Many of his actions, indeed, appeared ritual, and I think that comparatively few people who keep wild creatures realize the enormous security-value of routine in the maintenance of an animal’s contentment. As soon as routine is broken a new element enters, in however minute and unrecognizable a trace – the fear of the unknown which is basic to the behaviour of all animals, including man. Every living creature exists by a routine of some kind; the small rituals of that routine are the landmarks, the boundaries of security, the reassuring walls that exclude a horror vacui; thus, in our own species, after some tempest of the spirit in which the landmarks seem to have been swept away, a man will reach out tentatively in mental darkness to feel the walls, to assure himself that they still stand where they stood – a necessary gesture, for the walls are of his own building, without universal reality, and what man makes he may destroy. To an animal these landmarks are of even greater importance, for once removed from its natural surroundings, its ecological norm, comparatively little of what the senses perceive can be comprehended in function or potentiality, and the true conditions for insecurity are already established. As among human beings, animal insecurity may manifest itself as aggression or timidity, ill-temper or ill-health, or as excessive affection for a parental figure; unfortunately this last aspect encourages many to cultivate insecurity in their charges, child or animal, as a means to an end.
It was about this time that Mij delivered his first serious, intentional bite. He was fed now upon live eels – which I had learned to be the staple food of many races of otter – supplemented by a mixture of raw egg and unpolished rice, a sticky concoction for which he evinced a gusto no doubt influenced by his early life among the Arabs. The eels I kept in a perforated bucket under the kitchen tap, and fed them to him in the bath; it had become an established way of quieting him when he was obstreperous, to shut him in with a full bath of water and three or four eels. On this occasion I had closed the bathroom door imperfectly, and Mij elected to bring his second eel through and eat it in the studio. To this, though he was sodden with water and the eel very slimy, there seemed no alternative, for it is folly to try to take away from a wild animal its natural prey; but when after a few mouthfuls he decided to carry it upstairs to the gallery I determined to call a halt, visualizing a soaking and eel-slimed bed. I put on three pairs of gloves, the outermost being a pair of heavily-padded flying gauntlets. I caught up with him halfway up the stairway; he laid down the eel, put a paw on it, and hummed at me, a high continuous hum that could break out into a wail. Full of euphoric self-confidence I talked away quietly to him, telling him that he couldn’t possibly hurt me and that I was going to take the eel back to the bathroom. The humming became much louder. I bent down and put my heavily-gloved hand upon the eel. He screamed at me, but still he took no action. Then, as I began to lift it, he bit. He bit just once and let go; the canines of his upper and lower jaws passed through the three layers of glove, through the skin, through muscle and bone, and met in the middle of my hand with an audible crunch. He let go almost in the same instant, and rolled on his back squirming with apology. I still held the eel; I carried it back to the bath, where he refused to pay any further attention to it, fussing round me and over me and muzzling me with little squeals of affection and apparent solicitude.
There were two small bones broken in my hand, and for a week it was the size of a boxing glove, very painful, and an acute embarrassment to me in the presence of those who from the first had been sceptical of Mij’s domesticity. I had been given a sharp and necessary reminder that though he might carry painted rubber balls through the London streets he was not a spaniel.
It was not lack of curiosity, so much as lack of time and opportunity, that made me delay for nearly three weeks before making any real effort to establish Mij’s identity. It would, I thought, require a day’s research in the library of the Zoological Society, and at that early stage Mij could not be left alone for more than a hour or so without fretting. But, as may be imagined, he caused no small stir in his walks through the streets of West Kensington, and it was increasingly borne in upon me that I could answer only in the most perfunctory and unsatisfactory terms the fire of questions with which our strolls were punctuated.
It is not, I suppose, in any way strange that the average Londoner should not recognize an otter, but the variety of guesses as to what kind of animal this might be came as no less of a surprise to me than the consistent accuracy with which a minority bracketed the bull’s-eye without once touching it. Otters belong to a comparatively small group of animals called mustellines, shared by the badger, mongoose, weasel, stoat, polecat, marten, mink and others; an official at Cairo airport had set an early precedent of outer scoring when he asked whether Mij was an ermine – which is, of course, a stoat in winter coat. Now, in the London streets, I faced a continual barrage of conjectural questions that sprayed all the mustellines but the otter; wilder, more random fire hit on practically everything from ‘a baby seal’ to a squirrel. The seal heresy had deep root, and was perhaps the commonest of them all, though far from being the most bizarre. ‘Is that a walrus, mister?’ reduced me to giggles outside Harrods, and ‘a hippo’ made my day outside Cruft’s Dog Show. A beaver, a bear cub, a newt, a leopard – one, apparently, that had changed his spots – even, with heaven knows what dim recollections of schoolroom science and a bewildering latinized world of subhuman creatures – a ‘brontosaur’; Mij was anything but an otter.
But the question for which I awarded the highest score – a question evading with contemptuous dexterity any possible inaccuracy on the part of the speaker; putting the blame, as it were, for the creature’s unfamiliarity squarely on my own shoulders; hinting, or doing more than hint, that someone had blundered, that the hand of the potter had shaken; containing, too, an accusation of unfinished work unfit for exhibition – came from a Herculean labourer engaged, mightily and alone, upon digging a hole in the street. I was still far from him when he laid down his pick, put his hands on his hips, and began to stare. As I drew nearer I saw that this stare held an outraged quality, one of surprise, certainly, but also of affront, as though he would have me know that he was not one upon whom to play jokes. I came abreast of him; he spat, glared, and then growled out, ‘ ’Ere, mister – what is that supposed to be?’
It was, I think, his question more than any other that reminded me of my own ignorance; I did not, in fact, know what Mij was supposed to be. I knew, certainly, that he was an otter, but I also knew that he must be one of a species which, if known to the scientific world, was at least not known to live in the delta marshes of the Tigris and Euphrates, for the scant zoological literature that had accompanied me to Iraq made it plain that the only known otter of the Mesopotamian marshes was the Persian sub-species of the common European otter, Lutra lutra. Chahala, the cub that had died, had clearly belonged to that race; she had longer fur with ‘guard hairs’ in place of Mij’s sleek, darker velvet; she was lighter on her throat and belly than upon her back, whereas Mij’s body seemed to have been slipped into an evenly dyed plush bag; the under side of her tail was not, as was Mij’s, flat like a ruler.
In a village of the marshes between the Tigris and the Persian frontier I had bought two otter skins from the householder with whom we had been staying; both were, apart from any possible scientific interest, objects of fascination, for they had been ‘case’ skinned, the whole carcase having been removed, without a single incision, through the mouth. One of these skins belonged to Chahala’s race; the other, contrast heightened by juxtaposition, was plainly of Mij’s, a much larger and darker creature, whose fur was short and shiny and the colour of milkless chocolate. These two skins now reposed in my flat, pregnant with possibility and as yet unexamined by competent authority.
I telephoned to the Natural History Department of the British Museum, in Cromwell Road, and the same afternoon Mr Robert Hayman arrived at my flat to examine the two skins and the living specimen. There is in the serious zoological world
a deadpan-ness, an unwillingness for committal, that must rival the most cautious of consulting physicians. Hayman was far too competent a zoologist, far too encyclopedic in his knowledge, to have been unaware in those first moments that he was looking at a skin and a living animal from a habitat that made the race quite unfamiliar to him, but he did not betray it. He took such measurements as Mij would permit, examined him closely, peered at his formidable array of teeth, and left bearing the two skins for comparison with museum series.
But in due course, after the slow, precise, painstaking processes of the taxonomic world, Mij’s new race was proclaimed. Hayman summoned me to the museum to see the cabinets of otter skins from all over Asia, where the larger of mine lay, unlabelled and conspicuously differing from any other, in a drawer by itself, but in apposition to its nearest relatives. These, various sub-species of Lutrogale, a short-coated otter with a flat under side to the tail, ranged over most of Eastern Asia; according to their geographical race they were of a variety of hues from pale sandy to medium brown, but none had been recorded west of Sind, in India, and none resembled my specimens in colour.
There are very few people, and even fewer amateur zoologists, who stumble upon a sizeable mammal previously unknown to science; in the nursery world of picture-books of birds and beasts the few who had given their own names to species – Steller’s eider and sea eagle, Sharpe’s crow, Humboldt’s woolly monkey, Meinerzthagen’s forest hog, Ross’s snow goose, Grant’s gazelle, Pere David’s deer – had been surrounded for me with an aura of romance; they were the creators, partaking a little of the deity, who had contributed to the great panorama of bright living creatures in which, unshadowed and uncomplicated by knowledge, my childish fancy wandered. Now, when Hayman suggested that the new otter should bear my name, I experienced a sharp, brief conflict; I felt that it should bear his, for he, not I, had done the work; but something small and shrill from the nursery days was shouting inside me that I could be translated into the hierarchy of my early gods and wear, however perilously, the halo of a creator. (‘Can I have it for my own?’ we used to ask when we were small. ‘For my very own?’ Here, surely, was an animal of my very own, to bear my name; every animal that looked like it would always bear my name for ever and ever, unless some odious taxonomist of the future, some leveller, some jealous, dusty scribe of the backroom and the skeletons, were to plot against me and plan the destruction of my tiny, living memorial.)
So Mij and all his race became Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli, and though he is now no more, and there is no ostensible proof that there is another living specimen in the world, I had realized a far-off childish fantasy, and there was a Maxwell’s otter.
9
It was now early May, and I had been in London for more than three weeks, three weeks of impatience and nostalgia for Camusfeàrna, and I felt I could wait no longer to see Mij playing, as I visualized him, under the waterfall, or free about the burn and the island beaches. I went by way of my family home in the south of Scotland, where Mij could taste a partial but guarded liberty before emancipation to total freedom in the north.
During his stay at Monreith, the home of my family, Mij’s character began to emerge and to establish itself. At first on farm mill dams, then in the big loch over which the house looks out, and finally in the sea – which, though he had never known salt water, he entered without apparent surprise – he demonstrated not only his astonishing swimming powers but his willingness to reject the call of freedom in favour of human company. At first, guessing the urgency of the summons that his instincts would experience, I allowed him to swim only on the end of a long fishing line. I had bought a spring reel, which automatically took up the slack, and attached this to the butt end of a salmon rod, but the danger of underwater snags on which the line might loop itself soon seemed too great, and after the first week he ran free and swam free. He wore a harness to which a lead could be attached in emergency, but its function was as much to proclaim his domesticity to would-be human aggressors as one of restraint. The design of this harness, one that would neither impede movement nor catch upon submerged branches and drown him, was a subject that occupied my imagination for many months, and was not perfected for nearly a year.
This time of getting to know a wild animal on terms, as it were, of mutual esteem, was wholly fascinating to me, and our long daily walks by stream and hedgerow, moorland and loch were a source of perpetual delight. Though it remained difficult to lure him from some enticing piece of open water, he was otherwise no more trouble than a dog, and infinitely more interesting to watch. His hunting powers were still undeveloped, but he would sometimes corner an eel in the mill dams, and in the streams he would catch frogs, which he skinned with a dexterity seemingly born of long practice. I had rightly guessed that his early life in a Marsh Arab household would have produced an enlightened and progressive attitude towards poultry – for no Ma’dan would tolerate a predator among the sparse and scrawny scarecrows that pass in the marshes for chickens – and in fact I found that Mij would follow me through a crowded and cackling farmyard without a glance to right or to left. To most domestic livestock he was indifferent, but black cattle he clearly identified with the water buffaloes of his home, and if they gathered at the edge of water in which he was swimming he became wild with excitement, plunging and porpoising and chittering with pleasure.
Even in the open countryside he retained his passion for playthings, and would carry with him for miles some object that had caught his fancy, a fallen rhododendron blossom, an empty twelve-bore cartridge case, a fir-cone, or, on one occasion, a woman’s comb with an artificial brilliant set in the bar; this he discovered at the side of the drive as we set off one morning, and he carried it for three hours, laying it down on the bank when he took to water and returning for it as soon as he emerged.
In the traces left by wild otters he took not the slightest interest. Following daily the routes for which Mij expressed preference, I found myself almost imperceptibly led by his instinct into the world in which the otters of my own countryside lived, a watery world of deep-cut streams between high, rooty banks where the leaves of the undergrowth met overhead; of unguessed alleys and tunnels in reedbeds by a loch’s edge; of mossy culverts and marsh-marigolds; of islands tangled with fallen trees among whose roots were earthy excavations and a whisper of the wind in the willows. As one may hear or read a strange, unusual name, and thereafter be haunted by its constant coincidental recurrence, so, now that I had through Mijbil become conscious of otters, I saw all around me the signs of their presence where I had been oblivious to them before; a smoothed bank of steep mud which they had used for tobogganing; a hollowed-out rotten tree-stump whose interior had been formed into a dry sleeping place; the print of a broad, capable, webbed foot; a small tarry dropping, composed mainly of eel-bones, deposited upon a stone in midstream. In these last I had expected Mij to show at least an equal interest to that which he had displayed in their canine counterparts, but whether because otters do not use their excreta in an anecdotal or informative way, or because he did not recognize in these the product of his own kind, he treated them as if they did not exist.
During all the time that I had him he killed, so far as I know, only one warm-blooded animal, and then he did not eat it, for he seemed to have a horror of blood and of the flesh of warm-blooded animals. On this occasion he was swimming in a reedy loch when he caught a moorhen chick of a few days old, a little black gollywog of a creature half the size of a day-old chick. He had a habit of tucking his treasures under one arm when he was swimming – for an otter swimming underwater uses its forelimbs very little – and here he placed the chick while he went on in a leisurely way with his underwater exploration. It must have drowned during the first minute or so, and when at length he brought it ashore for a more thorough investigation he appeared disappointed and irritated by this unwarrantable fragility; he nuzzled it and pushed it about with his paws and chittered at it in a pettish sort of way, and then, convinced
of its now permanent inertia, he left it where it lay and went in search of something more cooperative.
In the library at Monreith I explored what natural historians of earlier generations had to say about otters. There were no recent works, for the relevant section of the library had received no addition for many years past. The great American naturalist, Ernest Thompson Seton, writing soon after the turn of this century said, ‘Of all the beasts whose lives I have tried to tell, there is one that stands forth, the Chevalier Bayard of the wilds – without fear and without reproach. That is the otter, the joyful, keen, and fearless otter; mild and loving to his own kind, and gentle with his neighbour of the stream; full of play and gladness in his life, full of courage in his stress; ideal in his home, steadfast in death; the noblest little soul that ever went four-footed through the woods.’ In his writings I recognized the animal that I knew, ‘the most beautiful and engaging of all elegant pets. There seems no end to its fun, its energy, its drollery, its good nature, and its postures of new and surprising grace’.1
We arrived at Camusfeàrna in early June, soon after the beginning of a long spell of Mediterranean weather. My diary tells me that summer begins on 22nd June, and under the heading for 24th June there is a somewhat furtive aside to the effect that it is Midsummer’s Day, as though to ward off the logical deduction that summer lasts only for four days in every year. But that summer at Camusfeàrna seemed to go on and on through timeless hours of sunshine and stillness and the dapple of changing cloud shadow upon the shoulders of the hills.
When I think of early summer at Camusfeàrna a single enduring image comes forward through the multitude that jostle in kaleidoscopic patterns before my mind’s eye – that of wild roses against a clear blue sea, so that when I remember that summer alone with my curious namesake who had travelled so far, those roses have become for me the symbol of a whole complex of peace. They are not the pale, anaemic flowers of the south, but a deep, intense pink that is almost a red; it is the only flower of that colour, and it is the only flower that one sees habitually against the direct background of the ocean, free from the green stain of summer. The yellow flag irises flowering in dense ranks about the burn and the foreshore, the wild orchids bright among the heather and mountain grasses, all these lack the essential contrast, for the eye may move from them to the sea beyond them only through the intermediary, as it were, of the varying greens among which they grow. It is in June and October that the colours at Camusfeàrna run riot, but in June one must face seaward to escape the effect of wearing green-tinted spectacles. There at low tide the rich ochres, madders and oranges of the orderly strata of seaweed species are set against glaring, vibrant whites of barnacle-covered rock and shell sand, with always beyond them the elusive, changing blues and purples of the moving water, and somewhere in the foreground the wild roses of the north.
The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy Page 12