Taking a break from writing on a dreary afternoon, I photographed rain-wet trees chewed by beavers who have been decimating alders and pincherries near our bridge over Matheson Brook here in northern Nova Scotia. The toothmarks were exquisitely clear, the layers of bark gnawed away in irregular ovals and circles, the bright sapwood under the bark clearly demarcated from deeper, quieter heartwood.

I found a pair of chewed chokecherry trunks that resembled knock-knees, a felled pincherry with only the thinnest bridge of shredded wood still joining beaver-axed trunk to stump, and other victims of the beavers that are now mere stump monuments to the young trees they once were, flakes of their bodies scattered around them like coarse petals.