“Canada is built on dead beavers.”
“That is to say, nine dead beavers in a line on the sand. There was something decorative about this, but also ominous or forbidding.”
“The beaver dam had been constructed on the ruins of a man-made one, built by the CCC back in the thirties and later dynamited by an irate Finn who'd objected to the government's meddling with nature.”
“Beavers give a dam”
“willing me to understand: thatpeople should be sacrificed to causes, that beauty can be built on the backs of the dead.”
“I told him they built a statue of Schultz, and then he said that a monument is cold comfort to a dead man, and then I said that the statue was built not for Schultz, but for us--to remind us how to be human.”