the little critter gamely re-surfaces to continue its journey, off the other way to where its house stands, its scaly little nose poking out of the water like a mini-periscope slicing water as it goes, the ripples that it makes fanning out and out and out, not a single sound to mar them, just rippling silence. And you know you're home, home where you were born, home where you belong.

Even though the beaver can be found in other countries such as the U.S., France, even Argentina, it still seems uniquely Canadian. That's OUR animal. She's on our nickel. To us, "amisk"—"beaver" in Cree, my mother tongue, stress on the second syllable—means "Canada."