The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

by Gavin Maxwell

  Because of the limitations of wall space in the kitchen–living-room it was not advisable to leave Edal quite alone there for long periods. She was more accommodating in this matter of being left alone than Mij had been, and if she had been exercised and fed she was content for five hours or more. When we went by boat to the village or over to Skye we would leave her shut into a room given up entirely to her, the unfurnished room over the kitchen, that had served the same purpose in Mij’s day. Here she had her bed, made from a motor tyre covered with rugs; her lavatory in a corner, composed of newspapers laid on American cloth (to this somewhat remote convenience she would dutifully ascend from the kitchen whenever necessary); a host of miscellaneous toys; and dishes of water. This room had one great disadvantage: it had a single-plank floor and it was directly above the living-room. Though her water bowls were of the non-upsettable variety made for dogs, they were far from non-upsettable to her, for having tried and failed to tip them by leverage she would simply pick them up in both hands and overturn them; and the ceiling was, as I have indicated, far from waterproof. In the early days, too, her marksmanship at her lavatory was none too accurate, and this was unfortunately situated at a point roughly above the chair where any casual guest would normally sit.

  Water multiplies its value to an otter as soon as it is falling or otherwise on the move, and Edal discovered that having overturned her bowl upstairs it was possible to scamper down to the kitchen and receive the double dividend of the drops falling through the ceiling; I have seen her on the kitchen floor, head up and mouth wide open, catching every drip as it pattered down from above.

  The otter and the five greylag geese were the resident familiars of Camusfeàrna, though during the course of the summer there were other, more transient visitors; a young Slavonian grebe that from all the multitudinous waters of that landscape chose to alight upon the tiny pool that we had dug behind the house for Edal, and found the surrounding wire-netting too high to permit take-off; a miserable blind young vole dropped by its parent as she carried it in torrential rain from the suddenly flooded ditches of forestry drainage, and which survived for four days fed from a laborious replica of a mouse’s teat; a wounded and scarcely fledged herring gull, picked up near to the house, dying in deluge and gale, who recovered to develop both flight and a degree of dependence upon household scraps; and a water rail, that arrived from the village in a cardboard box on the back of whose label was written, ‘What bird is this, and is it usually found perched by the fire-side?’ It had, inexplicably, been discovered squatting by the empty hearth when the householder came down in the morning. It was a great surprise to me, this bird of which a more usual view is in short flimsy flight low over the rushes of some snipe bog, the most unambitious of aerial enterprises, ending abruptly in a landing that, though invisible, one feels can only be ungraceful and inept. A thoroughly undistinguished bird, one would say, nondescript in plumage, gauche in action, and in habits retiring to the point of nonentity. Yet the specimen in the cardboard box, thus forced as it were into propinquity and social contact with mankind, revealed itself as dapper, even dressy, in personal appearance, with irascible ruby-red eyes and an aggressive, choleric temperament. He flew like a fighting cock at any hand that approached him, and the deceptively slender red bill had a grip like a pair of pliers. He clearly resented every detail of his ignominious captivity, but he had arrived in the evening and I did not want to set him free until I was sure that he was uninjured; he spent the night in my bedroom, whose floor was for the occasion littered with earthworms and other unsavoury offerings; either in pursuit of these or in simple self-assertion he stamped about all night making, as the occupant of the room beneath put it, a noise like a mouse in hob-nailed boots. Daylight showed him to be sound in wind and limb, and he resumed anonymity in a larger landscape.

  Finally, producing a more lasting impression, came a wildcat kitten. Late one afternoon we had discovered that the Calor-gas cylinder (an innovation that year) was almost exhausted, and we decided to take the boat up at once to the village five miles away. It was a blue-and-gold September afternoon, with the sea between the islands as smooth as the face of a cut and polished stone. The tide was ebbing and the tops of the sea tangle showing between the skerries, so that had we not been pressed for time before the village shop would close we should have passed outside the lighthouse point; now the possible saving of ten minutes seemed a worthy gamble against the danger of running aground, and we decided to try the channel between the lighthouse island and its neighbour. I was at the tiller, and Jimmy Watt was kneeling in the bows, directing me between the rocks. Suddenly he called my attention excitedly to something at the surface on our port bow.

  There, fifteen yards away, was a half-grown wildcat kitten, swimming uncertainly in the direction of the farther island. (I have since learned that it is no rarity for wildcats to take to the water, even when they are not pursued, but at the moment it seemed as strange as would a fish progressing over land.) The cat was in about two fathoms of water, and swam slowly and very high, so that the whole back and tail were above water and dry. I tried to turn towards it, but at that precise moment the outboard engine bracket, which in our hurry to set off had not been tightened securely on the transom, came adrift on one side and left me without steering. To our amazement the cat then appeared to turn towards the boat as if towards rescue, and by forcing the engine into the water with one hand I was able to bring the bows alongside it. I had never handled a living wildcat, and I thought the least that Jimmy was in for was a bad scratching, but there was not so much as a snarl as he grasped it round the body, lifted it from the sea, and dumped it into a wicker hamper. It was difficult to associate this meek, fluffy, lost kitten with the untameable ferocity of all reports, and I thought that here was the opportunity to test the rumours at first hand. But it was difficult to see how Camusfeàrna could contain with any placidity both a wildcat and an otter, and my thoughts turned to Morag; she, I thought, would welcome this ghost of her childhood days, for long ago she had kept, and mourned the loss of, a hybrid with a wildcat sire. She was at that time housekeeping, during the daylight hours, for the lodge by the river four miles up the coast, so we abandoned our idea of replenishing the Calor-gas supplies and headed for the river. Morag, however, had already left by the mail Land Rover for Druimfiaclach; at the lodge we were lent a car, and continued to her home by road. The calm of the cat within the hamper had by now given place to a low but almost continual growl, a menacing sound that suggested a curbed ferocity hardly held in rein.

  When I learned that Morag felt herself too cramped by household duties to commit herself to the care of a wildcat, I should, no doubt, have released it, but despite all that I had heard and read of the untameable nature of wildcats I had met no one who could personally contribute to the picture; I knew, too, that it was very rare to capture an undamaged kitten, and I felt that an opportunity to test the validity of the myth was not to be thrown away. I returned to the lodge, and from there telephoned to Dr Maurice Burton, a zoologist who at his home in Surrey keeps and observes a great variety of wild creatures, and who had in the course of a lifetime devoted to the study of animal behaviour acquired experience of most British fauna. Curiously, however, he proved never to have kept a wildcat, and knew no one who had ever tried to tame one, though he did know someone whose lifelong ambition it had been to acquire a healthy kitten for the experiment. He proposed telephoning to this friend, who would in turn telephone to me during the next half hour, and in due course I spoke to Mr William Kingham, who was prepared to leave London by car at dawn the next morning to collect the cat. It was then Friday evening; he expected to complete the seven-hundred-mile journey by Sunday morning.

  I carried the now distinctly vocal hamper back by boat to Camusfeàrna. There was only one way of bridging the next thirty-six hours: to evacuate my bedroom in favour of the kitten and to sleep in the kitchen. This I did with some reluctance, not because I envisaged the shambles to which my room
would be reduced, but because it had been but three nights before that I had returned to it after the departure of my last guest.

  It was already dark when we beached the boat below the house, and there was no means of obtaining any suitable food for a wildcat that night. I left the hamper open in my bedroom beside a saucer of tinned milk and some sea-trout roes. As an afterthought I blocked the chimney with a screwed-up ball of wire-netting.

  In the morning, after a far from novel night in a sleeping-bag by the kitchen fire, a cursory inspection of the bedroom discovered no cat. One of the trout roes and all the milk had disappeared, and there was an odoriferous mess in the centre of my bed, but of the perpetrator of this outrage there was no sign whatever. Just so, I remember, would we as children incarcerate hedgehogs in rooms that would not have offered exit to a mouse and yet find on awakening, eager and unwashed, not so much as a single spine to tell us that it had not been a dream. I have since suspected the adult world of some nocturnal interference in the matter, but in those days we were both fatalistic and ingenuous.

  A more detailed examination revealed the cat, in the chimney. It had pulled out the inadequate cork of wire mesh, and was ensconced, owl-like, on a ledge some two feet above and to one side of the grate. My first tentative fumblings drove it up higher into the dim funnel, into regions accessible only to weapons of remote control such as chimney brushes.

  I was distressed by this, for recapture was clearly necessary, and equally clearly would be a traumatic experience for the subject of an experiment in domestication. But there was no alternative, and Jimmy Watt, armed with a long string and a weight, scaled the roof while I waited, heavily gloved, to grasp the kitten when it should descend within range.

  The gloves proved, in fact, to be encouragingly unnecessary; there was a certain amount of snarling and spitting, but no retaliation whatsoever. Liberated, the cat made one bound for the darkest corner of the room, and remained there, eyes glowing dully, while I made the chimney impregnable.

  Sunday morning came and there was devastation in every corner of my bedroom, but there was no sign of any relief party from the south. During the night, it seemed, my captive had enjoyed the greatest of high spirits; it had concentrated not upon escape but destruction, tearing up letters, playing ball with ink-bottles, ascending with airy grace to remote shelves beyond the wildest dreams of any otter. It had dined well upon the carcase of an oyster-catcher, of which nothing but the wing feathers and the bill remained. The insult on the centre of the bed had been repeated, louder and clearer, so to speak, than before. The cat had taken up daylight quarters in a peat creel, a wicker pannier designed to be carried by a pony, that we had found washed up on the beach, and which now hung on the wall as a wastepaper basket beyond the reach of otters.

  The necessity for shooting birds locally in order to feed this creature worried me. Many of the birds in the immediate vicinity of Camusfeàrna were tamer, more trusting, than in areas where someone or other was constantly on the prowl with a gun; not only was I reluctant to disturb this tranquillity, but I felt, as I set out from the house with a loaded weapon, like a deliberate traitor to the small sanctuary that I had long respected. The situation was made no easier for me by the geese, who insisted on accompanying me, sometimes on foot, sometimes locating me from afar and flying in to join me as I crouched, camouflaged, on the rock of some outlying skerry; by them I was embarrassed, obscurely ashamed that they should witness this predatory side to my nature. I found myself, as I crouched there in the salt wind and spray, repeating a childish little litany: ‘I am only doing this so that the kitten may live’; this, by some absentminded transposition, reshaped itself into the words and tune of a forgotten hymn ‘He died that we might live’; and then I realized that my subconscious mind had jumped a gap at which my intellect had jibbed – for after all Christians do eat the body and blood of their God.

  So, with distaste, I kept the wildcat supplied with birds that I would rather have seen alive: a turnstone, a shag, an oystercatcher, and a curlew, and my unwilling guest consumed them all with relish and went on defecating squarely in the middle of my bed. I put a box of earth on the floor, but though it was much dug by morning and smelled strongly of ammonia the bed remained the major receptacle.

  On the Monday a telegram arrived explaining that Mr Kingham had reached Glasgow a day earlier, only to be overtaken by sickness that had compelled him to turn back. Unaware that the number from which I had spoken to him was five miles by sea, he asked me to telephone to him in Surrey that evening.

  The relief that I had hourly awaited being thus indefinitely postponed, I set off again for the village with a faltering outboard motor which completed the northward but not the return journey. By intermittent use of the oars I got home late at night, with the promise of an immediate telegram about the future of the wildcat.

  There were further delays and misunderstandings, but a week after the original capture an emissary arrived at the railhead twelve miles north by sea, and dispatched a hired launch to Camusfeàrna. He did not accompany it himself; I had assumed that he would arrive to stay for the night and receive such information as I could give him about the wildcat’s habits, so that I was quite unprepared for boxing the animal at once with the launch waiting outside on an ebb tide. However, though the human escort was absent he had sent a stout and commodious crate filled with straw, at the back of which lay a plump unplucked pullet.

  To the cat this third and necessarily hurried capture was still further trauma. He – for excremental reasons I vaguely supposed it to be a male – was crouched on a high shelf in the shadow of my typewriter (already knocked down and smashed by the otter), and the first advance of a gloved hand produced a tigerish and highly intimidating snarl of warning. On the second attempt he bounded from the shelf to a table in the window and crouched there growling with his back to the glass.

  At this point Jimmy, who had been out in the boat fishing for mackerel when the launch came, arrived and demanded to take control. He put on the gloves and entered the arena with all the confidence of inexperience. At his first near approach the cat became transformed; almost, I had said, transfigured. The last trace of resemblance to a fluffy domestic Persian kitten vanished utterly; in its place was a noble, savage wild animal at bay before its ancestral enemy. Laying his ears not back but downward from the broad flat skull, so that the very tips and the tufts of hair that grew from within them were all that turned upward, baring every fang and gum in his head so that the yellow eyes became slits of rage and hate, swelling his ringed tail to twice its previous girth, he reared himself back against the glass of the window pane. But while one paw was lifted high with extended talons, the other still rested on the table, for the forelegs seemed to have elongated like telescopes; those velvet limbs had in an instant changed from instruments of locomotion into long-reaching weapons to rake and to slash. As an image of primordial ferocity I had seen nothing to equal it; it was splendid, it was magnificent, but it was war.

  Jimmy, as yet accustomed only to handling creatures whose bluff was easily called, was undismayed by this display of fuchtbarkeit, but retired after an instant with a bite clean through glove and thumb-nail.

  It seemed as if deadlock had been reached, until it occurred to us that we could as it were bottle the cat between the open of the crate and the window glass; this manoeuvre was instantly successful, and he bolted to the dim interior behind the straw and was silent. That was the last I saw of him; it is, however, not improbable that we shall meet again, for his new owner undertook that if the cat followed the pattern of legend and proved untameable it should be returned to Camusfeàrna and freed where wildcats enjoy the privilege of protection.

  It is October, and I have been for six unbroken months at Camusfeàrna.The stags are roaring on the slope of Skye across the Sound, and yesterday the wild swans passed flying southwards low over a lead-grey sea. The ring of tide-wrack round the bay is piled with fallen leaves borne down the burn, and before a chill
sea wind they are blown racing and scurrying up the sands. The summer, with its wild roses and smooth blue seas lapping white island beaches, is over; the flower of the heather is dead and the scarlet rowan berries fallen. Beyond are the brief twilit days of winter, when the waterfall will thunder white over flat rocks whose surface was hot to bare feet under summer suns, and the cold, salt-wet wind will rattle the windows and moan in the chimney. This year I shall not be there to see and hear these things; home is for me as yet a fortress from which to essay raid and foray, an embattled position behind whose walls one may retire to lick new wounds and plan fresh journeys to farther horizons. Yet while there is time there is the certainty of return.

  Camusfeàrna

  October 1959

  Jimmy and Edal next to the house…

  … and on the heather hillside above the bay.

  Edal

  ‘She juggled with such small objects – marbles, clothes-pegs, matches, Biro pens – as could be satisfactorily contained within her small, prehensile grasp.’

  ‘She was a small, exceedingly heavy body inhabiting a rich fur skin many sizes too large for her… 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.’