by John Kulish
Like the beaver, an otter has two growths of fur. Its underfur is short, dense, and waterproof. The equally thick but much darker outer fur is longer and stiffer, but rarely more than one inch in length, being longest on the topside of the widest part of the tail; it is barely a quarter-inch long around the head, mouth, and tip of the tail.
The coat is much shorter than either a beaver’s or a muskrat’s. The otter needs to swim faster, and bulky fur would only slow it down. In the wild, its fur appears to be black, but it is really a dark, oily brown. I have seen only one coat that was a true brown without the usual black cast. The fur across the back is darker than that on the belly. No matter how dark the rest of an otter may be, the fur under its jaw and on its throat is a lustrous silver. The fur is darkest in November and December, when it has a beautiful, rich sheen. By the end of winter, after many weeks of sliding over the snow and ice during long daylight hours, the guard hairs appear silvery and develop a slight curl. In the fur trade, this is called “singeing.” The pelt is no longer as valuable.
An otter hide is the thickest and strongest of any furbearer in the East. It is as thick as that of a deer, but tougher. That toughness, combined with its long, slender shape, induced the American Indian to fashion their quivers from otter skins. From all indications, an otter’s lifespan is similar to a dog’s, averaging about twelve years. Their muzzles, also, turn gray with age.
For such a large animal, its eyes are surprisingly small. Even more surprising is their keenness of vision. Gavin Maxwell, the English author who has written several delightful books about his domesticated otter, claims they have poor eyesight. This troubles me because it conflicts with personal conclusions based on my almost life-long experience with them in the wild. In situations where neither sound nor smell could have saved them, it seems to me sharp eyes did. They can see as well in dark water as they seem to be able to in bright sunshine.
Wild otter live primarily on fish, and these fish are not motionless. In southern New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts, they dart about in some waters the color of Coca-Cola, so dark one can hardly see one’s hand submerged a foot and a half on a sunny summer’s day. In the dead of winter, two feet of ice topped with three feet of snow covers the murky water. On the brightest day, it is midnight down there. Yet otter catch fish at will. I think they depend mostly on their sharp eyes, although it may be possible that this remarkable mammal is blessed with equipment similar to that of a bat, a porpoise, or a whale. Because they are so shy and their habits so secretive, nobody has experimented with the animals to find out. But it would not surprise me if a generous Creator has given them a fourth dimension. In any case, they certainly do have some way by which to locate small, fast-moving things in the dark.
One fall another link was added to my lengthening chain of evidence. Sign told me a pair would be passing through my territory about every seven days. Darkness was falling. Working against time, I set a trap more hastily than usual. Bending down so that my nose touched the water, I made a last-minute check to make sure everything looked natural. Satisfied, I left, confident it would hold an otter on my next visit. A week later, I approached the set from the opposite side of the deep, twelve-foot-wide stream. The clog, to which the trap was fastened, was still in place. Had my quarry changed their schedule?
Each week, until the ice came, I rechecked the set. I couldn’t understand why the pair hadn’t passed through. Curiosity drove me upriver a half-dozen miles, where their fresh sign told me they had indeed come through on schedule. Why hadn’t they stopped?
Since an inch of ice now covered the river, I returned to pick up the bypassed trap. Even more important, I had to find out why the otter had avoided it. Something was wrong. Kneeling on the transparent ice, I looked down at the set. The trap was hidden, but off to one side something glimmered. I punched a hole in the ice with an axe, rolled up my sleeve, reached down and scooped up a loaded shotgun shell.
It had been almost dark when I set the trap. I wore a sleeveless canvas vest over a flannel shirt. The front pockets of the vest held shotgun shells. One had slipped, unnoticed, into the water, to be embedded upright in the mud. When the otter had approached, their small, sharp eyes had spotted a suspicious object, even though less than a quarter-inch of brass had been exposed!
Undoubtedly, Mr. Maxwell is right as far as his domesticated otter are concerned. Why should they depend on their eyes? They don’t need to catch fish or to fear man. Remember, he observed captive otter in his home. I observed free otter in theirs. It is the only animal I know whose sight, hearing, and smell are equally acute. Other animals may have one, occasionally two, but rarely all three such highly developed senses.
While trapping mink as a boy, I often saw otter tracks in snow. Gradually, it dawned on me that these tracks appeared only at regular intervals, sometimes every seven or fourteen days, sometimes only once a month. Otter keep moving. They don’t stay anywhere long enough to warrant a home address. That’s one of the reasons why even people who ply a backwoods river or lake almost daily seldom see them. When the pups are born, these nomads do settle down, but only until their young are big enough both in size and understanding to travel along with mother and dad.
Far up the tributaries of the Ware River, I found where a pair of otter had come up to visit a backwoods pond, fished it for an hour, and left to go back down toward the main stream. The day was young. The tracks were fresh. Why not try to get ahead of the pair and set a trap for them?
I began to follow their trail. Fifteen snowshoe miles down the river I gave up. During the day I had passed several old dams where the otter had emerged to climb around before re-entering the river. The next morning, still intent on heading them off, I snowshoed directly to an old broken damsite five or six miles below the last one I had visited the day before. My quarry had already crossed over it. I stuck with them for another fifteen miles. Wherever spring holes bubbled along the river’s edge, the pair had pushed up through the thin ice, surfaced, left their scat, popped back down the hole, and kept heading downstream. In two days, they had traveled more than thirty miles and were still going strong. They knew exactly where they were going. At that time, I could only guess.
Because the otter’s patte2rn of travel can best be explained by using a particular river as an example, let’s take an otter’s tour of the Contoocook. This river is born quietly where Mountain Brook and the outlet from Contoocook Lake meet in Jaffrey. Finally, burgeoned by countless other streams both large and small, it flows north to be swallowed, full-grown, by the Merrimac, seventy-five crooked miles away. Ponds made by God, man, and beaver interrupt both the major and minor streams at irregular intervals.
A pair of otter will rarely explore just the main stream of such a river. If they do, it is an exception rather than the rule. Because they are happiest in primitive waters, they habitually leave the main artery to follow a tributary to its smallest capillaries. Unafraid there, they fish and play until both adventure and appetite are fulfilled. Returning to the main river, they swim on to the next branch, whether going up or downstream, to follow it to its beginning many miles and many minnows away. Thus a seventy-five-mile canoe trip on the Contoocook adds up to ten times that when traveled by an otter.
Otter know exactly where and how to travel, whether by land or by water. Many years ago, while hunting in compass country before any snow had fallen, I came upon some otter scat. This didn’t seem logical where there was no pond, no river, no brook; only dense, dark forest. It so piqued my curiosity that, once I was back home, I paused only to take off my mittens before getting out my U.S. geodetic map. The nearest water was a small pond about a mile to the east, fed by a tiny brook that petered out many miles southeast from where I had found the scat. But when my exploring finger moved westward across the map barely a half-mile from my discovery it found another brook flowing northwest. This one emptied into a small, boggy pond. Here, in a dark swamp, another watershed was born. Somehow the otter knew it.
Because I kept an accurate census of the otter population on each of the watersheds within a fifty-mile radius of my home, I was aware of any new arrivals. They fished the entire system with typical zest. When the time came to leave overland, they always took the exact same route used by countless generations of others before them, even though no observable sign, no trail, marked the way.
Within seventy-five miles of my cabin I can take you to more than a dozen of these shortcuts connecting two major watersheds. Sometimes otter will use direct overland routes within a river basin itself in order to reach different branches of the same stream. Again, according to geodetic maps, it is always the shortest possible way. Why do they leave? How do they know where to go? Is this any less of a navigational miracle than that of the U.S.N.S. Nautilus probing its way under the polar ice cap? Biologists call it natural adjustment. Scientists call it instinct. I call it a gift of God.
Otter do not travel haphazardly. They plan their trips; and whichever one of their many tours they may choose to take, the itinerary is definite, never decided on the spur of the moment. That is why I can tell exactly where they’ll be coming by and whether it will be two days or two weeks from the time the sign left on their latest stopover is studied.
Oftentimes, on arriving at a confluence, a pair of otter may split up, or one may leave the family group. This temporary parting is prompted by a gustatory rather than a marital difference of opinion. One, leaving its mate in the main river, ascends a contributory branch, passes straight through several fish-filled ponds, to arrive purposefully at some backwoods pool. It may spend two hours or two days in and about that tiny pond before returning downstream. Meanwhile, its mate has been a patient spouse, fishing the main river, but never too far from where they separated. Perhaps that parting conversation went something like this.
“Say, Sweetie, I got a craving for freshwater lobster and I’m heading for Lobster Pond. I know you don’t like ’em, so you don’t need to come along. Just stick around; I’ll be back.”
During their endless traveling otter may pass through a particular section on a certain river once a week, once a month, or once in a lifetime. There are a hundred places where they can come ashore. I call the coming-out places stations. For me, these otter stations read like a book. The scat explains everything: when, how many, how often, how big, what sex, what schedule, and whether the last restaurant served pickerel, perch, or sucker. Although otter leave clues for me, I never leave any for them. Nothing at the station should be changed. Above all, never use the rest room. One glance, one sniff, tells otter whether the enemy has been around. They’ll never come back. Remember the shotgun shell!
The fall I was fourteen, I found some scat along a river. Thinking it the only otter sign in the world, I went to my old friend, Arthur Leonard, with my boy-shaking discovery. His quiet blue eyes studied me.
“I remember where that is, John.”
Any otter stations, painstakingly discovered by me during the next decade, were no secret to this close-mouthed man of eighty. He never told me anything unless I had already discovered it, but he knew them all. He had trapped them himself only a few years after the Civil War, jolting from brook to brook, river to river, in his horse and buggy, with only his thoughts to accompany him.
At eighty, he was still lean and wiry. But his greatest strength was his obvious happiness with himself. It made him glow with a dignity and a kindness possessed only by people who truly like themselves. He was a silent man, in the way people who spend much of their time in the woods are silent. Chatting is a byproduct of civilization. When he spoke to a boy bursting with unasked questions, his voice was gentle. The ruddy color of his weather-worn cheeks made a full beard look even whiter. His deft, though knotted fingers showed me how to skin my first otter. At eighty-eight, shortly before he died, he gave me the otter board he had fashioned himself in 1895 out of a special piece of basswood. On it was carefully inscribed data about the seventeen otter he had trapped during his lifetime. Now, both sides of the time-darkened board are covered with writing, for on it are recorded most of the otter I have caught over a span of almost forty years. If my cabin were burning, that board is one of two things I would risk my life for.
Whenever other people, including game biologists, write about otter, they emphasize the animal’s affinity for sliding on chutes they have fashioned out of mud and clay along river and lake banks, where they “slide down, repeating the process over and over for the apparent enjoyment of it.” Where? If only someone would take me to just one otter slide! After thousands of hours of research, I have yet to locate a single one in either north central Massachusetts, southern New Hampshire, southern Vermont, or along the entire wild length of the Allagash River in Maine, including the upper reaches of the West Branch of the Penobscot.
The closest to it was a clay bank which rose at a forty-five-degree angle, six feet above a deep pool in the Millers River. The otter slid down the slope, but only because it was the easiest way to get back into the water. There was no evidence that they used it as a playground. The natural places they choose whenever leaving a bank set steeply above water, show no signs of repeated activity, such as can be seen on any beaver “ramp,” the path leading from a pond to the main “logging road,” which these lumberjacks build on every log job. They use it to haul down their pulp. A ceaseless flow of traffic spatters layers of mud on either side of the highway.
Why is it that a self-taught naturalist like myself, who has spent better than 20,000 hours studying the river otter in its habitat, never saw even one otter “slide”? Yet almost every article written about this charming mammal centers about this “fact.” What should I believe? What my eyes have read, or what my eyes have seen?
Under certain conditions, otter practice a peculiar, puzzling ritual. Arriving at one of their infrequent stations, they use their front paws to scratch up leaves, pine needles, and debris into a little mound from three to eight inches high. They deposit their scat on top. These mounds stand intact for many months before the elements can flatten them. Otter build these duff monuments only while on tour, never during the two to three months’ interval when they are raising their young. Single otter always perform the rite. Because they are so friendly with one another, I believe it is one way they communicate.
Scat is not the only thing they leave on these memorials. At the base of its tail, underneath the hide, an otter has two glands, each about one inch in diameter. These sacs contain a viscid, yellowish-white fluid with a potent, tantalizing odor. The oil is ejected through two small vents near the anal opening. The secretion is not offensive like that of the mink, weasel, or skunk. But it is so penetrating that I had to be very careful not to puncture the glands while skinning the animal. If some of the liquid got onto my hands, the odor remained for days no matter how often or how hard they were washed. I am sure that, whenever an otter makes a mound, he ejects some of this oil on top of it.
No dog can resist the aroma. Even a mongrel can smell it buried under six inches of snow. He will dig his nose into it, flop over onto his back and, with a silly look on his face, roll wildly around in it until he is dragged away.
For a long time, I have pondered the otter’s reasons for building these mounds. I believe the same emoti
on impels the otter which makes a climber build a rock cairn on a lonely mountain. Perhaps a pair is saying, “We have been here. The fishing’s not what it used to be.” Or a single one pleads, “I am lonely. Come join me.”
15. The Dog Otter Is a Family Man
The dog otter is a family man. He chooses one mate, travels with her year round, and when she bears his young, shows strong fatherly consideration for them. He assumes his full share of the family load, for the otter’s responsibility for its young has no gender. The dog enjoys his pups and teaches them with firm kindness. Here is an extraordinary family relationship. Otter were practicing togetherness long before marriage counselors started preaching it.
In the Northeast, all other adult fur-bearing creatures except the beaver live together only during the few frantic days of the rut. Whether it be July, September, January, or March, I have always found otter living together as a family group. They travel together, they fish together, they eat together, they play together, they grieve together.
Beaver are also family creatures but for different reasons. One beaver can’t build a dam any more than a single army engineer can. Who ever heard of a one-man construction job? Beaver live together through necessity; otter, by choice.
Otter are happy animals who enjoy living. They are fun-loving but not frivolous, frolicsome but not foolish, irrepressible but not irresponsible. The inference that they are “good-time Charlies” is unfair. Like any emotionally mature adult, they bear their burdens cheerfully.
Even during the rut, otter do not fight among themselves, and a marital triangle is unheard of. Even though theirs is a “live and let live” policy, if challenged, their courage is unlimited. No single domesticated dog would be a match for those savage teeth, that mongooselike agility, and sheer guts.