By JEFFERSON WEAVER

It was a dark and stormy night.

I lay flat on my back, half-covered in mud. A light rain fell on my face as the strengthening wind moaned in the treetops.

The trap wire tightened around my leg. The feeble glow of my flashlight was a few feet away, but my shotgun was farther – and it was coming.

I also wondered if maybe beaver trapping was such a good idea after all.

It all started when my friend Dean was grumbling about beavers in Sunday School one morning.

Dean and his father are farmers in my community, and to maintain a farm in southeastern North Carolina, you need canals.

Problem is, beavers love canals. Beavers move into an area because they like it, then set about changing it, oftentimes with little regard to the damage they cause in the process.

With beavers, you get dams that overrun fields, flood timber and bog down tractors and combines.

Anyway, I offered to help Dean clear out his beavers, and he readily accepted. Ken Pierce set me up with my trapping license, I read a couple of books and knocked pieces of the rust off some old traps.

I must note that once upon a time, I did some sport trapping. As my fortieth year passes into history, I tend to remember my first trapline as a relaxing, enjoyable time.

A morning in the woods along a creek always meant there was the possibility of taking a deer or maybe a few ducks, so running one’s trapline meant you were hunting, too. It couldn’t get much better, at least in the Norman Rockwell version I remembered.

Problem was, the beavers didn’t agree.

While I was thinking Norman Rockwell, they were thinking Osama bin Laden.

I knew I had a terrorist beaver on the third or fourth day on Dean’s farm.

I had rigged a nearly-perfect example of a trap-set (“set” means not just to prepare a trap, but to prepare the place where the trap is hidden), one which should have proven to be a siren’s call for any beaver on the planet.

This was a set to make any trapper proud, and it was virtually guaranteed, in mountain man parlance, to make meat. Beavers should have been waiting in line for the honor to sacrifice themselves on this set.

Problem was, the beavers didn’t look at it that way.

Said beaver piled mud across my trap, ate the bait, then used the camouflaging sticks surrounding it as part of his new dam. This is a family newspaper so I won’t describe what else he left behind.

This meant war.

So I withdrew and re-evaluated. Although beavers are known for their work ethic, I didn’t know they were supposed to be smart, too. That called for some new tactics.

I began sneaking into the area at all hours, leaving chips of bait in odd places, and generally lulling said critters into a false sense of security. For a week, I waited, my only occasional reward being a set of tracks or the flap of a big flat tail being slammed on the water in alarm.

Then came that dark and stormy night.

It was the Monday before Thanksgiving, just before the nor’easter struck the coast. I knew if I didn’t check my traps that night, the rising water might make them inaccessible.

As I left the truck, I snatched up my battered old Stevens, pocketed a pair of shells, and grabbed my flashlight. Although I doubted I would need it, I stuck a large hunting knife in my belt as well.

Little did I know.

Inching my way along the canal, I frightened at least three, possibly four water-critters off the bank.

They gave me a good feeling, like finding a fresh deer scrape exactly 50 yards from your deer stand, or watching a good dog hold a point.

My first set was virtually undisturbed, so I left it and turned to the next one. As I did so, something large and violent hit the water a few feet away.

“I’ll get you next time,” I promised, and started looking for my trap.

It wasn’t there – but my trap-wire led to the water.

The nearby beaver splashed again. I followed the wire from its stake to the water, and was confronted by the biggest beaver I’d ever seen.

Said critter had refused to follow the rules; rather than drowning head-first in my trap, he had caught his feet and tail. I locked down the line and drew him up for the coup de grace.

With a nod to Donald Trump, I told the beaver it wasn’t personal, it was just business, and drew back the hammer on my old shotgun.

And it misfired. The beaver stared at me.

Nonplussed, I cocked the shotgun again, with the same result.

The beaver still stared, and began to move toward me.

I reloaded, but the shotgun misfired again.

The beaver had had enough.

He dragged the trap wire between my feet and brought me down. My cap flew away, my malfunctioning shotgun landed in the mud, but at least my flashlight stayed fairly close.

And so did the beaver.

Like many hunters and trappers, I’ve seen the corpses of beavers used as part of a beaver dam. Whether this was efficiency, a bizarre memorial, or a warning to other beavers, I’ve never known.

Regardless of the purpose and principle of sticking a dead critter into a dam, I had visions of my wife calling out a search party that would find me plastered to the dam as a warning to other humans.

The fear of such ignominy drove me to scramble up, draw my big knife, and dispatch the critter. I came out of the event with some rather nasty scratches on my arm and leg, but nothing permanent.

He weighed out around 40 pounds, a big beaver under any circumstances, but I could have sworn he weighed three times that much when we were rolling around in the mud.

But then again, it was a dark and stormy night.

When he isn’t fighting beavers, Jefferson Weaver is a writer who lives in Kelly. He may be reached at 642-4104, ext. 227, or via e-mail at jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz.