Unique animal encounters …

I remember when I was in the Marine Corps, I was in the infantry officers course, which is a pretty intense school for officers who are going to go become Marine infantry officers.

So a lot of land navigation that you're doing where you're going out alone in the woods and you're having to find these boxes.

You're basically having to navigate with map and compass all over creation.

And I remember this was a time when I thankfully was alone.

Sometimes you do those kinds of things in pairs.

But I was alone.

It was a very hot day.

And I came upon a swamp.

And I had to get to the other side of the swamp.

Now, I could have...

What I could have done is just replotted and gone around the swamp, but, you know, being a marine knucklehead, I decided, because it would have added several miles to my walk on a very, very hot day, to reroute around this swamp, I decided, hey, I'm just going to shoot an azimuth across the swamp, pick out a landmark, a tree on the other side that I can keep in my vision.

And then I'm just going to walk across this swamp.

And there were beaver dams all over the swamp.

Like basically you could just walk on top of fallen trees that these beavers had knocked down.

And so that was my plan.

So I started walking across the swamp.

And I mean, it was great.

Everything was going great.

And then all of a sudden, my foot goes through a soft part of this beaver dam and actually goes down into the interior of the beaver den.

And of course, I didn't know that in the moment.

But when I took a couple of further steps and the angry beaver, whose home I had just collapsed, comes out of the beaver den and starts to chase me.

I mean...

Who's been chased by a beaver? An angry beaver.

I have.

And it must have been a comical, pathetic sight if someone had been there to observe it.