A countryside mystery for young readers

By Gareth M. Parkes

Benji found the ripples first.

He had come down to the flood meadows before the mist had properly lifted — that particular Sussex dawn when the Ouse valley holds the night's cold in the low ground and the light arrives without warmth yet, grey and soft and full of promise. The path ran along the top of the flood bank and below it the meadow stretched away in the particular way of the Ouse floodplain: flat and wet and alive, the grass giving way to rush and sedge as it reached the water, the water giving way to reedbed, the reedbed giving way to the slow, looping arms of the river and its backwaters.

Benji's red collar was dark with dew. He stopped at a place where the flood bank dipped and a track led down to a backwater — one of those quiet, looping channels where the Ouse had changed course long ago and left behind a still, secret pool, barely connected to the main river, warm in summer and sheltered year-round from the wind off the levels.

The water was moving.

Not the movement of current or wind. Something else — a long V-shaped ripple crossing the backwater from west to east, steady and purposeful, with a head at its point.

And behind the head, in the water: a branch. A whole willow branch, perhaps four feet long, being towed with complete assurance toward the east bank where the backwater narrowed between two willow roots.

Benji sat down on the flood bank and watched.

The branch was deposited. The head disappeared. Thirty seconds later it was back, crossing from the willow scrub on the far side with another branch, same pace, same line across the water, the same complete certainty of a creature that has done this before and will do it again and finds each repetition as worthwhile as the last.

A beaver.

Benji had not seen one in the wild before. She was larger than he'd imagined — low-slung and powerful, her flat tail barely visible at the surface as she swam. Her face, when she paused at the bank and looked at him across the still water, was broad and calm and entirely unbothered by the Sheltie sitting on the flood bank watching her work.

"You've been there twenty minutes," she said.

"Fifteen," Benji said honestly. "I found you on the third crossing."

The beaver considered this, then climbed partly out of the water to assess the branch she'd just delivered. "You're not going to chase me or bark at me?"

"No," said Benji. "My name is Benji Booboos. I walk the flood meadows."

"Weir," said the beaver. "I'm building."

"I can see that," said Benji. "What are you building?"

Weir looked at him with the particular expression of a creature who has been asked a question whose answer seems obvious.