3:25<\/p>\n
The Mayor of Magrath liked to think of himself as a reasonably sophisticated man. He’d left Magrath and attended university in Lethbridge. He’d spent time traveling the country and even spent four months living in Ottawa in his early twenties. He’d toured the museums, visited the galleries and breathed in the culture and history.<\/p>\n
He had also spent more than his share of time out in the bush: annual trips to the foothills to hunt, duck hunting every fall and quite a few camping trips in the Rockies when the family was young. His young son had even taken an interest in bird watching and for almost a whole year the two of them had spent every spare moment engrossed in ornithology of all stripes: building blinds and walking around the prairie with binoculars identifying and studying the remarkably diverse bird life of southern Alberta.<\/p>\n
But in all his days, he had never seen a beaver in the front seat of a Ford, at least not a live one. It was a little after lunch on one of the wettest days he could remember, and so far he had spent most of it in the small cafe in the hotel discussing \u2019civic matters\u2019 with old Johnston and Esther, the caf\u00e9 owner. They solved most of the town’s problems in principle by lunch and then celebrated with a Pil and a BLT. But there had been papers to sign and few calls to return, so he had decided to gear up and head back down main street to the town office and see whether he might put some of the principle into practice.<\/p>\n
As he had stepped through the old wooden screen door, he zipped his collar the rest of the way up and peered into the mist before crossing the street. And there was Meredith\u2019s battered brown pickup parked in front of the old eye-sore of a temple. He’d actually paused to make sure because for the life of him he couldn’t think of a good reason for her to be out on the greasy wet gravel roads on a crappy day like this. Those roads were one of the solved-in-principle problems he was trying to deal with because the County seemed to think it had better priorities than maintaining the roads immediately around the town.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s when, in that momentary glance, he noticed the compact shape in the passenger seat. As far as he knew Meredith had no visitors or house guests, hadn’t since that disaster with the traveling confidence man who had caused him so much embarrassment. So he decided to step over and say hello \u2014 see if he needed to do any official greeting or mayoring or some such. He put on his best neighborly smile, stepped up to the fogged up window and gave a quick rap on the glass. The shape inside shifted and he thought he could see two dark eyes peering at him, but the window didn’t come down and the mayor found himself standing in the increasing rain staring at a closed door.<\/p>\n
Well, this is ridiculous<\/em>, he thought to himself. He grabbed the door handle and pushed in the button, yanked the stiff door open and found himself staring into the eyes of a rather small specimen of Canadian beaver. The beaver turned his head to look into the mayor’s\u00a0 eyes but otherwise didn’t react or even look overly concerned.<\/p>\n \u201cA beaver. What the hell\u2019s a beaver doing in Meredith\u2019s truck?\u201d The mayor turned to look over his shoulder to see whether anyone else was around, but the street was deserted. \u201cA beaver,\u201d he repeated.<\/p>\n The beaver dipped his head slightly as if to acknowledge that the mayor, with all of his worldliness and sophistication, was indeed correct in his conclusion. Then he jumped out of the truck and headed up the shale path to the front door of the old temple.<\/p>\n At this point the mayor found himself dividing his attention between the open door of Meredith\u2019s truck and the front seat, which was now slowly getting soaked by the falling rain, and swiveling his head to stare at the rapidly disappearing beaver. This little tableau existed for a few minutes before the mayor slammed the pickup’s door in in frustration and started after the beaver. But three steps up the sodden path convinced him he would never catch the suddenly speedy rodent, and he stopped again. At that point he turned back to head into the caf\u00e9 again before realizing he couldn’t go in there with this ridiculous tale. Better he stick with the original plan and go back this evening for a beer or three and share the tale when he was more likely to be indulged.<\/p>\n A much better plan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 3:25 The Mayor of Magrath liked to think of himself as a reasonably sophisticated man. He’d left Magrath and attended university in Lethbridge. He’d spent time traveling the country and even spent four months living in Ottawa in his early twenties. He’d toured the museums, visited the galleries and breathed in the culture and history. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4230"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}