Edgar Beaver's Destiny has been constructed as an environmental fable and is based on the actual natural history of beaver life.  As a fable, an environmental lesson is taught in a story that involves the words and actions of animals.  And the story reflects the true natural history of beaver life.  It demonstrates the way they live and work in their lodges, dams and ponds, and the kind of food they eat, in this case Yellowstone Park of the 1920s and 30s.  This fable is not written for any special age with special age-approved language.  That is, the book is not a children's story, though many young readers have read and enjoyed it.  It is written more along the lines of Victorian children's stories which appeared 80-100 years ago.Edgar Beaver is someone who doesn't settle for the status quo.  He knows that beaverdom has a particular way of doing things, and that includes chewing trees down, taking a little to eat from them, then letting them lie on the ground to be degraded.  Edgar cannot and will not accept that habit, that way of doing things. Edgar is disgusted with all the beavers he knows.  He thinks that beavers should try to stifle their impulse to chew down every tree in sight and try to confine themselves to the trees they can and want to eat, or use for the lodge or dam because they are wasting the trees of the forest and a forced to move to new locations.  Also two year old beavers have to leave their home lodges too.  Of course, Edgar is a failure, for beavers by some compulsion in their nature chew down as many trees as is possible and eat only a fraction of the food on the tree.  It's a congenital habit.  They just have to chew down trees.This galls Edgar.  Why do beavers do this? he thinks.  Beavers waste 90% of the food on the tree.  Why don't they just chew down trees they can use, he says.  The beavers in Edgar's life never seem to get it.  Even Edgar's own family can't see why he's making so much fuss about the issue.Although Edgar's primary worry seems to be the eating habits and life style of beavers, he has other worries.  For one thing, at two year's old he's reached the time he has to leave his family's lodge.  Worse he never has gotten up the courage to ask Eula Mae Beaver, his most beloved soul mate, to join him and start a family at another location.  He's too shy, lacks confidence and neither does he have the kind of talent both his brother Emmett and Eula Mae are bursting with.Mack and his fellow bullies are rogue beavers who have fun picking on Edgar.  Rogue beavers, having been forced out of their own beaver colonies for bad behavior, force younger, less strong beavers to get food for them.  Mack picks one last fight with Edgar before he leaves the lodge, and the two engage in a struggle almost to the death. Both are pulled out of the pond, and while in a coma Edgar has a strange dream in which the Great Beaver tells him the history of beavers from the time of giant beavers, through their relationships with Native Americans, the white trappers who kill them almost to extinction while using there underfur for hats, up to Edgar's own time.  Edgar wakes up shaken both from his near death experience and the story of his beaver forebears he has dreamed.  His father interprets the dream, is reconciled with Edgar, and Edgar falls off to sleep again.When Edgar is awakened, Eula Mae is sitting by is side, and to his great astonishment and joy, Eula Mae tells him she wants to join him when he leaves the lodge.  The have a joyous love swim in the pond and set off.  They swim down the river, pick a spot to make their lodge, though they're worried that something might be