The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

by Gavin Maxwell

  Even during that first weekend, while I was still a stranger to her and her surroundings were unfamiliar, I was so enchanted by Edal that I found it difficult to believe my own good fortune. Because she did not feel herself to be in her own home I was able to see in those first days only a fraction of her fascination, a mere corner of the piquant personality I came to know later, but I saw enough to know that if I had searched the world over I could have found no more perfect successor to Mijbil.

  On the third day, while Edal was sleeping soundly on the sofa, Paula and Malcolm left silently. Our good-byes were hushed, almost tacit, both because we did not want to awaken that softly-breathing ball of fur, and because something of their own feeling of unhappiness and betrayal had communicated itself to me, and in my long-postponed moment of triumph I felt not jubilation but sadness for the sundered family.

  After they had gone Jimmy and I sat beside Edal on the sofa, waiting miserably for her awakening and the panic that we thought would follow the realization of her abandonment. An hour passed, two, and still she slept on. Presently Morag arrived; the Macdonalds had called at Druimfiaclach as they left, and told her that Edal might feel less lost and despairing in feminine company. So we three sat silently and anxiously, as around a sick bed, and my thoughts wandered between the sleeping animal and her late owners, for I had recognized in them the same obsessional feeling for their otter as I had experienced for Mij, and for nothing in the world would I have changed places with them as they drove home desolate now.

  When Edal awoke at last she appeared to notice little amiss. Paula’s jersey lay beside her on the sofa, her own towel and toys were on the floor, and if she was aware of her owners’ absence she was too well-mannered a guest to comment upon it so early. Also, as was to be expected, she got on extremely well with Morag.

  It is time to give a more detailed description of Edal as she was when she came to me early in May 1959.

  By far the strangest and most captivating aspect of her was that of her hands. Unlike Mij, whose forepaws were, despite the dexterity he contrived with them, true paws with wide connecting webs between the digits, hers were monkey-hands, unwebbed, devoid of so much as a vestige of nail, and nearly as mobile as a man’s. With them she ate, peeled hard-boiled eggs, picked her teeth, arranged her bed, and played for hours with any small object that she could find.

  Once in a hospital in Italy I watched a crippled child practising the use of artificial hands. She had before her a solitaire board and a numbered set of marbles; the holes were numbered too, but the marbles had been wrongly placed, and her task was to transpose them until each ball and socket corresponded. She worked with complete absorption, oblivious of onlookers, and with each passing minute she discovered new powers. Once, too, I had watched a ball juggler practising his act with the same withdrawn, inturned eye, the same absence of irritation or impatience at failure, the same apparent confidence of ultimate success.

  Of both these Edal reminded me as she juggled with such small objects – marbles, clothes-pegs, matches, Biro pens – as could be satisfactorily contained within her small, prehensile grasp; she would lie upon her back passing them from hand to hand, or occasionally to the less adept grip of her webbed but almost nail-less hind feet, working always with two or more objects at a time, gazing fixedly at them all the while, as though these extremities of hers were in some way independent of her and to be watched and wondered at. At moments it was clearly frustrating for her to require four feet upon which to walk, for she would retrieve a lost marble clutching it firmly in one hand – usually the right – and hobbling along upon her other three limbs.

  Because, it seemed, of her delight in her own dexterity, it was her practice to insert her plaything of the moment into some container from which it had then to be extracted, a boot or a shoe for choice, and it mattered little to her whether this receptacle already contained a human foot. She would come hobbling across the room to me with some invisible treasure clenched in her right fist and thrust it into my shoe just below the ankle bone; on more than one occasion the foreign body thus introduced turned out to be a large and lively black beetle. She was also an adept, if not entirely imperceptible, pickpocket; with impatiently fumbling fingers she would reach disconcertingly into the trouser pockets of any guest who sat down in the house, hardly waiting for an introduction before scattering the spoils and hurrying away with as much as she could carry. With these curious hands she could, too, throw such playthings as were small enough to be enclosed by her fingers. She had three ways of doing this; the most usual was a quick upward flick of her arm and forepart of the body as she held her clenched fist palm downward, but she would also perform a backward flick which tossed the object over her shoulder to land at her other side, and, on occasion, usually when in a sitting position with her back supported, she would throw overarm.

  Like Mij, she was an ardent footballer, and would dribble a ball round the room for half an hour at a time, but here she had an additional accomplishment that Mij had not learned, for when she shot the ball wide or over-ran it she would sweep her broad tail round with a powerful scoop to bring it back within range of her feet.

  For the rest she was a small, exceedingly heavy body inhabiting a rich fur skin many sizes too large for her. It cannot be described as a loose fit; it is not a fit at all. The skin appears to be attached to the creature inside it at six points only: the base of the nose, the four wrists or ankles, and the root of the tail. When lying at ease upon her back the surplus material may be observed disposed in heavy velvety folds at one or other side of her, or both; a slight pressure forward from the base of her neck causes the skin on her forehead to rise in a mountain of pleats like a furled plush curtain; when she stands upright like a penguin the whole garment slips downwards by its own inertia into heavy wrinkles at the base of her belly, giving her a non-upsettable, pear-shaped appearance.

  She is thus able to turn, within surprisingly broad limits, inside her own skin, and should one attempt to pick her up by the scruff of the neck one is liable to find oneself gripping a portion of skin rightly belonging to some quite different part of her body, merely on temporary loan, so to speak, to the neck. The colour of the fur is the best guide to what really belongs where; her chest and throat are of yellow-tinged white – not pure white as I had thought when seeing her first in the sunshine – and here the pelt hangs in such positive bags of redundancy that she has a habit of gathering up this bib in her two hands and sucking it with an enjoyment that the fine plush texture makes wholly understandable. The bib is divided from a silvery, brocade-texture head by a sharp line of demarcation immediately below the ears; the body and the enormous tail are pale mauvish-brown, velvet above and silk below. Beyond the points of attachment at the four wrists the fur is of an entirely different character; it changes from velvet to satin, tiny, close-lying hairs that alter colour according to how the light falls upon them. The tightly gloved hands and the enormous fullness above the wrists give her the appearance of wearing heavy gauntlets; watching her lolloping out for her morning walk with Jimmy Watt I have thought that she resembled nothing so much as a very expensive woman taking no chances on the weather at a point-to-point meeting.

  Her comparative babyhood, and her upbringing by human beings, had left some strange gaps in her abilities. To start with, she could not lap water or milk, but only drink from a dish as does a bird, lifting her head to allow the liquid to trickle down her throat, or sucking it noisily with a coarse, soup-drinking sound punctuated with almost vocal swallowing. She possessed, however, an accomplishment probably unchallenged among wild animals – that of drinking milk from a spoon. One had but to produce and exhibit a cup and spoon for her to clamber on to one’s lap and settle herself with a heavy and confiding plump, head up and expectant. Then she opened her mouth and one poured the spoonfuls into it, while the soup noises reached a positive crescendo. At the end of this performance she would insist upon inspecting the cup to make certain that it was indeed empty;
she would search into it with enquiring fingers and abstracted gaze; then, belching and hiccuping from time to time, she would lift the spoon out in one clenched hand and lie upon her back, licking and sucking it.

  It came as a shock to me to discover that she was the most precarious of swimmers. Even in the wild state otter cubs have little if any instinct for water, and their dam teaches them to swim against their better judgment, as it were, for they are afraid to be out of their depth. In the water Edal preferred to keep her feet either in surreptitious contact with the bottom or within easy reach of it, and nothing, at that time, would tempt her into deep water. Within these self-imposed limits, however, she was capable of a performance that even Mij might have envied; lying on her back she would begin to spin, if that is the correct word, to revolve upon her own axis, to pirouette in the horizontal plane, like a chicken on a spit that has gone mad. In this, as in the novelty of new aquabatic powers that she quickly learned, she took a profound delight, and if she had not yet apprehended that otters should swim under water and only return to the surface for refreshment, she knew all the joys of a great disturbance upon it.

  Her language was at first an enormous problem to me. While she shared a certain number of notes with Mij they were, whether by reason of her different species or because she had not been taught to speak by parent otters, used in so utterly different contexts as to produce, at the beginning, acute misunderstanding. Thus the singing hum that had proclaimed Mij’s extreme anger she employed to ask for food that a human was holding, and she later learned to do this at request. Mij’s interrogatory ‘Hah?’ was, with her, also a request for some piece of food held in the human hand, a confirmation that she had smelled it and found it acceptable. The high, snarling wail that had, very rarely, marked the end of Mij’s patience and the probability of a bite, she produced in response to any stranger who came near her, and appeared apprehensive rather than aggressive, for she never bit, but only ran to the safety of her friends. All through the first two nights I suffered, intermittently, from this terrifying din screeched into my very ear-holes. She had been wont to share a bed with her late owners, and to pass most of the night upon the pillow; now she chose the foot of my bed, and, heavy and forgetful with sleep, came ambling up every half hour or so to take her accustomed position. At the discovery of a strange head on the pillow, one that seemingly never lost its dismaying novelty, she put her mouth against my ear and vented her feelings in wails and screams of abandoned anguish. I could not, perhaps, be blamed for finding this alarming; I also was recalled each time suddenly to consciousness, and to me those sounds had in the past been precursors to a bite like a leopard’s.

  Her call note was basically the same as Mij’s, but less resonant and assertive, more plaintive and feminine. Beyond these similarities, she had a whole range of then unfamiliar expressions denoting affection, pleasure, greeting or casual conversation; notes strongly reminiscent of the human infant; most of these might, unflatteringly, fall into the category of squeals rather than chirps – unflatteringly, for they had none of the ugliness that the word connotes. Like the other otters I had owned she had a note used only when suddenly and extremely alarmed; I had heard it first from Chahala in the Tigris marshes, when the door of the reed-hut was suddenly darkened by a human figure. The sound was exactly like that produced by a human being who fills his cheeks with air and expels it violently through half-closed lips. I heard it once from Mij and once from Edal.

  From the very first she formed an entirely different relationship with Jimmy Watt from that which she established with me; it was, with him, a violently vocal friendship on her side, while with me, though she quickly became deeply affectionate and demonstrative, much remained tacit. Jimmy she would greet, crow over, harangue, nag, scold, caress and croon to, yell at if he disturbed her while she was sleeping, squeal with pure joy when he first appeared in the morning; with me, while she would perform the same actions, she spoke hardly a word. ‘It’s youth,’ said Morag. ‘She thinks he’s another otter.’ A little later other differences between the two relationships were evident, for on her daily walks she would come anywhere with me, but would not follow Jimmy if he appeared to her to be setting off in a dull or distasteful direction.

  We had intended that for a full fortnight Edal should remain within the confines of the fence that enclosed the house and the pool. At first this did not seem difficult, for the pool was a new delight to her, and her moments of fretting were rare, mainly in the evenings. Then one day our attention strayed from her for a moment or two and she was gone. Where the wire joined the little shed at the north end of the house, nearest to the bridge and the route by which she had arrived with Malcolm and Paula, she had found that she could force the barrier. By the time we had made sure of her absence she had perhaps ten minutes’ start.

  We guessed rightly the route that she had taken; when we reached Druimfiaclach she had already been there for five minutes. Morag was away, and her husband had been unable to establish rapport with this preoccupied creature all of whose thoughts were suddenly for the past. She lay at the top of the stairs (I have found that if there is a stairway an otter is possessed of an inalienable instinct to ascend it) and wailed piteously. She seemed pleased to see us, and greeted Jimmy with notes almost as loud as those of her distress, but she did not want to come back to Camusfeàrna. We had never put the lead on her before, but now there seemed no alternative.

  The return journey took more than an hour. She would trot happily ahead for perhaps fifty yards; then she would sit down, dig in her toes, and wail. I did not realize that it would have been the easiest thing in the world to have picked her up and carried her home, with no inconvenience beyond the weight of her ponderous person, for I was still under misapprehension as to the threat contained in this item of her repertoire. As it was, the nervous strain was more exhausting than any load could have been.

  A few days later she repeated this escape for the second and last time; but on that occasion Jimmy, unhampered by my conditioning to other otter language, caught her up half-way and carried her home round his neck like a lead-weighted fur collar.

  At the end of a fortnight there was no further danger of her straying. We had provided her with so many distractions, so many novelties – and the greatest of these was certainly constant access to running water – that she had been suborned. It was, perhaps, fortunate for us that this period of acclimatization coincided with the migration of the elvers. For these transparent morsels, who swarmed and wriggled in the rock pools below the waterfall and formed a broad snail-paced queue up the vertical rock beside the white water, she discovered a passion that obscured every other interest. Hour after hour she would pass about these pools where Mij had hunted before her, scooping and pouncing, grabbing and munching, reaching up the rock face to pluck the pilgrims as they journeyed, and from these lengthy outings she would return surfeited to play and to sleep in the kitchen as if she had known no other home.

  These elvers, however, proved no small embarrassment to us, for over a period of several weeks they intermittently blocked our water supply and reduced us once again to carrying water in buckets from the burn. In our anxiety to keep Edal occupied and amused during her period of acclimatization we scooped buckets-full of the elvers and tipped them into her pool. The pool was fed by a branch of the same alkathene piping that carried our water from the top of the falls to the house; the elvers, quick to discover the only upstream exit from the pool, took up their interrupted migration with the same inflexible determination that had inspired them for the past two years, ascending the hundred-and-twenty-yard length of pipe until they reached the perforated ‘rose’ at the top. The perforations in the metal were, however, just too small to allow passage to their bodies, and there they stuck and died, each hole blocked by the protruding head of an elver, a pathetic and ironic end to so long and brave a journey. The ‘rose’ in the pool above the waterfall was accessible to us only by rope descent into the ravine; a dozen times a da
y we would go there and extract the dead elvers, but it was like sniping at a swarm of locusts, for behind them there were ever more of the journeying host to strangle on the very verge of liberty.

  Routine is, as I have explained, of tremendous importance to animals, and as soon as we saw that Edal was settled we arranged a daily sequence that would bolster her growing security. She had her breakfast of live eels, sent, as they had been for Mij, from London, and then one or other of us took her for a two-hour walk along the shore or over the hills. During these walks she would remain far closer at hand than Mij had done, and we carried the lead not so much as a possible restraint upon her as a safeguard against attack by one of the shepherds’ dogs, for Edal loved dogs, regarded them as potential playmates, and was quite unaware that many dogs in the Western Highlands are both encouraged and taught to kill otters.

  On one of these morning outings with her I had a closer view of a wild otter than ever before. Edal was hunting rock-pool life on a ledge two or three yards from the sea’s edge and a few feet above it; she had loitered long there among the small green crabs, butter-fish and shrimps, and my attention had wandered from her to an eagle coasting over the cliffs above me. When I turned back to the sea I saw Edal, as I thought, porpoising slowly along in the gentle waves just beyond the pool where she had been. I could have touched her with, say, the end of a salmon rod. I whistled to her and began to turn away, but as I did so the tail of my eye perceived something unfamiliar in her aspect; I looked back, and there was a wild otter staring at me with interest and surprise. I glanced down to the pool at my feet, and saw Edal, out of sight of the sea, still groping among the weed and under the flat stones. The wild otter stayed for a longer look, and then, apparently without alarm, resumed his leisurely progress southward along the edge of the rocks.