The river ran slow and brown under a late-summer haze, thick with the smell of mud and rotting reeds. Darla Snapjaw lay half-submerged near the bank, only her ridged shell and yellow eyes breaking the surface, watching the world the way a bored siege engine watches a gate. She had been drifting downstream for weeks, taking odd jobs breaking logjams and scaring off bandits, but mostly just moving because staying still felt like admitting defeat.

A rhythmic slap-thud-slap-thud drew her attention upstream. A beaver, broad, brown, industrious, was hauling a branch twice her size toward a half-finished dam. The beaver worked with the single-minded focus of her kind, tail smacking the water for balance, whiskers twitching at every sound.

Darla’s stomach rumbled. Beavers were good eating: fatty, rich, satisfying. But she was not particularly hungry today, just… empty in a different way. She watched the beaver wrestle the branch into place, muttering French-Canadian curses under her breath when it rolled free again.

The beaver’s name was Ann. She had come down from the northern pines looking for new timber after loggers cleared her home river. She had not come looking for trouble, but trouble had apparently come looking for her.

Darla rose from the water like a living boulder, riversheets cascading off her shell. Ann froze, branch still clamped in her teeth, eyes wide.

Darla lumbered closer, tail dragging a trench in the mud. She stopped a respectful three feet away, close enough for Ann to smell swamp rot and old blood on her breath, far enough that Ann could still bolt if she was very, very fast.

“You,” Darla said, voice like gravel sliding downhill. “Be my girlfriend. Or I eat you.”

Ann dropped the branch. It landed with a wet slap. She made a small, high-pitched sound, half squeak, half sigh of resignation.

“Ep! Alright, alright. I’ll-I’ll be your girlfriend. Just… don’t eat me, okay?”

Darla blinked once, slowly. That had been easier than expected. She had braced for screaming, splashing, a frantic paddle upstream. Instead she got immediate surrender. It was almost disappointing.

“Good,” she rumbled. “Name’s Darla.”

“Ann,” the beaver managed, voice trembling but polite. Canadians, Darla thought. Always so polite, even when negotiating their continued existence.

And so they began dating.

Ann moved her belongings, a few choice saplings, a collection of smooth stones for gnawing, into the overhang beneath a fallen cottonwood where Darla had been sleeping. Darla did not ask; she simply watched Ann drag everything in, then lay down across the entrance like a living door. Escape, after all, would be unwise. One splash too many and those predatory instincts would wake up hungry.

Darla’s affection was direct. She would loom behind Ann while the beaver worked on her dam, resting one massive clawed hand on Ann’s back, less a caress, more a reminder that the hand could close and end everything. When Ann paused to breathe, Darla leaned down and gave her what she considered a kiss: a slow, deliberate press of broad, toothy jaws around the beaver’s muzzle, tongue thick and rasping and far too long sliding in without invitation. Ann’s whiskers flattened against her cheeks. She endured it, eyes squeezed shut, small paws curled against Darla’s plastron.

It was not pleasant. It tasted of fish and swamp water and old meat. Ann’s whole body tensed every time, waiting for teeth to close. They never quite did.

Ann had seen it before. Her aunt had belonged to an otter for a season, sleek, laughing, cruel in play, until the otter found shinier distractions. Her grandmother had spent two floods under the lazy possession of a big snapping turtle who barely moved but expected tribute in fish and grooming all the same. They’d survived. They’d carried the marks. Life went on.

At night Darla curled around her like a scaly fortress, tail draped heavily over Ann’s smaller body. The weight pinned her in place. Any attempt to wriggle free earned a low warning growl that vibrated through both their ribs.

Ann told herself it was temporary. Chelok lost interest eventually, everyone knew that. Beavers had stories about it, passed down from dam to lodge: the big predators who took mates the way storms took trees. You didn’t fight. You didn’t run. You endured until the river changed course and carried them away. It was the way of the water. It could not be helped.

Some mornings Darla brought fish, still flapping, and dropped them at Ann’s feet with a grunt that might have been pride. Ann thanked her politely, even when the fish stared at her with the same resigned expression she felt in her own whiskers.

Weeks slid past. Ann’s dam grew despite everything, sticks and mud woven tight against the current. Darla watched the construction with half-lidded approval, occasionally hauling entire logs that would have taken Ann days to manage. It was the closest thing to tenderness she knew how to offer.

One dusk, as the sky bled orange into the river, Darla lay on her back, belly exposed in the old Snapjaw way, and stared at the first stars. Ann sat nearby, gnawing a fresh willow branch, trying to ignore the ache in her shoulders from Darla’s latest “kiss.”

“You could leave,” Darla said suddenly, voice quieter than usual. “If you wanted. I ain’t chained you.”

Ann paused mid-gnaw. Her heart thumped hard enough to rattle her teeth. She glanced at the open water beyond the cottonwood, then at the massive shape beside her, seven feet of muscle and scale and barely-leashed hunger.

“I… know,” she said carefully. “But the current’s strong tonight. Better to wait till morning.”

Darla grunted. It might have been agreement. It might have been disappointment.

Ann resumed gnawing. She would wait. Not forever, just until Darla’s yellow eyes drifted to some new horizon, some new irritation or hunger that did not involve pinning small furry things beneath four feet of tail.

Beavers are patient builders. Rivers change. Predators move on.

One day, Ann told herself, she would finish this dam, swim north, and tell her kin the story of Darla Snapjaw, the crocturtle who wanted a girlfriend and didn’t know how to ask without sounding like a death threat.

They would laugh, nervously, around the lodge fire. They would slap their tails in sympathy.

And Ann would be alive to tell it.

That, at least, was the way of the river.