A work of fiction. Standard disclaimers.
Jerry and Zeke Weaver, of Clan Cohasset, stood with their tutor, Sisyphus, by the banks of the stream that ran past their village, and on beyond to where it met the ocean at Cohasset Onenya. It had been a hard winter, and the stream, swollen from pounding rains on melting snow, ran fast and turbid and cold, chafing against the rocky ledges that held it, protesting, in its channel. The turbulent noise of what would be a mighty river if it could dominated the landscape, otherwise the cloudy gray-brown of a day of which the rushing water was the only sign of hoped-for springtime.
The boys shivered in their woolen togas, for it seemed that the stream forced blasts of damp cold straight through them. And yet they stayed and marveled, for they knew this stream best in the summer months, where it lay still, its water (when there was any) warm and brown and full of … things. “Where is all this water”, Jerry asked no one in particular, “when the sun is at its hottest and even the trees wilt, begging for a drop?”
Sisyphus, on hearing the question, looked quizzically at the boys for a few moments, then got their attention and led them to a place on the stream bank where the rocky ledge was nearly vertical. He pointed … and they saw that the ledge was scored in several places, as if the rushing water had gouged out scars in the rock. Some of the scars were smooth, as if time had worn off their edges, whereas others looked torn and angular, as if they had just been made. Several of the scars were well above where the water now ran.
Sisyphus cleared his throat, getting Jerry and Zeke’s attention. They looked up from the river, and saw their tutor with some rod-like thing in his right hand, something that had an orange-red color and that had one end flattened, the other drawn to a sharp point, the whole slightly more than a hand long, measured from wrist to the end of the middle finger. In his left hand, he held a rock of the same stuff as the river ledge. He scraped the point of the rod against the rock, and it left a mark … just like those in the riverbank ledge.
The boys, who were used to tools of wood and stone, fibers and bone, had never seen anything like this before. Zeke blurted out, “What is that, and where did you get it? Is it … from … Onenya?”
“It was made by the people of Onenya”, Sisyphus acknowledged, “but it was found at a place far from Onenya itself, where the risks were less. The Wise” (the class of Tutors in Clan Cohasset, among whom Sisyphus included himself) “have recovered and made use of what we could, including the devices that your family uses to produce these togas. Nature has reclaimed the rest.
“You now know what these marks are, and who made them”, he concluded, and then asked, “What are they for?”
The boys pondered a moment, and then Jerry, the elder, responded, “I can only guess that they show the highest level the water reaches, perhaps the highest level each year. And that the water, high as it is, is not the highest that it has been … I count at least five marks higher than where the water is now.”
Sisyphus nodded, then lectured. “Learn the larger lesson. Some years, the water in the river runs high at the end of winter, some years it runs low. The wise leader will measure the depth of the winter snow, the frequency of the rains in spring, and how high the river has run during the days in between, and will prepare the clan for summers with water, and summers without.”
“And now”, Zeke announced, “you will tell us why we cannot keep this water where we can use it to ease the summer drought, rather than letting it run away every year to where it does no one any good.”
“Tell you I will not,” Sisyphus responded, firmly but without rancor; he had learned how to deal with Zeke’s flashes of insight and the pre-adolescent insolence that arose from them. He turned away from the stream, skirted the border of the surrounding scrubby forest until he found a track, apparently little more than a deer trail, that headed upriver, and started down it, beckoning the boys to follow, which they did.
After an hour of bushwhacking, the trio emerged into a clearing, at the center of which was a pond of water, and at its margin nearest to where they stood, a dam of interwoven sapling trees, most of them newly felled, over which the water of the stream, leaving the pond, spilled noisily.
“Beavers!” Jerry exclaimed.
“Yes”, Sisyphus replied, “and they have been busy, more so than I anticipated. Either the clan’s hunters have been unable to catch these animals for their skins, or they have finally heeded my admonitions to leave this population alone, lest our summer water issues be worse than they are. This explains this year’s low stream level, and bodes better for summer water stores than the stream level forecasts. This is indeed good news.”
“Why can we not then do as the beavers do, but better?”, Zeke persisted.
In response, Sisyphus pushed through the brush to the end of the beaver dam, with Zeke and then Jerry hard on his heels. He found a spot covered with brush and reeds, pushed them aside with his hands to reveal a dark mass, then picked up a stout stick and rapped the mass. The striking produced a dull, heavy, immovable thump, as of heavy stone. He got each boy to look at and then touch the structure and its coarse, flat surface.
“The answer to your question, Zeke,” Sisyphus announced, “is, ‘we have’. You see and feel here what remains of a dam that the people of Onenya built on this spot, indeed emulating the beavers. In a sense, the beavers are now emulating us, they are using what’s left of Onenya’s labors to ease their own.
“If the people who built these dams had been content merely to copy the beavers, Onenya might still be habitable, not the forbidden place of poisons, traps, and contagions that it is now, and Clan Cohasset might still be living there. But the people of Onenya were not content. Always with them, it was ‘if a little is good, more must be better’. If a dam across a small stream is good, a dam across a mighty river miles wide is better. If a dam as tall as a tree is good, a dam taller than a hundred trees is better. The dams they built produced lakes a thousand, nay ten thousand, times larger than this little pond. The lakes had no fish in them, because the dams prevented them from getting into the lakes, but they had water. Well, they had water until the lakes behind the dams filled up with dirt, so there was no more water behind the dams than there had been in the rivers before the dams were built.
“A beaver spends much of its life energy keeping its little dam in repair. So it was with people and their massive works. But the people got tired of working that hard, and eventually lost interest in maintaining the dams. And the dams failed, either through neglect or heedless destruction, in war or rebellion against those who insisted that the work of repair be done. The people dependent on the dams died, as did those who had the ill fortune to live below the dams when they failed. And in the end, the people were no better off than they were before. In fact they were worse, for they had forgotten how to live in harmony with the land, and the land they had despised because it was in the way of their building was now their implacable enemy. Their implacable, and victorious, enemy.
“Learn the larger lesson. There are many dreams, and many people who will gladly profit from selling you a dream. They cannot be trusted. We cannot be trusted. Our lives are hard, and many of us die young, too young. But we have lives. The grand dreamers, the grand builders of Onenya do not. They are gone. All of them. We remain.”
Sisyphus stopped talking; the sudden silence was broken only by the rush of water through and over the beaver dam. For some minutes, none of the three moved or spoke. Then, finally, Sisyphus broke the silence, in a softer voice that brought them back to the present, a present of immediate, simple things that still could become too grievous to bear. “Sundown is approaching. We must return to the village before we are missed.”
In silence, the tutor and his pupils bushwhacked their way home.
