He had been with me for a year and a day on the night he had left London.
11
I missed Mij desperately, so much that it was a year before I could bring myself to go to Camusfeàrna again. I mourned for my fallen sparrow; he had filled that landscape so completely, had made so much his own every yard of the ring of bright water I loved, that it seemed, after he had gone from it, hollow and insufficient; for the first time all the familiar things in which I had taken joy appeared as a stage backcloth against which no player moved. I did not stay there after I knew that he was dead; instead, I returned at once to Sicily, and resumed a work that had by now been long interrupted. As the slow summer months passed under that scorching sun, the year during which I had had an otter for a companion, and even Camusfeàrna itself, seemed at times like a dream. I could not deny to myself how much I had been affected by the death of one wild animal, but some part of me stood aside and questioned the validity, the morality, perhaps, of such an attitude in face of the human misery surrounding me. Like my occupancy of the Isle of Soay, that year now appeared to me episodic, sharply defined at beginning and end, and without possible extension; but, as in that other instance, I was wrong.
I came back from Sicily in the autumn, and moved house to Chelsea, partly, I must confess, because I found the elaboration of otter-proofing devices that now composed my premises to be too constant and nagging a reminder of my failure to keep alive an animal to which I had given so much attention. But I had grown accustomed to the continual proximity of an animal, and when one day in Harrods I found a ring-tailed lemur, lately the property of Cyril Connolly, not even the price of seventy-five pounds could discourage me from my folly. Kiko, as she was called, came to live in my new flat. Kiko was an exceedingly beautiful animal rather larger than a very large cat, an haute couture creation in soft blue-grey fur, with a foxy black-and-white face, a great bushy tail of alternating black and white rings, golden eyes, monkey hands with straight needle-pointed claws, and habits that were both insanitary and obscene. For the greater part of the time she remained almost perpetually on heat; what was noticeable, however, was not so much the heat as the humidity. For the rest, she had some deep-seated psychosis that made her about as suitable a pet as a wild-caught leopard. For nine hundred and ninety-nine minutes out of every thousand she was as loving and gentle as any child might wish; for that remaining minute she was a killer, attacking without warning or casus belli, and always from behind. Her technique of inflicting grievous bodily harm was to spring from some high bookcase to one’s shoulder – she could leap twenty feet without apparent effort – and claw for the eyes with the rending pins on her fingers. Whatever the early traumatic experience responsible for this hideous treachery, it was, I deduce, concerned in some way with windows, for each of her three attacks was launched when I was standing at a window, and, for one purpose or another, touching it; at the moment of the third and final outrage I was talking through the window to someone on the pavement outside.
I think I was fortunate not to have been killed by Kiko, for I ignored the danger signs for far too long. I chose to regard my slit eyelid as an accident, thinking that she had lost her balance and clawed without intent. The next time I defended my eyes with my hands, and as a result bear scars that I shall never lose, for her teeth were slashing instruments with razor-sharp edges. I excused this on the ground that she had interpreted my movement as a gesture of aggression. The next time I used my arms rather than my hands to cover my eyes, and Kiko lost balance and fell to the floor. She seemed to me to be making angry feints at my legs, but I was unaware of any actual contact before I noticed, with something very like panic, that I was standing in a large and rapidly widening puddle of blood. I knew that nothing but an artery could have produced that astonishing volume; I got out of the room somehow, and made for the bathroom, leaving behind me a trail of blood that appeared appropriate to a slaughterhouse. There I found that my tibial artery was sticking out of my calf like a black cigarette end, and spouting blood to a distance of more than a foot. I soaked a handkerchief and tried to apply a tourniquet, but my knowledge had deserted me; I could not remember the pressure point. At the end of several minutes trying here and there I estimated that I had by now lost something like two pints of blood, and I wasted several more seconds trying to calculate how soon I should lose consciousness, for I was already beginning to feel weak and shaky. I made out that at the present rate of loss I had a little over five minutes, and I was searching wildly for some thread to tie the artery when I suddenly had a perfect mental picture of a huge wall chart showing the venous system in red and the arterial in blue. The tibial artery, of course, only surfaced at the groin. I got the tourniquet on and a cigarette lit and began to think about Kiko. The psychoanalysis of a lemur, I realized, would present insuperable problems. She now shares spacious accommodation with three other ring-tailed lemurs in the Chester Zoo. She is still mine, and once I hoped that she would breed and I might rear her offspring well sheltered from trauma, but now I feel that lemurs, sharing as they do a common ancestor with man, might require as careful choosing as do human friends.
After Kiko came a bush baby, who, apart from the wholly misleading blood-curdling shriek with which he would nightly challenge the sleeping jungle of Chelsea, turned out to be a really crashing bore; his hobbies, moreover, were solitary and embarrassing. Later, after he had moved on to less exacting ownership than mine, I was offered another with the curious but most appropriate name of Hitchcock; though he proved, in fact, to have been christened by the surname of his owners, it was a reminder, and I declined.
I did not experiment with any other animals; none of these creatures had, anyway, the least affinity with Camusfeàrna. I acquired, instead, a baker’s dozen of small, brilliant tropical birds, who flew at liberty about my sitting-room; they proved to be both less insanitary and less dangerous than Kiko.
In the early spring of the following year I made up my mind to go back to Camusfeàrna. There, with the cold, bright March weather shining on the landscape that had long become my real home, I found myself assailed again by echoes of the emptiness that I had experienced when Mij was killed; dimly at first, and then clear and undisguised, came the thought that the place was incomplete without an otter, that Mij must have a successor; that, in fact, there must always be an otter at Camusfeàrna for as long as I occupied the house.
Having at last made up my mind, I turned all my attention to this end. With vivid recollection of my slavery to Mij’s exigence, I wrote first to the zoological friends who had offered to find an otter-keeper for me, and then began a systematic examination of all the holts I knew up and down the coast from Camusfeàrna. One of the chain of islands leading out from the bay is called Otter Island, and on it is a tumbled cairn of big boulders forming a system of low caves much used by otters; in an earlier year, before I had become as it were otter-conscious, there had been a litter of cubs there. But now, though several of the inner chambers had been well ordered and lined with fresh bedding, there was no sign of young, and the public lavatory was little used. There is a lavatory at every otter holt, and the excrement (which is known as ‘spraint’, and has no offensive odour, being composed almost entirely of crunched fish bones, or, in the case of shore-living otters, of fragments of crab carapace) often forms a high pyramidal pile; on the very top of one such I remember seeing, in that year when the cubs were on Otter Island, a tiny caterpillar of spraint whose deposition must have been an acrobatic feat for the tottering cub.
One by one I visited all the holts of which I knew, but there seemed no otters breeding in the Camusfeàrna area. I did not despair of acquiring a cub locally, for otters have no ‘breeding season’, and cubs have been found in every month of the year, but as a second string I wrote to Robert Angorly in Basra, and asked if he could arrange with the Marsh Arabs to get me another of Mij’s species.
In response to Angorly’s request the Marsh Arabs brought in a succession of cubs, three of whi
ch were Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli, but each in turn died within a few days of arrival. This he at last put down to the fact that for days before arrival they had been tended by ungentle and inexpert hands; now he said flatly that he would accept no cub that had been more than twelve hours captive. As a result, the next cub lived, and in late June he wrote to tell me that I could arrange her transport to England when I liked. She was not, he said, a Maxwell otter, but he personally believed her to belong to yet another undiscovered race. She lived in the house, and was as playful and friendly as any dog.
With this apparent certainty of a successor to Mij, I began to make elaborate preparations, for I was anxious to make the fullest use of my hard-earned experience. My early enquiries for an otter-keeper had at last borne fruit, and now I was able to engage Jimmy Watt, a boy leaving school, who, though without firsthand knowledge of otters, had a profound natural feeling for animals and a desire to work with them. In London I had a large glass tank erected in the garden.
I had arranged for the otter to be flown from Basra to London on Thursday, 10th July, but the glazing of this tank was still uncompleted on the preceding Monday, and I telegraphed to Angorly asking him to postpone dispatch until the same flight on Tuesday the 15th.
On Monday, 14th July, revolution swept Iraq, and on that Tuesday they were playing football with the Crown Prince’s head in the streets of Baghdad. Of Robert Angorly, who by nature of his office as chief game warden numbered as one of the tyrant’s personal entourage, I have heard no word since.
Then I made up my mind to rear a cub in Scotland, and with that end in view I returned to Camusfeàrna, for a prolonged stay, in the spring of 1959.
I had been there for no more than a week when there occurred by far the strangest episode in the saga of my efforts to replace Mijbil, a coincidence so extravagant, partaking so insolently of the world of fiction, that had it been unwitnessed or in another land I should hesitate to record it.
On 19th April I motored to the station, thirty-odd miles away, to meet an arriving guest, a foundation guest, as it were, who over many visits had constructed much of the Camusfeàrna furniture, and who with me had watched the house grow from an empty shell. I arrived very early in the village, to do some necessary shopping, and had lunch in the hotel, a large and exceedingly glossy hotel that caters for the most moneyed element of the tourist trade; in the summer it is loud with Cadillacs and transatlantic accents. Now, however, it was comparatively empty; and on falling into conversation with the hall porter I found that we had many acquaintances in common. He remembered my shark-fishing boat the Sea Leopard; we shared affectionate memories of Captain Robertson of the island steamer Lochmor, who, because of a voice pitched in an almost supersonic key, had been commonly known as Squeaky.
We exchanged stories about Squeaky, and it transpired that I knew one that he had never heard. It dated from the war years; Squeaky had been sailing northwards from Barra in a thick white mist, and there was among his passengers a certain admiral spending his leave in the Hebrides. Peering from the boat-deck into the enveloping white screen, the admiral thought the ship was on a course to lead her into a minefield, and as the minutes passed and the Lochmor churned on unheedingly he grew more and more apprehensive. At length his alarm became so acute that he decided to beard the captain on the bridge. The two had never met, and Squeaky was quite unaware that he was carrying a high-ranking naval officer. Gazing glassily ahead with his remarkably protuberant blue eyes, and dreaming perhaps of happy deals in coupon-free Harris tweed at the northern extremity of his run, he was suddenly outraged to observe standing at his elbow a stocky little man in a raincoat and a Homburg hat. Squeaky was an habitually irascible man, and he exploded.
‘Ket off my plutty pridge, you pugger!’ he shouted in a voice like that of an angry wren.
The admiral remembered that he was in civilian clothes, apologized, and introduced himself. Squeaky, though by nature no respecter of persons, was impressed.
‘An Atmiral, is it? And what could I be toing for you, Atmiral?’
‘Well – Captain Robertson – I wondered whether you would be kind enough to give me our position.’
‘Position? Ach, well, we’re chust here or hereabouts.’
‘No, no, Captain, I meant our position on the chart.’
‘Is it a chart?’ shrilled Squeaky. ‘I haven’t seen a chart for forty years!’
The admiral was insistent. ‘Ach, well, Atmiral, if you’re so keen to be seeing a chart, come down to my capin and have a wee tram, and we’ll see what we can find you.’
The two went below to the captain’s cabin, and after the ‘wee tram’ Squeaky began to rout about in his chart drawer. There were charts of the Indian Ocean and the China Sea, charts of polar seas and of the Caribbean, of the English Channel and the Skagerrak; at last, seemingly at the very bottom of the drawer, he discovered a chart of the Minch. He spread this on the table, adjusted his spectacles, and at length planted a stubby forefinger a few miles north of Eriskay.
‘Well, Atmiral, it’s hereabouts we are, and this is our course northwards.’
The admiral stared ominously at a sprinkling of black dots right in the ship’s path. ‘What,’ he asked bleakly, ‘are these?’
Squeaky peered. ‘Those plack tots? Well, if they’re rocks we’re puggered for sure, but if they’re what I think they are, which is fly-shit, we’re right as rain!’
I have digressed to recount the whole of this anecdote, partly because it is irresistible, and partly because the sharing of this joke and of other memories with the hall porter had a direct bearing upon the dream-like happenings of two hours later. Had we not in those few minutes discovered the bond of mutual friends and recollections, those extraordinary events would never have taken place.
I met my guest on the station platform, and we returned to the hotel for what Squeaky would have called a ‘wee tram’ before setting off for Camusfeàrna. We sat in the sun-lounge that overlooks the sea, but we were well back from the window, and out of sight of the gravel sweep beyond the glass. Suddenly the hall porter came running over to us from the hall.
‘Mr Maxwell!’ he called. ‘Mr Maxwell! Come quick to the door and tell me what’s this strange beast outside – quick!’
I have an open mind on the subject of so-called telepathy and extra-sensory perception in general; I have had one or two curious experiences, but none quite as strange as the overwhelming and instant certainty that I felt then of what I was going to see. Whether that certainty communicated itself from me to my guest, or whether he had a separate moment of clairvoyance, he too had a sudden and vivid knowledge of what was outside the door.
Four people were walking past the hotel, making for a car parked near to the jetty. At their heels lolloped a large, sleek otter, of a species that I had never seen, with a silvery-coloured head and a snow-white throat and chest. I had a deep feeling of unreality, of struggling in a dream.
I rushed up to the party, and began to jabber, probably quite incoherently, about Mijbil and how he had been killed, and about how time and time again my efforts to find a successor had been frustrated at the eleventh hour. I must have been talking a great deal, because what they were saying in reply took a long time to sink in, and when it did the sense of dreaming increased almost to the point of vertigo.
‘… only eight months old and always been free, house trained, comes and goes as she likes… brought her up myself with a bottle. In six weeks we’ve got to go back to West Africa, so it looked like a zoo or nothing – what else could we do? Everyone admires her, but when they come to the point of actually owning her they all shy off… Poor Edal, it was breaking my heart…’
We were sitting on the steps of the hotel by this time and the otter was nuzzling at the nape of my neck – that well-remembered, poignant touch of hard whiskers and soft face-fur.
By the time I had taken in what her owners, Dr Malcolm Macdonald and his wife, from Torridon, were saying, the party had dwindled by t
wo; it transpired that the only reason why they had been in the village at all was to give a lift to two foreign girl hikers whose destination it was. And the only reason that I was there was to meet my guest, and the only reason that the Macdonalds and I had met at all was that two hours earlier I had made the acquaintance of the hall porter and exchanged reminiscences about Squeaky Robertson. I had not sat near enough to the window to see the otter for myself, and if he had not called me they would have passed by the hotel and gone home to Torridon, and I should have finished my drink ten minutes later and gone home to Camusfeàrna.
It had been a strange climax of our meeting, the meeting of the only man in the British Isles who was trying desperately to find a home for a pet otter with the only man who was searching, with equal desperation, for an otter.
Ten days later Edal became mine, and there was once more an otter at Camusfeàrna, playing in the burn and sleeping before the hearth.
12
Nothing was decided at that first meeting; Edal’s owners not unnaturally wanted to satisfy themselves that this extraordinary coincidence was all it seemed on the surface, and that she would find with me the home they wanted for her. They promised to write during the next few days; Edal jumped into their car with the ease of familiarity, and as they drove away she appeared leaning far out of the passenger window, one hand delicately shielding her windward ear.
A week later she visited Camusfeàrna for an afternoon; then, after an interval of ten days Malcolm and Paula came to stay for a weekend, to leave Edal with me when they went. I had not been idle during those ten days; I was determined to repeat none of the mistakes that had led, directly or indirectly, to Mij’s death. I sent to Malcolm Macdonald a harness that had been made for Mij just before he was killed; with the help of Jimmy Watt I enclosed the house with a fence that might not, perhaps, have foiled Mij, but which would, I thought, be barrier enough to baffle this apparently more docile, less self-willed creature if she should think in the first days to seek her late foster parents; within these confines we dug a pool and piped to it water that rose in a fountain jet appropriate to more formal surroundings. The entrance to this enclosure, and thus to the house, we guarded by a double gate, the lowermost wood of which met a sheet of metal sunk into the ground against digging. I did not think that these precautions would be necessary for long; they were to make certain that during the period when she would inevitably fret and believe herself to belong elsewhere I should not lose her through any fault of my own.
The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy Page 16