In those rock pools along the shore Edal learned to catch gobies and butter-fish; occasionally she would corner a full-grown eel in the hill streams, and little by little she discovered the speed and the predatory powers of her race. Her staple diet was of eels sent alive from London, for probably no otter can remain entirely healthy without eels, but she was also fond of ginger nuts, bacon fat, butter, and other whimsical hors d’oeuvres to which her upbringing by humans had conditioned her. Among local fish she disdained the saith or coal fish, tolerated lythe and trout, and would gorge herself gluttonously upon mackerel. We put her eels alive into her pool, where after early failures in the cloud of mud that her antics stirred up, she proved able to detect and capture them even in the midst of that dense smoke-screen. This is achieved, I think, by the hypersensitive tactile perception of her hands, for when in the shallow end of the pool she would appear deliberately to avert her gaze while feeling round her in the opaque water; the palms, too, are endowed with a ‘non-slip’ surface, composed of a number of round excrescences like the balls of fingers, which enable her to catch and hold between them an eel that would slither easily through any human grasp.
By the end of June she was swimming as an otter should, diving deep to explore dim rock ledges at the edge of the sea tangle, remaining for as much as two minutes under water, so that often only a thin track of bubbles from the imprisoned air in her fur gave guide as to her whereabouts. (This trail of bubbles, I have noticed, appears about six feet behind an otter swimming a fathom or so under water at normal speed; never, as the eye subconsciously expects, directly above the animal.) But though she lost her fear of depth she never felt secure in great spaces of water; she liked to see on at least one side of her the limits of the element as she swam, and when beyond this visual contact she was seized with a horror vacui, panicking into an infantile and frenzied dog-paddle as she raced for land.
Hence our first experiments with her in the rowing boat were not a success; the boat was to her clearly no substitute for terra firma, and in it, on deep water, she felt as insecure as if she were herself overboard – more so, in fact, for she would brave a wild rush for the shore rather than remain with us in so obvious a peril.
Edal was not the only newcomer to Camusfeàrna that summer. Years ago I had formed, at Monreith, a great collection of wild geese; after the war they represented the only major collection of rare wildfowl left in all Europe, and in 1948 they went to form the nucleus of Peter Scott’s Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge. By then, however, the commoner varieties had bred in such numbers and were so elusive to the pursuer that they were not thought worth the trouble of transporting; and the flock of full-winged greylags remained about Monreith Loch, intermittently harried for sport or as vermin to the grazing parks, semi-feral, and unwary only in the breeding season, for ten years after the collection was a thing of the past. By 1959 there were still some two or three pairs nesting at the loch, and I arranged for one brood to be hatched under a hen at Monreith and sent up to Camusfeàrna. After a long and circuitous journey by train and boat five goslings arrived, feathered but not fledged, gawky, uncouth and confiding, displaying a marked predilection for human company at variance with the traditional characteristics of their race. This paradox was pleasing to me, for like many others I had come to a fondness for wild animals and birds by way of bloodthirstiness; in my youth I had been an ardent wildfowler, and these five goslings were the direct descendants of birds I had shot and wing-tipped or otherwise lightly wounded at the morning flight years before. It had, in fact, been the keeping and taming of a few wounded greylags shot in blustering winter dawns on the salt marsh and mud-flats of Wigtown Bay that had initiated my attempt at a living collection of all the wild geese of the world, and these gabbling flat-footed five who tried so persistently to force their way into the house at Camusfeàrna were the twelfth generation, or so, in descent from the victims of my gun. Perhaps it was from some obscure part of the guilt under which, unrecognized, we labour so often, that I wanted these birds to fly free and unafraid about Camusfeàrna, wanted to hear in the dawn and the dusk the wild music of those voices that long ago used to quicken my pulse as I waited shivering in the ooze of some tidal creek with the eastern horizon aflame.
As a daily delight and as an ornament to Camusfeàrna these particular wild geese exceeded my most optimistic expectations. To begin with they were, as I have said, as yet unable to fly; only the very tips of their sprouting pinion feathers peeped out of the casing of blue blood-quill, but day-long they would stand flapping hopefully and grotesquely, lifting themselves a foot or so into the air and progressing in a series of ill coordinated and ungainly hops. As it had fallen to Jimmy Watt and myself, neither of whom can swim, to teach an otter to do so, so now as the geese grew and their wing feathers became long enough for flight, but their imagination remained too small to compass the attempt, it was we who taught the wild geese to fly. Jimmy would run in front of them wildly flapping his arms in a mime of flight, until one day the goslings, performing much the same action as they hurried after him, found themselves, to their consternation, to be airborne. The immediate result was a series of most undignified crash landings, but in those few seconds they had found their powers; within a week they were strong and certain on the wing, and in answer to a call from the house they would come beating up the wind from the beaches of the distant islands.
At night we kept them shut up in a wire enclosure, wire floor and roof, too, as a safeguard against wildcats and foxes, and when we let them out in the morning they would rise with a great clamour and wing their way down the burn to the sea, twisting and turning in the air, ‘whiffling’ as wildfowlers call it, in the pure joy of their flight.
I must admit that for all their charm and beauty these five wild geese displayed, in some matters, a truly astonishing want of intellect, a plain stupidity, indeed; the very opposite of the sagacity usually ascribed to their race. Even after months of familiarity with the precincts of the house it was doubtful whether they could enter the garden gate without one or other of their number getting left behind; a goose would as often as not find himself on the wrong side of the open gate, and instead of walking round it to rejoin his companions, would concentrate upon moronic attempts to penetrate the wire that divided them from him.
More striking still was their behaviour in the pen which confined them at night. Every morning I would go to open the wire-netting door and release them; as soon as I appeared they would set up a gabble of greeting which reached crescendo as I lifted the barrier and they stalked out. One morning in September, being up at first light, I opened their door (which formed the whole of one side of the enclosure) some two hours earlier than the time to which they were accustomed. They greeted me as usual but did not immediately emerge, and I went back to the house thinking that they would move only when the sun was up, and pondering afresh on the role of routine in animal behaviour. It was nearly three hours later, and thus long past the time when they would normally have flown down to the sea, that I caught sight of them from the kitchen window. They were still inside the pen, chattering irritably, and walking up and down in front of the open door as if some invisible barrier separated them from the grass outside. Deciding that they could only be liberated by some symbolic gesture, I went out to them exactly as if we had not met that morning; I closed the door and then re-opened it with a flourish, talking to them the while as I was wont. With profound relief apparent, one would have said, in their every action, they came trooping out at my heels and almost at once took wing for the shore.
From the last days of May until early September the summer, that year, took leave of absence; while England panted in equatorial heat and the coast roads from London were jammed by twenty-mile queues of motionless cars, Camusfeàrna saw only sick gleams of sunshine between the ravings of gale and rain; the burn came down in roaring spate, and the sea was restless and petulant under the unceasing winds. The bigger dinghy dragged her moorings and stove a plank, and there w
ere few days when the little flat-bottomed pram could take the sea without peril. Because of this, and because, perhaps, I welcomed Edal’s fear of the open sea as a factor in favour of her safety, it was not until the first of September that we renewed experiments with her in the boats.
She had gained much confidence meanwhile, both in us and in her proper element, and she gambolled round us in the warm sunshine as we dragged the pram across the sand into a still blue sea that reflected the sky without so much as a ripple. The geese, ever companionable and anxious to share activity, followed us in a chuckling procession down the beach, and the whole strange convoy set off from the tide’s edge together; Edal shooting through the clear, bright sea, grabbing and clasping the oar blades or bouncing inboard with a flurry of aerated water, the geese paddling along a few yards astern with mildly disapproving eyes behind their orange bills. We rowed for a mile down the coastline, with the glorious ochres and oranges of tide-bared weed as a foreground to the heather, reddening bracken, and the blue distances of mountain heights. All the magic of Camusfeàrna was fixed in that morning; the vivid lightning streak of an otter below water; the wheeling, silver-shouldered flight of the geese as they passed to alight ahead of us; the long, lifting, blue swell of the sea among the skerries and the sea tangle; the little rivers of froth and crystal that spilled back from the rocks as each smooth wave sucked back and left them bare.
Edal, finding herself from time to time swimming above an apparently bottomless abyss, would still panic suddenly and rush for the boat in a racing dog-paddle, her head above water and not daring to look down; her instinctive memories, it seemed, alternated between those of the dim mysterious depths and forests of waving weed, and the security of the hearth rug, lead, and reassuring human hands. So she would turn suddenly for the boat (of which she had now lost all fear and felt to be as safe as the dry land), a small anxious face above furiously striking forefeet, cleaving the surface with a frothing arrow of wave, and leap aboard with her skin-load of water. Then she would poise herself on the gunwale, webbed hind feet gripping tensely, head submerged, peering down on the knife edge between sea and terra firma, between the desire for submarine exploration and the fear of desertion in the deep unknown. Sometimes she would slide, soundlessly and almost without ripple, into deep water, only to panic as soon as she had submerged and strike out again frantically for the boat. Yet in the moments when her confidence had not yet deserted her, when the slim torpedo of her form glided deep below the boat’s side, weaving over the white sand between tall, softly waving trees of bright weed, or darting in sudden swift pursuit of some prey invisible from above, it seemed as if the clock had been set back and it was Mijbil who followed the dinghy through the shining water.
After the first of these paradise days among the islands the geese failed for the first time to return at nightfall. In the morning I called for them, but there was no greeting chorus in reply. It was as yet early for them to have felt any migratory instinct, which I thought would in any case have probably been extinguished by some generations of static forebears, and when I had seen no sign of them by the afternoon I feared that they had wandered too far and fallen prey to some tourist with a .22 rifle. I had, indeed, given up all hope of them when in the early evening I landed with Edal upon one of the white-sand beaches of the islands, drawn there by the desire to make the acquaintance of some visitors who had landed from a sailing dinghy. I was talking to them when I saw, half a mile or so to the northward, the long unhurried beat of goose wings against the sky, and recognized with an absurd surge of joy, my missing greylags. I called to them as they made to pass high overhead in the sunshine, and they checked in mid air and came spiralling down in steep, vibrant descent, to alight with a flurry of pinions on the sand at our feet.
It never ceased to give me delight, this power to summon wild geese from the heavens as they passed, seemingly steady as a constellation upon their course, or to call to them from the house when the sun was dipping behind the hills of Skye, to hear far off their answering clangour, and see the silhouette of their wings beating in from the sea against the sunset sky. I found more enjoyment in that brood of humble greylags than ever I had in the great collection of exotic wildfowl of which their ancestors had been the discarded dregs, the lees, not worth removal; more pleasure, perhaps, in their peaceful, undemanding coexistence than had any medieval nobleman in the hawk who at his bidding rose to take the wild duck as they flew or hurl the heron from the sky.
Though the greylags gave little trouble and much reward, they produced on occasion, as do all creatures for whom one is responsible, moments of acute anxiety. The worst of these was the sight of one of their number, out of my reach, doing its utmost to swallow a fish hook. Edal, as I have said, was fed upon live eels sent from London; this was a costly procedure, and as she grew and her consumption of eels rose beyond the original order for six pounds a week, I had begun experiments to supply her from the Camusfeàrna burn, in which eels abounded. But despite much advice I had failed signally to devise a satisfactory eel trap, and one afternoon we set a number of short lines from the bridge, baited with worms. This proved effective, and we had several eels in a few hours, but I had forgotten the geese. They were not often at the bridge, and I had not thought, in any case, that they would be inquisitive enough to investigate the almost invisible lines. Some two hours later, nevertheless, they chose perversely to fly in there from the sea, and by the time that I saw them one had a foot-length of trout cast dangling from its bill. At the end of the cast was the hook, a small hook taken from a stripped trout fly, and the goose, unaware of danger, was trying hard to swallow what remained. The fineness of the cast was all that impeded the intention, but while I watched in an agony of suspense another two or three inches disappeared from view. The other geese gathered round my feet, but this one, intent upon its personal problem, kept obstinately to the centre of the pool, while the hook, in response to the gobbling movements of the bill, mounted steadily higher. In the nick of time we lured it to the bank with an offer of food, and when I gripped the cast and pulled I found myself hauling it out hand over hand, for the bird had some five feet of line in its crop. The incident put a temporary full stop to my efforts to supply Edal with eels from the burn.
For the same reason the geese became an embarrassment, too, to fishing expeditions at sea; when they did not actually accompany the boat out from the beach they would discern it from afar, long after we thought to have eluded their pursuit; they would come winging out over the waves and alight, gabbling, alongside, pressing in close round the darrow line, fascinated by the fish-hooks and the dancing blue-and-silver glitter of fish hauled in over the gunwale, so that often it became necessary to control a darrow full of mackerel with one hand and fend the geese from danger with the other. It was at such moments that I understood how difficult life would be if all wild animals and birds were unafraid of man; how complicated the everyday business of living must have become to St Francis.
13
The house had been much transformed since Edal’s arrival. While there had been no otter at Camusfeàrna I had concentrated upon improving the décor and comfort of the rooms; now that the whole premises were once more, as it were, in a state of siege this aspect had perforce to be abandoned for more practical considerations. Every table and shelf had somehow to be raised above the range of Edal’s agile inquisition; every hanging object upon the walls moved upward like the population of a flooded town seeking sanctuary upon the rooftops. No longer could there be a paper-table at the end of the sofa, for this recently constructed innovation she appropriated for her own on the first day, tearing and crumpling the effete reading matter until it formed a bed suited to her exacting taste. There she lay upon her back and slept, her head pillowed across a headline describing traffic jams on the roads out of London.
It was exceedingly difficult to elevate every vulnerable object above her reach, for by standing on tiptoe she could already achieve three foot six inches. When wet she
would pull down a towel, or several towels, upon which to dry herself; when bored she would possess herself of any object that caught her wayward fancy, and, deeply absorbed, set about its systematic disintegration. These moods would come and go; there were days when she was as sedate as a lap dog, but there were days, too, when there simply was not room enough on the walls for the fugitives from her depredations. By nature of its surroundings Camusfeàrna is heavily stocked with rubber boots, both Wellingtons and sea-boots; many of these have over a period of years been patched with red-rubber discs, and Edal early found a fiendish delight in tearing these off and enlarging the holes they hid.
Thus the rooms to which she had access acquired the look of country-house parks whose trees display the ‘browsing line’ so much deplored by late eighteenth-century writers on landscape gardening. From the height above ground to which the trees were branchless it was, in those parks, possible to deduce whether the owner kept fallow deer, cattle, or horses, and by much the same process I was able to compare the relative sizes of Edal and Mij. If there was any doubt at first, at the end of her first month with me she was certainly a much larger creature, and yet she was still a full six months younger than he had been when he was killed. Her growth was almost visible. In May Malcolm Macdonald had estimated that she was some forty-two inches long and weighed twenty-five pounds; by August she was close on fifty inches, and I estimated her weight as not far short of forty pounds. She was then a year old, and since she had not yet come into season it was clear that her growth was far from complete. In equatorial America there are otters the size of seals; if they have ever been domesticated the rooms of their owners must present a most curious appearance.
The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy Page 18