I happened to catch sight of it through my kitchen window.

A big brown creature in the yard, over by the birdbath.

First thought: Neighbor’s cat.

But in the milliseconds it takes to process thought, I knew the creature was too big, too low to the ground, too oddly-shaped, too uniformly brown to be the cat.

Oh! A groundhog.

They’re pretty common around here, usually sighted standing up by the roadside like little totems.

The groundhog sniffed the air like a dog…what does it smell?

I grabbed my phone for a photo. Better yet, a video…the granddaughters will want to see this…

The groundhog bunched itself up. Humpbacked, it made an about-face and trotted away alongside the fence toward the woods.

That’s when I saw its tail.

A very long, very ratlike tail.

You are not a groundhog.

Their tails are furry. Wider, flatter.

Clearly not a beaver, although, come to think of it, how does one tell a beaver from a groundhog unless one actually sees the tail?

What ARE you, strange creature?

A muskrat.

I showed the video of the muskrat to my husband.

“It’s HUGE!” he said. “I thought muskrats were a lot smaller.”

“It has that rat tail,” said I.

I showed the video to friends at church.

“It’s not a muskrat,” said one, an avid outdoorsman. “It’s a nutria.”

My husband and I have lived in these parts for over thirty years and have never seen a nutria before (to our knowledge; maybe a former “groundhog” or two may have been this creature instead?).

We had never even heard that nutria live ’round here.

My daughter-in-law, a Louisiana native, knew it right away: “Oh, a nutria rat!”

I looked them up.

Nutria have frothy white whiskers and giant, terrifying orange teeth. They live in marshlands. This one was headed back through the woods toward a field; marshes are nearby, but in all the recent rains, everything out here is marshy. Nutria also detroy wetland ecosystems (I learned on Wikipedia that Louisiana loses wetland acreage the size of a football field every hour). Needless to say, the creature is a rodent. Invasive. A nutria can weigh upwards of twenty pounds. They carry diseases that can be transmitted to humans.

I stopped reading these fun facts and switched to symbolism instead.

In various cultures, nutria stand for good luck. Balance. Humility. Resourcefulness. Strength. Resilience. Prosperity. The interconnectedness of all things.

I’ll be honest: It had a rather friendly face (I couldn’t see the teeth).

Its rather inocuous name means “mouse-beaver.”

In Brazil, however, nutria are called ratão-do-banhado: big swamp rat.

I gotta say the Brazilians hit the tail—er, nail—on the head.

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with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge