The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

by Gavin Maxwell

  I returned to London with Mij in the autumn, and with his usual good humour he adjusted himself quickly to the absence of his beloved burn and foreshore. During the car journey from Camusfeàrna to Inverness he seemed, in a long deep sleep, to shed his wild nature and to awake metamorphosed as a domestic animal. In the station hotel he lay beside my chair while I had tea, and when a waitress brought him a saucer of milk he lapped it as delicately as any drawing-room cat, spilling never a drop. He entered his first-class sleeper as one long used to travel, and at the studio next morning he seemed actively pleased to be among his old surroundings. He settled quickly, too, in his earlier routine; eels in the bath; walks round the grubby London streets; even, not without trepidation on my part, an afternoon’s shopping in Harrods. By one local shop he was allowed to make his own selection before purchase; he had, as I have mentioned, a passion for rubber toys, more especially such as would squeak or rattle when manipulated. Near by to my flat was a shop devoted entirely to such oddities; india-rubber fruit and buns, explosive cigars, apparently full glasses from which no drop of liquid could escape, even papier mâché imitations of dog and cat excrement – the whole practical joker’s compendium. Here I was hesitating one day between a chocolate eclair that whistled and an india-rubber mackerel that wheezed when the assistant said, ‘Why not let him make his own choice, sir?’ and placed both on the floor. Mij plumped for the éclair, to the assistant’s surprise, and thereafter Mij chose his own toys and himself bore them home in triumph. It was a very realistic éclair, and as we passed the door of the pub on the corner a figure emerged swaying slightly, focused on Mij, and stood riveted. ‘Good God!’ he said, quite quietly, and behind him a voice shouted, ‘You’ve got ‘em again, Bill – you’ve got ‘em again!’

  Mij seemed in those days to possess a quality of indestructibility, an imperviousness to physical hurt, that was little short of miraculous. He succeeded, despite all my precautions, in falling from the gallery to the parquet floor below, but he might, for all the notice he took of the incident, have fallen upon a feather bed; his head was caught, without protest, in a slamming door; and, finally, he chewed a razor blade into fragments. I had been out for the evening, and had left him the premises beyond the kitchen, the bathroom, that is to say, with a full bath, and beyond it the box-room where he had a tattered armchair of his own and an electric fire that shone down upon it from the wall. When I came in I opened the bathroom door and called him, but there was no response. I went in and saw that the bath was empty of water, at the bottom of it my safety razor was in two pieces, lying among splintered pieces of the blade. It did not at that instant strike me that the total absence of blood indicated, however improbably, an intact otter; I went through into the box-room expecting to find a corpse in the chair beneath the warm glow of the fire. But there among the cushions he was squirming with self-satisfaction, as though conscious of having carried out a difficult task with initiative and acumen, and there was not, as far as I could discover, so much as a scratch on him.

  I cannot now remember whether, when I had been in Iraq, I had ever seriously considered what was to be done with an otter during such times as I was unable to look after him myself; when, for example, I was again abroad, or even when I wanted to be away from my own premises for a day or two. Perhaps I had thought that at any rate in the latter case he could accompany me, for I had not yet learned that an otter is not at its best as a guest in a strange house – or rather that the house would be very strange indeed at the end of the visit. Mij was content to be alone for four or five hours, but for no l this dependence that I was forced to take the problem seriously.

  In November I had to be away from London for three days, to lecture in the Midlands, and this was Mij’s first and only imprisonment away from the people and surroundings that he knew. I arranged for him to be boarded for those three days at the zoo sanatorium, and took him up to Regent’s Park in a taxi. Once inside the gardens he plodded sturdily ahead at the end of his lead, and for all his reaction the teeming animal voices and smells around him might not have existed. Only when he passed by the aviaries containing the great birds of prey did he cower and tug his lead the other way; a memory, perhaps, of his native marshes where, winter long, the eagles wheel above the wastes of water, and where they must be the otter’s only natural enemy; or perhaps an inborn instinct that his race’s foes came from the skies. I left him in a grim cage whose last occupant had been a sick wart-hog, and when the door was closed on him and he found himself alone his wails went to my heart. I could hear him long after I had closed the gate of the sanatorium yard.

  On the evening of the next day I telephoned from the north to enquire if he had settled down. Too much, I was told; in fact he had insulated himself from the world by the same deep coma into which he had sunk when shut into a box on the air journey. He had refused all food, and after digging at the iron and cement that enclosed him until his feet bled he had curled up in my sheepskin coat and refused to be roused. I was advised to come back for him as soon as possible; not rarely pet animals in such surroundings would pass almost imperceptibly from such a coma into death.

  I left for London very early the next morning, but there was a dense white fog which slowed me to a bicycle’s speed for the first hundred miles. Then it furled up suddenly to reveal a bare blue sky and bright autumn sunshine. My car was a ferocious vehicle, converted from a single-seater Grand Prix racing car, and in her distant prime speeds in excess of 160 m.p.h. had been claimed for her, but at this moment I was running-in a set of new pistons that she seemed to require about as often as more modest conveyances need refilling with petrol. With that last hundred miles the running-in distance was, on the milometer, completed, but in my anxiety to reach London and my pining otter I left out of account that they had been covered so slowly as to be valueless for the purpose. I came out on to the long straight north of Grantham, and unfortunately there was not another car in sight to slow me down. I had been driving at about 90 m.p.h.; now, I thought, I would go very much faster, and, for a short time I did. The supercharger screamed, dial needles moved with incredible rapidity towards red zones; I had a glimpse of the speedometer hovering at 145 m.p.h., and I was still accelerating briskly. Then there was a rending sound, the cockpit rilled with a great puff of blue smoke, and in the mirror I saw a thin black trail of oil stretching away behind me. I came to rest opposite to a farmhouse, and all I could think of was whether a train could get me to London before the staff of the zoo sanatorium went off duty in the evening. The farm had a telephone; the only possible train left Grantham in thirty-eight minutes, and I caught it as it was moving out of the station.

  Back at the zoo sanatorium, I could not at first even see Mij in his cage. There were a lot of dead fish lying about untouched and a big basin the size of a hip bath had been slopped about so that there was water everywhere; the sheepskin jacket was lying in a huddle in the middle of this, and there was no movement anywhere. I came in through the steel-barred door and called his name, but nothing stirred. I put my hand into the jacket and I felt him warm and breathing, as far into the arm hole as he could push himself. Only when I thrust my hand in beside him until I could touch his face did he begin to awaken, with a slow, dazed air as if he were emerging from a trance; then suddenly he was out and leaping in a frenzy of joy, clambering over me and inside my coat, and rushing round and round that barren cage until he threw himself down panting in front of me.

  In those two days he had taken on the sour small-cat-house odour of stale urine and dejection and indignity that is the hallmark of the captive; he had lost his self-respect and fouled his own bed, so that his usually sweet-smelling fur stank like an ill-kept ferret. It was not an experiment that I ever repeated, but his boarding was clearly a problem to which I had to find a solution.

  He paid one more visit to the zoo, but this time not as a captive. I had for long wanted to have a clear, eye-level view of his performance under water, and to this end I was allowed by the Zo
ological Society to erect in the back premises of the Aquarium a large glass tank that I had hired for the day. Had I known that there was never to be another opportunity I would have arranged for a cinema camera, but as things were I asked Michael Ayrton to come and make drawings of him. With the tank I was provided with a number of goldfish for Mij to catch and consume; I could have wished that there had been something of more feral appearance, something associated less in the mind’s eye with the parlour and the aspidistra and the loving care of an old maid, or with the cosy, unpredatory world of the nursery, where only in fiction was nature permitted to be red in tooth and claw. Mij, however, was untroubled by any such connotations, and set about their destruction with a zeal and a display of virtuosity for which even my long hours of watching him from above had left me unprepared. His speed was bewildering, his grace breath-taking; he was boneless, mercurial, sinuous, wonderful. I thought of a trapeze artist, of a ballet dancer, of a bird or an aircraft in aerobatics, but in all these I was comparing him to lesser grandeurs; he was an otter in his own element, and he was the most beautiful thing in nature that I had ever seen.

  As with his toys, he was not content to be in possession of only one fish at a time; having captured the first he would tuck it under one arm, and, apparently utterly unhandicapped by this awkward parcel, would swoop, sometimes ‘looping the loop’ as he did so, upon another; at one moment he had fish under both arms and a third in his mouth. At the conclusion of this display, which had cost me in hire charges some ten shillings a minute, I felt that I had seldom been so richly rewarded for financial outlay on visual experience, and I determined that I must have a glass tank of my own for him in London.

  I began my own search for emancipation by inserting an advertisement in Country Life, the Field, and The Times, requesting in gist a temporary home for Mij where he could be left for anything from days to months as necessity demanded. Altogether I received some forty replies to this somewhat egregious demand, and conscientiously followed up every one of them, but one by one the prospective guardians were weighed and found wanting. Few of them had any idea of what they would be taking on; fewer still had premises in any way suitable; some turned out to be schoolchildren applying without their parents’ knowledge. At the end of two months I was no further on than on the day I had drafted the advertisement.

  Then I began to interview retired zoo keepers, but a few weeks of this convinced me that a retired zoo keeper has an implacable intention to remain retired. Meanwhile the book that I had been writing was finished, and I should in the normal course of events have begun again to travel. It seemed an impasse. Though I found a temporary solution – to return to Camusfeàrna in the spring and there to write a book about Mij – these were clearly no more than delaying tactics, and with friends in the zoological world I left an urgent plea to find me, by hook or by crook, a whole-time otter-keeper. But by the time he was found and engaged, Mij was dead.

  What little there remains to tell of his story I shall write quickly, for anyone who in reading it has shared a little of my pleasure in his life must share, too, a little of my unhappiness at his death.

  I had arranged to go to Camusfeàrna to spend the spring and summer alone in his company, and there to write the book about him that I had projected. I was to leave London early in April but I needed a fortnight’s freedom from his incessant demands upon my time, and I arranged that he should precede me to Scotland in the charge of a friend. I packed his ‘suitcase’, a wicker basket whose essential contents seemed ever to become more and more elaborate – spare harnesses, leads, tins of unpolished rice, cod-liver oil, toys partially disintegrated but long favoured, and I travelled with him in the hired car from my flat to Euston station. It was a big Humber, with a broad ledge between the top of the back seat and the rear window; here, I recall with a vividness that is still in some sense painful, he sprawled upon his back and rolled my fountain pen to and fro between his forepaws, or held it clasped with one of them against his broad, glossy belly. I called my companion’s attention to the rich sheen of his coat reflecting the neon lights. He was in his most domesticated mood.

  At the station he tugged purposefully at the lead all the way up the astonished platform to the sleeper, where he made straight for the wash basin and accommodated his plastic body to the curves. His left hand reached up and fumbled vaguely with the tap. That was the last I ever saw of him.

  During the next ten days I received letters telling me of Mij’s delight in his renewed freedom, of the fish that he had caught in the river and in the sea; of how he would come in dog-tired and curl up before the fire; of anxious hours of absence; of how it had been decided at last that he would be safer without his harness, which, despite the care and experiment that had gone to its design, might still catch upon some underwater snag and drown him.

  On 16th April I had packed my own luggage, and was to be at Camusfeàrna myself the following afternoon, when I received a telephone call from the estate agent of the property to which Camusfeàrna belonged. It was rumoured, he told me, that an otter had been killed at the village four miles north of Camusfeàrna, and Mij was missing. There was, however, a discrepancy; the otter that had been killed was said to have been so mangy and scabby that the killer had not thought it worthwhile to preserve the skin. There was no detailed information.

  Nor was there to be any yet; no tidy end, no body to identify, no palliative burial at the foot of the rowan tree; no human kindness that would spare those who had been fond of him the day-long search, the door standing open all through the night.

  I arrived at the village the following afternoon. I had heard conflicting tales at the railhead station, on the launch that took me to the village, at the village pier. Some said that a very old wild otter had been killed, but that Mij was already safely returned, others that he had been seen in a village miles to the south of Camusfeama. I did not believe them; I knew that Mij was dead, but I was driven by a compulsive desire to know by whom and how he had been killed.

  A roadman, I was told in the village, had been driving his lorry past the church when he had seen an otter on the road where it bordered the sea, and had killed it. The skin was partly hairless and he had not kept it.

  I found out where this man lived, and drove some four miles inland to see his family. I arrived furtively, for I expected to find Mij’s pelt nailed out to dry somewhere in the environs of the house – a thing I should not be allowed to see if I made my enquiry first. For me it would have felt like finding the skin of a human friend, but I had to know.

  The family denied all knowledge of it. The skin, they said, had been so mangy that the killer, Big Angus, had thrown it away before reaching home. No, they didn’t know where. Big Angus was not back yet – he would come riding on the pillion of a motor-cycle; if I was to wait in the village I might see him.

  I waited. The motor-cycle came at last. Yes, it was true that he had killed an otter yesterday, but it was also true that the skin was half bald, and he had not thought it worth keeping. He was soft-spoken and ingenuous.

  I asked him to show me where it had happened. I walked back with him some two hundred yards to a sharp bend where a little churchyard lay between the road and the sea. He had come round the corner with his lorry, and the otter had been there, just above the road, in the ditch. He had stopped his lorry.

  I could see it desperately plainly. ‘How did you kill him?’ I asked. ‘With a stick?’ ‘No, Major,’ he said, ‘I had a pick-head in the back of the lorry.’ He thought that a wild otter would wait in the road while he went to fetch the instrument of its death. He stuck to his story; by his account the otter he had killed could not have been mine. ‘He was very old and skinny,’ he said again and again. ‘I threw the carcase in the river, and I don’t remember where.’ He had been well briefed and well rehearsed, as I learned much later, when he had gone in panic to seek advice. Brave murderer; for his lies and deceit I could have killed him then as instinctively and with as little forethought as h
e had killed the creature I had brought so many thousands of miles, killed him quickly and treacherously, when he was expecting it no more than Mij had, so that the punishment would fit the crime.

  Instead, I appealed foolishly to the quality he lacked; I pleaded with him to tell me; I tried to make him understand what it would be like for me to remain at Camusfeàrna waiting day after day for the return that I did not believe possible. He did not give way an inch.

  I learned later, from someone else with more humanity.

  ‘I felt I couldn’t sit by and see you deceived,’ he said. ‘It’s just not a decent action in a man, and that’s the truth. I saw the body of the beast on the lorry when it stopped in the village, and there wasn’t a hair out of place on the whole skin – except the head, which was all bashed in. If he didn’t know fine it was yours he knew then, because I told him: “You want to get your head seen to,” I said, “if you think that’s a wild otter, or if you think a wild one would wait for you to kill it in broad daylight.” It’s just a pack of lies he’s telling you, and I couldn’t think of you looking and calling for your pet up and down the burn and by the tide every day, and him dead all the while.’

  I got the story little by little. Mij had been wandering widely for some days past, and though he had always returned at night he must have covered great distances, for he had turned up one day at a hamlet some eight miles south by sea. There he had been recognized and gone unmolested; the next day he had journeyed north up the coast to the village where he was killed. Earlier in the day he had been recognized there too; a man who saw an otter in his hen run had fetched his gun before he was struck by the otter’s indifference to the chickens, and made the right deduction. Mij had been on his way home when he had met Big Angus, and he had never been taught to fear or distrust any human being. I hope he was killed quickly, but I wish he had had one chance to use his teeth on his killer.