What Is This Thing?!

I was upstairs fiddling with the blog to see if I could make it load any faster (did it work?) when my son yelled up to me, "Mom, come see this big furry thing eating our leaves!"

At first I thought he was joking, but I realized the  kids were talking about it together, giggling, asking all sorts of questions about it.  I ran down with the camera and caught one good picture of it.  (I tried to sneak outside to get a zoomed-in picture, but that thing was more scared of me than I was of it.  It took off like a mom and a kid fighting over a dropped M&M.)

So now I've got a picture of something, but I don't know what it is.  

We think it's a beaver without the big tail, but really we get confused between a dog and a cat sometimes... what do we know?  But the funny thing is that we don't live near a large river or anything.  We do have a tiny creek that runs through our neighborhood and it only gets wet when it rains, but we don't live near it at all.

So all you nature-loving, walking encyclopedias, what is this thing and, more importantly, should I be scared?  Because if I should, I'm totally not going to go outside to become beaver food...