Fiber Zibethicus

The rains returned, the rivers rose again, and the dikes and bridges, barns, houses and fields of grain in fat Czecho-Slovakia and lower Hungary continued to be inundated and swept away during a fourth week of natural catastrophe (TIME, July 19, INTERNATIONAL). Farmers pled piteously with their governments to "do something." Peasants cursed and blamed the ill-omened new radio stations. Governments lamented, spoke dolefully of sunspots as the cause of disastrous weather. Afflicted mankind was miserable. . . .

But in secret places under Central Europe's dikes, slipping quietly through the floods out to drowned wheat fields, softly swimming like malicious undines or night-prowling water-sprites of the olden time, went millions and tens of millions of small water-folk rejoicing in a new paradise. Scientists do not believe in fairies, good or bad, but they were quite willing to believe that much of Central Europe's woe was the work of these small water-folk. They were muskrats, common American fur-bearing rodents, fiber zibethicus. In 1903 an enterprising Czech farmer introduced them to the Danube basin where they increased and multiplied amazingly. But as they multiplied in their new environment, their coats deteriorated, becoming short and scrubby and unable to compete in the fur markets with the pelts of their sleek American cousins. Danube trappers gave up taking them. So they bred and littered more promiscuously than ever, and their multitudinous burrows honeycombing the Danube dikes--already left in disrepair by political upheavals-- hastened the destruction of one of Europe's richest granaries in the torrential summer of 1926.