I never thought I'd write this story.

On tuesday morning I was at the Anchor to do an errand and found a several foot section of our old cedar baseboard that had been chewed into coarse splinters. Thats one big damn rat ,I thought. For the past year or so Slinky and Tubby , my names for two feral neighborhood cats that had adopted the Anchor as their ratting grounds, have kept the rat population down to nothing (almost).

Yesterday afternoon I recieved an excited phone call from my wife down at the Anchor - something about chewing,attacking, killing ect. After I got her to slow down a bit heres the basic story she told: it was about 3pm and the place was empty except our day bartender, a single customer, my wife and our mutt Max. They were at the bar shooting the breeze, when a strange creature came out from somewhere, waddling along the base of the wall to where the above mentioned chewing took place, and started gnawing away on the baseboard again, right in front of everybody. Amazingly ( because he's usually kind of a wimp) Max sprang into action and grabbed the critter by the neck and started thashing it around. It flew loose ran up the stairs to the upper level, where he grabbed it and lost it again and it ran out the door.

" An Aplodontia walked into a bar..." sounds like a joke, however this one (yes, that is what the critter is) walked into the bar at the wrong time. Steve, our customer, he from Oklahoma, and our bartender is an orchard gal from Okanogan County - both of them having a bit of a 'varmint' perspective on wild fuzzy things and they did the thing in. Nobody even knew what it was, but over the phone with my wife I figured it out, and had her save the evidence.

As tweeters may recall there was quite a thread of postings about Aplodontia (or Mountain Beaver as more commonly known) on tweeters a few months back. The most ancient rodent, it is pretty common in moist ravines around the lowlands, like around Everett where I've seen many of their shallow burrows in the woods. Gardeners living near greenbelts often know the Aplodontia as a bit of a pest.

The Anchor Pub may sound like a real wildlife center (sometimes on friday or saturday night it is) but really it's just an urban pub along the railroad tracks on the industrial waterfront of Everett. The nearest Aplodontia habitat is probably the ravine of Forgotten Creek about 2 long blocks to our south , however there is a little patch of woodsy vegetation just across the tracks from the bar - I dont think it would provide enough understory vegetation to support a Mt. Beaver. Our poor victim is a large male that did'nt look like it had missed many meals - a real chunky one. What it was doing at the Anchor I dont know - maybe it got liquored up off a half empty can of bum beer along the tracks. Who knows.

It did give me ideas for a great movie though called ,'Ancient Anger' (or something like that) wherein all the Aplodontias in Everett have had just too much abuse from big hominids whomping on em, and stepping in their burrows and stuff and they all swarm out at once (at night of course) with a 'great gnashing of teeth' - a term that has a nice 'end time' feel to it I think - and chew us all up. And then the big cedar stump in the Anchor crawlspace ( about 5' in diameter and still solid enough to have a foundation post on it) starts growing again during a metal band concert lifting the whole tatooed and pierced enchilada into the sky, and returning the world to peace and quiet. This would go along with the book I'm not going to write titled ' The Sound and the Furry' where Sea Otters return to Puget Sound, bent on revenge, using rocks to crack more than sea urchins. Part of a Nature Bats Last sieries. Maybe I'm spending too much time working alone.

Jeff Gibson
The Anchor Pub
1001 Hewitt Ave
Everett Wa