The War against the Beavers is a wry and funny account of two people's ten-year apprenticeship in backwoods living, from their arrival as naive babes in the woods to their education in the ways of nature as they face plagues of insects, fungus, storms, and droughts, and embark on a lengthy campaign to eradicate a colony of beavers that threatens the peace and beauty of their forest refuge. It is only the coming of a mechanized and much more menacing threat-bulldozers and other heavy machinery clear-cutting the woods-that restores perspective to the obsessed cabin dwellers.