'Your friend is very clever, though his heart is not in it. He drew away the beavers while I took the poles. The female—-' He laughed. 'She was so angry. I think she would have killed me if she got the chance.'
'Killed you? A little two-foot long beaver?'
'Two feet?' he winced. 'Perhaps the beavers of your world are only that long, but I promise you, these were larger than any wolf.'
She studied him, disbelieving. A bizarre thought had just occurred to her. 'Are you telling the truth?'
'Why would I lie?'
She threw back the upper fold of the fur, searched among the books. She quickly found what she was looking for: PREHISTORIC EARTH, ESSAYS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. She checked the index, thumbed the yellowed and clumping pages.
Her mind fell back into itself. Sure enough, sketched there in relative detail against the background of a large den, was the figure of a great prehistoric beaver, '…..eight to twelve feet in length.' Recovering herself, she moved hastily to sit beside him.
'Do they look like this?'
'Yes, more or less.'
She flipped through the stiff, distending pages—-Mammals of the Pleistocene. She stopped at a pair of saber-toothed cats, lurking hungrily near a tar-pit. 'What about these?' Have you seen them?'