1.

Pete looked out across the snow covered field to the stream's edge where, hidden among the close-gathered pine trunks, the beaver worked the bank, its thick, damp torso rocking and laboring at something hidden from the line of sight afforded by the dilapidated bird blind.

The blind had been erected by the previous owner, a novelist of considerable fame.  Or more accurately the novelist had had it erected by a pair of handymen from the largely defunct upstate village several miles down the road.  That part had been mentioned to him third hand, as most things were in town especially to the likes of Pete, that is, just another outsider as far as they were concerned, handyman's wife to Willy, the owner of the awful diner, who then brought it up to the realtor while Pete was intentionally within earshot.  

The beaver seemed to be making repairs.  It was moving a large branch that was stuck at one end in the driving current of the stream, and the frothy mud that accumulated there. The rodent would not give up.  It kept pushing and testing different angles.

Pete sat in the blind to smoke, not to bird watch.  He wouldn't know a gull from a goldfinch though he could probably tell the difference at least.  He hunkered down low and exhaled the smoke straight out the top of the blind like a chimney and regarded the beaver through a crack in the wall.  The novelist had left a stool, which now supported his propped feet, and a variety of strewn garbage.  Pete had found fast food wrappers and used tissues and pornography torn from magazines among the leaves and dirt drifted on the floor of the blind in the several seasons since the novelist had left the house and its property, not intending to sell, but being forced to eventually by the shifting fortunes of the publishing industry and the general decline of the reading public--a decline he documented and lamented variously, preaching to the choir as it were, in all of the loftier literary periodicals.

Pete had the desire to set in all on fire.  He wondered what the beaver would make of that.  He decided at almost the same time that the beaver would move along pretty quickly not wanting to be in the vicinity of any fire in the woods; good instinct that. This made the idea of a fire much less palatable to Pete, not because he was any nature lover but more because he respected the beaver's general operating principles and envied them even, and the least he could do was not upset a creature that was, for the time being, making something of and for himself, as opposed to smoking idly halfway up a tree.  

He stood and dropped the cigarette amid the trash.  He spat and then nudged the butt into the saliva and clotted snot and then ground the whole mess beneath his boot feeling confident that nothing would catch flame for the time being.

The beaver hunkered its body but nosed the air, his eyes scanning wildly catching the scent and sound of Pete lumbering down the ladder of nailed 2-by-4 sections on the maple trunk, and scampered into some well-hidden warren when Pete's boots hit the leaves.  Pete's knees buckled slightly and he groaned at the twinge of pain.