It was February 1995, and I was awakened by the barking of the dogs, but this time they sounded different. I could usually tell what or who was coming by which dog barked and how much, but today was different.

The border collie always barked at animals, not people, so if he barked I knew it did not mean people. He always wanted to corral everything, whether some of the baby ducks, the guineas, some calves, a skunk, or whatsoever. Even try to round up armadillos, with him maneuvering himself in front of it, to invariably get run over (or under) by an animal that can't see or hear well.

If the other dogs barked a little, and then quit, I knew it was someone who regularly came by, like one of the visiting nurses that would check on my mother, now ninety, and wheelchair bound, and living with me since 1985 when both of my parents had come to live with me from Houston. Other than a nurse now and then, things were quiet at my farm.

My father had passed away in 1991 at the age of 93. Starting in 1985 he had helped me raise about sixty baby calves that we would pick up at one of the local dairies, lift it into the trunk of the old 1969 Ford, to be raised on a bottle in the barn. Between the two of us we had three gardens, and had planted all kinds of trees around the house. I had taught science and math at Martins Mill on an emergency basis for a short time back in 1985, but now was only tutoring a few of the neighborhood kids. Things were quiet.

Checking on the still barking dogs a saw a Van Zandt sheriff's car parked in the driveway. It was Otis Munns, my minister, who was also a deputy sheriff. Otis would now and then come by to just visit or to check on my mother, but never this early in the morning. I had never had much use for ministers, but Otis was different. He was also interested in cattle, plants, and animals like me, and I had incubated some eggs that he had brought over to be put into my incubator. I got a pecan pie out of that, and soon joined his little flock.

But today Otis had no basket of eggs, not his usual smile, but only a piece of paper. Otis had now and then talked about being a "process server" for the sheriff's department, but I had never known, or cared, what that was. Today I found out as he handed me a piece of paper that said "You have been sued", and so forth, that "You may retain an attorney", and that "You have twenty days to reply". So this is what "process" meant.

Otis almost apologized for having to be the one to serve me, but I had no reason to blame him. I told him that I could not believe that this long time neighbor of mine had gone ahead and sued me, of all things, over beavers. Otis told me to be sure to answer the suit, that otherwise they could get what was called a "default judgment" on me. I did not know what a "default judgment" was, but I was going to find out. After a little more small talk, Otis left.

It had been sometime in the fall that my neighbor had left a message on my recorder, something about water, or beavers, I could not quite make out, but I immediately got in touch with him. That summer I had heard him run a bulldozer and seen smoke from brush being burned over there. I hate bulldozers, but have also learned that when people go happy with bulldozers there is not much one can do about it, as it is their land, and they have made up their mind. So I leave them alone, and I left him alone, hoping he would not set my place on fire, which he did not, unlike one of my other neighbors who would invariably do so.

When I went to his place, he immediately wanted to go down to Steve's creek that runs from his place to mine. We passed the barn where he had kept pheasants before giving them to me a few years ago. We passed the two small catfish ponds he had dug out on the hill near the house, now nearly empty, after he had quit pumping water in there from down on Steve's creek. That was in the days that he and his wife were visiting with my parents about eight years ago, and he had helped me put in about 600 feet of water line from my pond up to my garden on my hill. I had last seen him about six years ago when his bull kept jumping the fence between us and kept tearing up the electric fences that I was using to control my cows. I had quietly tried to raise the fence with an extra strand of wire, but it did not work. After first blaming me for not having a high enough fence, he finally managed to catch his bull, and take him to the auction, but there were no real problems between us.

But as we went down to Steve's creek I saw what all my neighbor had done. There had always been beaver down there, a dam on my place, another small terrace about at the fence line, right under the barbed wire, and beaver in the creek on his property. As fall would come, I could see ducks by the hundreds, just at dusk, come from all over the place and settle on his property. It had always been a beautiful sight. But the area was quite remote from my house and one had to cross another creek on my farm to get there, and in fact the only practical way to come in was from across the creek through other property.

As we went down to the creek I saw for the first time where he had run a bulldozer all over the place. About 300 yards of the fence between us had been pushed down. There were big piles of brush, and there was loose sand and debris that had washed all over the place. He told me about getting a trapper to kill eleven of the "overgrown rats", of using dynamite to blow a fifteen foot section out of their dam (and flushing everything down on me), of getting a bulldozer to "clean" the creek. He was very proud of everything, and told me that the trapper he had used wanted a release from me before he would go onto my property.

I looked at the creek where it had eroded about six feet from where I had last seen it in that area more than eight years ago. Nothing on my property was causing my neighbor any problem, and there was not any way it could, not with the creek as eroded as it was. But my neighbor insisted that there was another dam on my place, so I let him lead me, and after wandering around we finally came onto a small terrace retaining about a foot of water, with sand washed up all around the place where it had come down from my neighbor.

My neighbor told me that the terrace had to come out. I told him that it was the only thing keeping erosion from cutting to the other side of my property, and that it was not a problem, and that it did not need to be removed. He was quite unhappy with me as we walked back. He saw things his way, I saw it differently, but he never called me again.

I was glad to have gotten away from there, for I had memories even from the good days, when my neighbor was pumping water into his ponds. He wanted to show me where he was going to raise catfish in the little pond. He showed me some tadpoles that he said he needed to get rid of first, and I caught a few in a jar and we both looked at them. Tadpoles of course do not eat fish. Then a few months later he called me to show me the catfish he had raised. I looked and saw that they were nothing but tadpoles, and again caught a few and proceeded to show him. No, they were catfish, and he did not need to look in the jar. I kept this experience in mind as he was pointing out his "beaver" problem to me. After leaving his place, I did not think about it anymore.

Returning back up to my house at the highest place on my farm, I could not believe that the lawyer had actually gone ahead and sued me. First, there was no problem, certainly not when I went down there with my neighbor, and if there had been a problem, my neighbor had never told me about it. Beavers had been in the area, but I had never heard of anybody complaining about them. I of course did not know much about lawsuits, never having been sued before, nor having any of my friends or acquaintances sued, or them suing, so this was something new. It did not seem right that I should be sued over beavers, if they had always been down there, and nobody ever complained about them, and there certainly was no problem down there now, nor likely to be with all the beavers dead and a bulldozer having been run all over the place.

We had quite a problem getting to the area from my farm, but we made it. We managed to cross the small creek on the west side of my property and somehow made our way through the brambles and young trees that had come up after I stopped mowing that area about ten years ago. I had taken my camera along this time, unlike when I had gone there with my neighbor. I took a few pictures of the creek with all the sand, and had a few pictures taken of me standing in the creek with my rubber boots, in about six inches of water. There were ripples in the sand that slowly moved downstream much like dunes blown by the wind. That is when we discovered a dead beaver lying in the creek, and I again wondered what on earth suddenly made my neighbor do this whole thing in the first place.

Now suddenly I had not only the problem of my neighbor washing all this stuff on me, but also suing me, and we somehow decided that this thing had gone too far, and went down to the District Attorney's office, and talked to an investigator by the name of Rick Sullivan and tried to explain our problem.

Mr. Sullivan told us that this was a "civil matter", that this was the Criminal District Attorney's office, and that they were not involved. He said that lawyers do this sort of stuff 98 percent of the time, and that the only way to counter it was to get another lawyer and sue the pants off of him. He also raised the question as to whether the beavers had been declared a nuisance, and I told him that they had not. Next he suggested that I try to get someone from the Sheriff's department to take a look at the area.

At the Sheriff's office I somehow managed to get a hold of a deputy by the name of Scott Johnson. I had never before tried or had a need to get a hold of a lawman, but had somehow, out of necessity, found the courage to approach someone in law enforcement, and somehow I got officer Johnson to go down to my area. Officer Johnson wanted to be sure we were not trespassing, and we approached through my property, although we had to go through another one of my neighbor's property to get to that portion of my property.

I filled officer Johnson in a little bit as we slowly made our way down there, and he in turn also warned me of the danger of the lawyer getting a "default judgment" by my not answering the court. That day is the first time I ever heard of "default judgment". In retrospect, it is foreboding, that I should be independently warned, by two lawmen about "default judgment". Officer Johnson made a few notes and we left. He promised to write a short report, and he did write up a few days later an "incident report". It mentions the bulldozer work and tracks on my property, and also the natural wetlands character of the whole area. I would not see Officer Johnson again until more than three years later, when the case finally went to trial, and I was calling him as a witness.