It's been a couple days since I took the pooches for a good walk, so they were all wound up. Comet was running circles in the field, barking at everything and nothing. Stella found a rodent hole to concentrate on and Leon, well, with the attention span of a gnat, you can imagine that he was very busy.
So I paused for a while to sit on the log bridge that spans the newly-restored stream. Not long ago, a coho swam underneath as I was walking across, so I was hoping to catch sight of another one today.
In no time, something swam right underneath my dangling feet. But it wasn't a coho. It wasn't even a fish. It startled me at first and I turned around to see if it would surface for air behind me, downstream. It never did.
Was it a beaver? I've seen evidence of beaver all around the trails - chewed ends of branches and tracks near the river. But this seemed too small to be a beaver and didn't have that big, wide tail.
Was it a RAT? No. It just couldn't be a rat. It swam so smoothly, like a streak and never came up for air the whole time I watched. Oh please, don't be a rat.
Was it a river otter? There's a thought. I had no idea.
When I got home, I Googled "River Otter" and found some pictures including the one above. Unless river otters are small, like large-rat-sized, I don't think what I saw was an otter either.
So the mystery remains.
UPDATE! It was a young beaver!
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