My Beaver Saga from Alone

“Persistence can change failure into extraordinary achievement.” Matt Biondi

On the evening of Day 1, I heard a beaver swimming in a neighboring pond, the slap of its tail breaking the surface of the water. Oddly enough, that sound was comforting. It pierced through the silence, and the silence itself had become one of the loudest parts of the experience. It echoed the stark reality of just how remote this place really was. I had no idea then that this animal would become one of the most important characters in my Alone journey.

At first, his presence was simply another part of learning the landscape. I found chewed willow, tracks and slides along the shoreline, and occasionally saw him swimming through the water. But once I began seriously trying to procure fish, his presence became impossible to ignore. Within a day of deploying my gillnet, it was destroyed. Half chewed willow branches were tangled through large holes and torn mesh, leaving little question about the culprit. My gillnet was never my only plan, so I quickly established other fishing systems. I stretched a trotline across a small crescent along my shoreline and built seven set lines using spring poles and hobo reels. He interfered with all of them.

And he didn't stop there. He stole willow I had gathered for my shelter and other crafts. He even took a tripod I had built and sank it to the bottom of the river. Every day, I watched him swim up and down my shoreline wondering what he would bother with next. At one point, he even came into my camp like a burglar looking for his next score, only to discover I was home and quickly retreat. Looking back, there is something hilarious about being repeatedly robbed and outsmarted by a beaver. At the time, when every calorie and ounce of energy mattered, it was incredibly frustrating.

I understood that if I wanted to remain in the game long term, calories were going to matter enormously. Protein alone wouldn't be enough. Fat mattered. Energy mattered. I had intentionally entered the experience carrying additional body reserves, but those reserves were temporary. Eventually, I needed the land and water around me to provide.

So every day, I worked. I set traps, repaired traps, fished with a hand line, rebuilt fishing systems, and constructed a new gillnet from monofilament fishing line. There were moments when I felt hopeless and moments when I felt like a complete failure. That feeling carried additional weight because I am a survival instructor. This is what I teach. I wouldn't call myself a master trapper or fisherwoman. I have always been more of a “Jacks of all trades,” but I had successfully procured food using primitive systems before and knew enough knowing I could succeed.

The Arctic didn't care what had worked for me somewhere else.

And neither did the beaver.

Eventually, I realized my fishing systems weren't necessarily failing because fish weren't there. I had placed them in the middle of someone else's highway. The beaver knew that shoreline. He traveled, gathered, ate, and built there. He repeatedly encountered everything I put in his path. Eventually, he became such a significant obstacle to procuring fish that I decided to pursue him instead. After all, the beaver himself carried something I desperately needed: fat.

We had been encouraged to use drowning sets for beaver. The system consisted of a snare connected to an anchor and float, designed so the beaver would pull the anchor into deeper water while the float marked the location for recovery. Building these systems was cumbersome. It took me four days to construct nine sets, which I positioned along the slides I had identified. But I knew that if I could find his lodge, I could narrow his movements and increase my chances of success.

Something unexpected happened while I was trying to outsmart this animal. I started admiring him.

Beavers are extraordinary creatures. They shape waterways, transform landscapes, gather food, maintain their shelters, and continually prepare for what comes next. The longer I watched this beaver, the more similarities I began seeing between us. He was constantly moving, and so was I. He gathered materials, and so did I. He built and maintained his home, and so did I. He altered the landscape through persistent work, while I cut paths, gathered resources, felled trees, and built my own shelter.

We were also both obsessed with home.

While living out there, I found myself dreaming about having land of my own. I imagined a place where friends and family could gather, a home that could offer healing, recovery, connection, and belonging. While physically building a temporary shelter in the Arctic, I was mentally designing my future home.

The irony became impossible to ignore. The animal I considered my adversary was living almost exactly the same existence I was. We were both trying to survive. We were both gathering food. We were both building homes. We were both altering the landscape around us. We were both persistent. Somewhere along the way, I began to feel as though I was embodying the spirit of the animal I was simultaneously trying to catch.

One morning, while searching the shoreline for the lodge, I came across another beaver lying dead at the water's edge. My immediate instinct was practical. I carefully examined the animal to determine whether it might still be useful. Beaver can provide an enormous amount of fat, exactly what I needed, but this animal was too far gone. The risk of disease and pathogen exposure was greater than the reward. I had entered this experience to challenge myself, but ultimately I was still playing a game. I wasn't willing to leave with a potentially life changing illness for the sake of proving something.

The animal appeared to have been shot. Then something happened that I still think about. While I stood beside the dead beaver, the live beaver I had been watching came remarkably close. The dead animal was much larger, and my mind began creating a story around what I was witnessing. Perhaps it was an elder. Perhaps even a parent. I wondered if the younger beaver had somehow led me there. Maybe he wanted help. Maybe he thought I could save it.

Of course, I will never know what was happening in that animal's mind, but I know what the experience made me feel.

Standing beside that dead beaver forced me to confront the reality of what I was preparing to do to the living one. I believe taking the life of an animal comes with responsibility. Hunting should never simply be about killing. When we take an animal, we should strive to honor that life through its use. Meat, fat, fur, bones, sinew, and whatever else can reasonably be utilized become part of that responsibility.

A life is still a life.

Finding that abandoned body made me ask myself a difficult question: Was I about to do the same thing to him?

What had started as a battle over fishing equipment had become something far more complicated. The beaver remained an obstacle to my ability to procure food, but he was also forcing me to think about hunting, stewardship, responsibility, and whether success can truly be called success if we fail to honor what made that success possible. I ultimately decided not to construct additional traps. I left some of the systems I had already built in place, holding onto the possibility that I might still procure him and, if I did, honor his life to the best of my ability.

Meanwhile, my lack of success with food procurement was weighing heavily on me. I felt ashamed, embarrassed, and frustrated. After all, I was a survival instructor, and in my mind I was failing at survival. That internal pressure became another burden to carry alongside everything physically required to survive.

Then one day, something told me to walk north.

It was an area I rarely visited because that portion of shoreline was incredibly difficult to navigate. Fallen trees and debris from the cliff made movement slow and expensive in terms of energy. But that day I felt drawn there, so I went.

Eventually, I reached a small opening along the shore and stood there thinking about everything that had been weighing on me. The emotional floodgates opened. I cried, and I prayed. I prayed for some kind of sign. I prayed for a shift. I prayed for reassurance that all of this work and failure would eventually lead somewhere.

I'm not entirely sure what I believe in. I wasn't raised within an organized religion, and my beliefs have been shaped by different cultures, traditions, experiences, and moments throughout my life. Sometimes I call it the universe. Sometimes Creator. Sometimes God. What I know is that I believe in something greater than myself, because there have been moments throughout my life that I have difficulty dismissing as coincidence.

For a brief moment, the clouds opened.

A beam of sunlight reflected across the water. Seeing the sun felt extraordinary after weeks blanketed in overcast. The surface glittered, and I suddenly imagined an abundance of fish swimming beneath it.

Maybe this was where they were.

Maybe this was where the fish were gathering away from the beaver's highway.

I remember asking out loud, “Is this where I'm supposed to put my net?”

Then a fish jumped, piercing the silence.

I listened.

And I moved my newly constructed gillnet there.

Practically, the decision made sense. I needed to get one of my most valuable fishing tools away from the beaver's regular travel corridor. But emotionally, moving the net represented something much larger. For weeks, I had repaired, rebuilt, reset, and repeated. I had been persistent, but there comes a point when persistence can become stubbornness.

Persistence does not always mean doing the same thing harder. Sometimes it means changing direction. Sometimes it means accepting that your original plan isn't working and taking another risk.

Moving that net meant letting go of where I thought I should succeed and trusting myself enough to try somewhere else.

Shortly after moving the gillnet, another clue appeared. One morning I noticed fox tracks running along the water's edge and followed them to see what the animal had been investigating.

The tracks led directly to the beaver's lodge.

Finally, I had found his home.

Instead of building additional traps, I relocated two of my existing drowning sets near the lodge, including one directly along the path leading toward his home.

It worked.

When I returned to check the area, one of the traps was gone. There was significant debris around the location, suggesting a tremendous struggle had occurred, but I couldn't see the beaver or the float. The pond had frozen overnight, preventing the float from rising visibly to the surface.

I searched feverishly for any indication of movement or life. Part of me desperately hoped he had escaped. Anything felt better than the possibility I feared most: that I had killed him and couldn't recover his body.

I returned repeatedly over the following two days, searching for the float, the animal, or any indication of what had happened. I hoped the pond would freeze solid enough for me to walk across and locate him beneath the ice.

Then the snow came and covered everything.

After that day, I never saw another sign of the beaver. No fresh slides. No tracks. No movement through the river.

Nothing.

He was gone.

I believed I had killed him.

Instead of feeling victorious, I felt devastated. I couldn't use his meat, fat, fur, bones, or sinew. I couldn't honor his body in the way I had intended. Feeling the weight of that realization, I removed the remaining traps. If there was even a slim possibility that he had survived, I didn't want to risk hurting him again.

Then came the shift I had prayed for arrived.

I caught a fish.

After all of the failure, frustration, rebuilding, praying, and questioning myself, there it was. Food. Calories. Success.

But it felt like much more than a fish.

It felt like validation.

I cannot prove that catching it was anything more than the result of practical decisions. Maybe removing the beaver eliminated the obstacle interfering with my fishing systems. Maybe moving the gillnet simply put it in better water. Maybe some part of my brain had been processing everything I observed about the shoreline, currents, fish, and beaver until the answer manifested as intuition.

Maybe it was coincidence.

Maybe it was manifestation.

Maybe it was the universe.

Maybe it was God.

I don't know, and maybe I don't need to know.

What mattered was that I had listened. I had changed course. And I had kept going.

Eventually, I realized the beaver had taught me one of the most important lessons of my journey: persistence does not mean refusing to change course.

When something disappeared, the beaver found another branch. If one route didn't work, he found another route. If he needed another resource, he found another resource.

He adapted.

Ultimately, that was what I needed to learn to do too.

There is a difference between stubbornness and perseverance. Stubbornness says, “This has to work because this is the way I decided to do it.” Perseverance says, “I am going to find a way, even if it isn't the way I originally planned.”

Survival requires the second.

Sometimes the obstacle in front of us isn't simply there to be defeated. Sometimes it is there to teach us something about ourselves.

For so long, I had been focused on everything I wasn't accomplishing that I had overlooked what I was doing. I kept rebuilding. I kept walking. I kept gathering. I kept experimenting. I kept failing, and then I kept trying again.

Just like him.

Perhaps that is why losing the beaver affected me so deeply. Somewhere along the way, he stopped being merely a nuisance and became a mirror. I saw my own persistence in his. I saw my obsession with home in his. I saw my constant movement in his. And eventually, because of him, I saw my own perseverance.

I wasn't able to honor his body in the way I desperately wanted to, but I can honor his spirit by remembering what he represented.

Keep going. Adapt. Find another route. Change the plan. Build again. Try again.

So thank you, Universe. Thank you, fish. Thank you, frustration. Thank you for the failures and the lesson.

And strangely enough, thank you, beaver.

Thank you for showing me that an obstacle can become a teacher. Thank you for forcing me to adapt. Thank you for allowing me to recognize my own perseverance when I was too consumed by failure to see it myself.

I began this story believing I was trying to outsmart a beaver.

I left realizing that I had become a little bit like him: persistent, adaptable, obsessed with building a home, and always searching for another way forward.

Perhaps there is no better way to honor what that animal came to represent in my journey than with a phrase that has followed women through challenges far greater than anyone expected them to overcome:

Nevertheless, she persisted.