Nathan said Saturday didn’t start off as an extraordinary day. In fact, it was pretty low-key: He was sitting in a chair in the woods, hunting, watching as a doe crossed in front of him.

After the doe left, he ate his lunch. Then nature called.

“I had to go to the bathroom but I had no toilet paper,” he explained.

Luckily, he was hunting right across the road from his family’s St. David home.

“I walked out of the woods and got on my four-wheeler and I went home,” he said.

Another thing he did (which, for the record, we’ve got to advise everyone to avoid): He leaned his Remington .30-06 rifle against the tree, next to the chair he had been sitting in.

“And when I got back, I couldn’t find the gun,” he said.

Nathan said he stood up from his chair and began looking around in the woods. Then things got interesting in a hurry.

Nature had called again … in a different way.

“There was a stream that was running about 100 feet away from me. I look, and there’s a beaver hauling that gun into the water,” he said.

Let’s take a moment to let that sink in.

A beaver.

Stole.

His gun.

Nathan said he really didn’t know what to do at that point.

“I was mad, but I started laughing because it was funny,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it was happening, that I was seeing him take my gun into the water.”

So here’s what Nathan did: Absolutely nothing.

“There was nothing I could do,” he said. “The gun was in the water and the beaver went under. That was it.”

The water was deep, and pursuing the beaver was out of the question. The gun was gone.

Besides that, the beaver was armed. OK. That was my concern. Nathan didn’t mention it in our interview.

Nathan said he figures the beaver’s intentions were more innocent.

Maybe. Maybe not. Right now we’re faced with the menace of an armed beaver that probably didn’t take the NRA’s Personal Defense in the Dam classes, and probably doesn’t even have a safe to keep the rifle locked up out of the way of the kits and yearlings.

In all seriousness, folks… don’t leave your firearms unattended. It is far more likely than an unattended gun will be picked up by a two-legged predator or one of your own young than an aquatic rodent.