Prodigal Beaver.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 23-APR-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

One recent evening, Stephen Sautner sat behind his desk in the Bronx Zoo's administration building, hoping that Jose hadn't washed away. Jose is an American beaver, and after Sautner discovered him, in February, during a lunchtime stroll along the Bronx River, the zoo celebrated Jose as the first beaver to claim New York City residence in more than two hundred years. ("Dam! The Beaver Returns to New York," Gothamist reported.) But a month ago a tempest of rain, sleet, and snow submerged Jose's lodge, a twelve-foot-long, four-foot-high engineering marvel of sticks, rocks, and mud. No one had seen him since.

Jose's forebears had a storied, if strained,...

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