Never Trust a Beaver

So here is the story of my walk with Arthur today.  I'll try to emphasize the funny parts since, personally, I think the title is intriguing and possible deceptive.

We went to Shelby farms, which I always describe as the central park of Memphis.  They have a free-run dog park of a few acres that contains a number of lakes.  After walking Arthur around for quite some time and letting him run free at the main lake, minding our own business of course, it is brought to our attention that there is a dog on the other side of the lake that is potentially stuck and maybe drowning.  This was of course alarming to us doggy lovers, so we started watching more intently to figure out what was really going on.

It was a beaver dam.  The dog in question had seen/caught scent of/who knows what of this beaver, and this dog's natural instincts went into OVERDRIVE.  He was a dog on a mission.  Come to find out Mr. Beaver, was not so friendly to intrusions such as these and was known to attack unsuspecting dogs.

The owner, a frail looking 61 year old woman, was spotted climbing through broken branches onto this little peninsula on the lake.  The very end was the beaver dam, so it was covered in uneven footing with logs everywhere.

This whole fiasco took place for a good twenty minutes, and you could tell the poor lady was frazzled to the max.

Anyway, I decide to go take on the beaver/doggy duo--me, the pregnant girl in flip flops.  So I am following the side of the lake, climbing through trees and large brush when I come to a narrow strip of water in which I need to jump over to get to the other side.  I don't think pregnant women are supposed to be jumping, and here is only one reason why.  My flip flop got caught in the mud on the bank and sent me nose diving onto the other bank, and straight into the water.  Oh, and I lost my flip flop.  I tried to make Arthur go fetch it for me, but he just looked at me like I was the craziest lady in the world.  If he were a person, he would be pulling one of those "I'm not with this lady; I swear I don't know her" moves.  But alas, he is man's best friend and thus just looked at me like I was psycho.  So, I retrieve my mud bathed shoe and started squishing my way along the bank of the peninsula to said lady and beaver obsessed dog.

Needless to say after much coercing, we managed to get ahold of the dog's collar, which of course then slid right off his neck, and back into the water doggy went--digging at the beaver lodge and swimming out whenever said sneaky beaver would show up ten feet into the lake.  I swear sneaky beaver was intentionally messing with crazed doggy's head.  The whole time Arthur could practically be heard saying,"Ok, this dog obviously isn't going to play with ME, and I really don't like crawling around these logs, can we go yet!?"

Finally, this nice man comes over and somehow convinces crazy dog to leave sneaky beaver dam alone. So, the dog goes running off to the other side of the lake with the other dogs.  Thus, frail lady and I (I'm still squishing, but my mud bath is starting to harden a bit...it's good for the skin you know...mud baths) work our way back over to the other side of the lake, where we manage to finally chase crazy dog down, and I get his collar back on him.  She proceeds to yell at crazy dog, being at her wits end, when I kindly remind her that though his collar is on, she has yet to re-leash crazy dog.  So, finally loopy is re-leashed and owner is done yelling, and they were happily on their way.  After all of that, so were we!

OH, you thought I was done....sorry!  This is like the Lord of the Rings, where you think its over cause you've never actually read the books but the awesomeness just keeps on going.  So here we keep going.

As we're heading out, I notice frail lady sitting in the dirt, legs stretched out, exasperated look on her face. I look to find her crazy dog barreling away, leash and all, back to sneaky beaver's dam.  Big dogs and frail ladies don't mix well.  So, the nice man and I head back over, and luckily the leash got caught in all the broken tree branches, so it wasn't off floating in the water with the dog.  The nice man gets the dog and hands me the leash as he crawls through the low hanging branches, and this time I was not giving crazy dog back to frail lady until we were WELL away from the sneaky beaver lake.  So, the real ending comes as we walk exuberantly off into the sunset, with contented success blanketing our weary bodies.  Ok, so it was like 10:30 this morning, and we climbed our way back out the trail and we walked together back to her car.

Anyway, moral of the story is, never sip cider through a straw.  The end.