Edal at the waterfall.
Installing the otter pool ‘looking like a giant’s washing-up basin’.
Edal in her new quarters.
‘At a range of two hundred yards or so from the citadel, the single word PRIVATE, in foot-high red letters.’
Mossy and Monday had discovered their unrivalled powers of escape from any enclosure.
‘… a ring of bright water whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea’.
The winter of 1961–62.
‘… the burn froze over and finally the waterfall itself’.
Camusfeàrna seen from the north. Between the house and the burn, to the right of the Norway fir, can be seen the rowan tree, ‘the magic tree that stands beside every old Highland cottage’.
THE ROCKS REMAIN
Foreword
To the most turbulent of lives come unforeseen periods of calm and tranquillity, as though some river running perpetually over rapids broadened suddenly into a deep, still pool of silence. Such a season of fair weather, an idyll belonging more properly to childhood or to old age, I described in Ring of Bright Water, the story of the West Highland cottage that I have called Camusfeàrna and of the otters that shared it with me. The time that this narrative covered represented perhaps the most placid period of my adult life; but without knowing it I had drifted nearer and nearer to the tail of the pool (for, I think, I had been in no backwater but in one of the main stream’s many and various reaches), nearer to the rock lip where the water falls in cascade and spume before rushing on towards the sea. I was caught again in the full strength of a shallower current, whirled as a bateau ivre back into its familiar confusion, striking greater and lesser boulders as I had done before, and more closely aware of the other human beings who were swept along with me.
Thus this book, though a true sequel to its precursor, will have little of its flavour; it is the partial story of the succeeding years, their difficulties, disasters and delights; and if disaster either so minor as to be comic or so major as to appear tragic seems to predominate, it is, like the rocks that remain, in the eye of the beholder.
1
Return to Camusfeàrna
When I was away in Morocco in March i960,I learned one day of a minor tragedy in my Chelsea house.
The houses of the square where I live when in London are of small rooms, in four floors. After Chelsea squares became fashionable the ground-floor back and front of these houses were, in most cases, knocked into one, giving a single long room of some twenty-five feet, with the structural supports of the old division projecting some eighteen inches from each wall. In the garden end of this room I was wont to work when I was in London, and in the other I had accumulated, slowly and almost by chance it seemed, a small collection of brilliant tropical birds, who flew at liberty and fed upon fruit suspended from natural branches. This collection had begun with an unwanted gift of two gem-like mites that I had for a time kept in a large and elaborate Victorian birdcage; eventually, having a dislike for the concept of caged birds, I liberated them in the room, and was so struck by their beauty in flight that I added another pair of a different species. The first had been tanagers, a South American group which contains some of the most brilliantly coloured birds in the world, and soon the addition of new tanager species became a minor, dilettante hobby. Certainly it was one mainly of sensory titillation, for we arranged concealed spotlamps to light the jewels in their wings as they flew, and papered the walls above the bookcases black so that none of the iridescence of the feathers should be lost by silhouette. By the spring of 1960 there were some fourteen of these birds, including one species that had rarely been kept successfully before. Most of them would fly down and take food from the hand.
The necessary temperature in this room was maintained by a oil stove, and one night a week or so before my return to London from Morocco, some irregularity of wick or paraffin feed had started a fire. The circumstances that caused this never became clear, but it was a slow, smouldering fire giving off a dense smoke and covering walls and ceiling with an oily black soot. Jimmy Watt, who had spent the winter in London with Edal the otter (for Camusfeàrna was not yet a place of permanent residence), had not been awoken by the fumes until too late, and all the birds were dead.
Edal, however, was unharmed. She occupied a basement room of her own, with a tunnel through the wall into the garden, and she slept peacefully even through the pandemonium of the fire brigade’s arrival; considering, perhaps, that the unseemly din above her was some typically tiresome human prank of no concern to her. So I returned, sad at the death of my birds whose wings seemed to have borne along so many sentences that without their inspiration would have been lumberingly pedestrian; as yet unquestioning that I should find Edal ready to return to Camusfeàrna and renew the idyll, unquestioning that the refuge, the pool of silence, could go on and on for ever.
When we had been separated in the past she had been used to greet me as does a dog after its master’s prolonged absence, and when I walked into her room now I expected a demonstrative welcome. She was curled up on the bed, and when I called her name she barely lifted her head. She looked at me vaguely and immediately curled up again. At first I thought she was sleepy and had not recognized me; only slowly did I begin to understand that she was very ill. She had eaten nothing, I was told, for two full days.
It was the beginning of a three weeks’ struggle, the first of two in six months, to save her life. Immediate veterinary tests showed the presence of liver fluke; it was not generally suspected then, as it is now, that this parasite with its curious multi-stage life cycle is probably endemic in otters and causes no damage to function unless present in vast numbers, and Edal was therefore treated for liver fluke as being the root cause of her symptoms. Under this treatment, which made her constantly sick, her condition deteriorated rapidly, and she became extremely emaciated. When further tests showed the presence of shigella dysentery, we decided to abandon interest in the flukes altogether.
Her treatment was not easy. In her own room she would not allow the vet to examine her or to inject her, and he suggested that from the psychological viewpoint her submission would be much more probable in the alien atmosphere of his surgery. In this he proved right, as he did also in suggesting a method of restraint that appeared to me wholly impracticable. It was necessary to give her three separate injections in quick succession every day, besides taking her temperature rectally, and granted that no wild animal could be expected to undergo these painful indignities without protest, we had somehow to restrain her head from turning. Edal wore a harness, not a collar, because an otter’s head is so little wider than the neck that a collar can always be slipped; now the vet suggested that if she wore two collars, with the lead attached to the hindmost one, the bunching up of the skin would keep them in position. This idea proved entirely successful, and every day Edal was immobilized on the operating table by three separate leads strained in different directions. It was strange that, as the drive to the surgery and the repetition of this ordeal became a daily routine, she showed no antipathy either to the waiting-room or the surgery; she never shied away from its door and she would sit on one of our laps, among the dogs, cats, parrots and other household pets that form the bulk of a city vet’s practice. When the time came for her to be carried down to the surgery and laid upon the operating table she made no protest.
For a fortnight or so there was little change. At best she had an even chance of living, and though we tempted her with every kind of dainty she would eat nothing of her own free will; we had all this time to feed her forcibly with concentrated liquids.
At last one morning I noticed, as we drove down the King’s Road on our daily visit to the surgery, that she seemed for the first time to be taking a little of her old interest in the traffic and the passers-by; she even hauled herself up to put her paws against the glass and peer, a little myopically, out of the passengers’ window. In the waiting-room she was restless, and in the surgery she eyed
the vet with distinct disfavour. He looked at her and said: ‘I do believe we’ve done the trick. This morning she looks for the first time like a truly viable animal.’ The same afternoon I opened her door quietly and looked round it, half expecting to find her inert upon the bed as she had been for so long, but she was engaged in guzzling a plate of scrambled eggs, stuffing her mouth full with those curious little simian hands just as she used to do. It was the first solid food, indeed the only food that she had eaten voluntarily, for sixteen days.
From then on she made a steady recovery; by 14th April she was her usual high-spirited and inquisitive self, and greeted a TV unit with all her old enthusiasm for novelties. She was, moreover, extremely patient with the constant retakes requisite to the threadbare story scripted for her by the BBC. (Mr Macdonald Hastings, the viewing public were asked to believe, had been astonished to see in the King’s Road an otter at the heels of Jimmy Watt and myself. Fortunately, having a whole television unit with him, he and it followed us home unobserved and noted the number on our door. By what embodiment he was then assumed to have passed through that door it is difficult to imagine, for the next scene showed him peering, unannounced, round the door of my sitting-room and registering delighted surprise at the sight of Edal sitting on my lap.)
A few days later she travelled up to Camusfeàrna by train with Jimmy. As in the past with other otters, I contrived that she should share his first-class sleeper, but as before she required a dog ticket. This time, instead of leaving blank the space for description of the dog, I indulged a flight of fancy, and wrote ‘Illyrian Poodle’.
Before Edal and Jimmy had left for Scotland there had taken place a further one of those coincidences that make my experiences with otters read like fiction rather than fact. To appreciate the extent of the coincidence it should be understood that the West African species of otter to which Edal belongs has very rarely been brought to this country at all, and never, so far as I know, had there been a specimen bottle-reared from blind helplessness as Edal had been by Dr Malcolm Macdonald. Now a Mr and Mrs Davin, on short leave from Sierra Leone, telephoned to me to say that they had brought to England with them a male otter cub that they had acquired unweaned in Africa and had reared on a bottle. The cub had already been promised to a country gentleman whom they had met on the boat, but they would like me at least to see it.
Presently their car was at the door. I did not want to bring the cub into the house, for fear that some trace of Edal’s infection might linger there: this was doubly important, as his owners explained to me, for not only did he eat with his fingers as did Edal, but he also had a baby habit of sucking them, especially when confronted with unfamiliar surroundings. Mr Davin reached into the travelling-box in the back of the car, and emerged with a superb ball of dark chocolate-coloured, almost black, plush; this in his arms uncoiled and re-formed as a small, stout otter lying on its back. It put three fingers of its right hand into its mouth and began to suck noisily, looking about with interest.
This otter seemed more completely domesticated than even Edal had been. It was the hour when the local school empties, and the children began to crowd round, screaming and laughing and calling to their distant companions, the bolder ones trying to touch him. To most animals, and more particularly to most wild animals, a surrounding crowd of vocal children and advancing hands would constitute a situation of fear, but this otter seemed in no way disconcerted; indeed it was clear that he considered them as potential playmates from whom he was being unjustly withheld. I coveted this creature; already in my mind’s eye I could see him and Edal gambolling together under the waterfall at Camusfeàrna or porpoising after each other in the calm blue waters of the bay below the house; already I was mentally enlarging the size of the otter bed in the cottage kitchen.
Teko (he had been named after an up-country veterinary station in Sierra Leone, without his owners being aware that ‘Tek’ is in fact an Old English word for otter) was not content in the Surrey home to which, after our meeting, he had been taken, and when I learned that Mr and Mrs Davin intended anyway to visit the West Highlands during their holiday, bringing Teko with them, I felt that the warmth of his welcome would be so great both from humans and from Edal as to leave his owners no room for choice about his future. As in the case of Dr Malcolm Macdonald, they would have somehow to find a home for him before returning to West Africa, and I knew that few households were allowed to revolve round the life of otters as mine did at that date. I reckoned, however, without Edal’s highly developed sense of property.
I arrived at Camusfeàrna a few days after Jimmy and Edal; I watched her revel anew in the freedom of stream and sea after her long winter sojourn in the drab confines of her London quarters, and in the fair golden weather that in those days seemed never to desert Camusfeàrna for long – it seemed to be the beginning of just such another summer idyll as the last. But there was to be no idyll, then or thereafter, for I had left the calm reaches of the river.
I had been at Camusfeàrna a fortnight or so when Mr and Mrs Davin arrived in the neighbourhood and found themselves lodgings some twelve miles away. By now they had more or less made up their minds that if Camusfeàrna seemed a suitable home for Teko they would leave him with me. I had provided them with a harness for him, so that his introduction to Edal could be carried out with the greatest caution and both animals under restraint. This policy paid dividends, for without our forethought there would have been little left of the unfortunate Teko. A year before, when Edal first arrived, any other animal was a welcome playmate; then, I am sure, she would have taken Teko to her heart with delight, but by now I entertained a suspicion that jealousy and possessiveness played no small part in her make-up, and I was determined that this first meeting should leave nothing to chance.
On the green sward of the field in which Camusfeàrna stands Mr and Mrs Davin waited with Teko on a lead, while I went upstairs, clipped Edal’s lead to her harness and led her out. At first she did not see him, for the group stood among scattered clumps of rushes, but she saw strangers, and stood on her hind legs like a penguin to get a better view, for otters are myopic, and of their five senses trust their eyesight perhaps the least. Then she advanced a few paces and stood up again. She was then no more than ten or fifteen yards from the group, and this time she saw Teko. Her nostrils wiggled frantically, and at last she caught a whiff of his scent. She uttered a shriek of anger, and made a dash for him that almost pulled me off my feet. It was not an encouraging start. For a quarter of an hour we walked the two otters along the beach and about the field, always at a respectful distance from each other, while Edal kept up a running commentary of rage in that high, screaming wail which of all the animal cries I have heard sounds the most vindictive. Then I took her back to her room in the house, and Teko’s owners and I conferred, as do generals when they have reluctantly to agree that they are attacking an unassailable position.
It seemed to us that the place of their meeting might affect her attitude, for otters are territorial animals, and that she might be more willing to accept him if the encounter were to take place on neutral ground over which Edal did not feel herself to reign supreme. The following day we made a second attempt, on the road above Camusfeàrna, but there was no noticeable improvement. Then we took Edal to the vicinity of the house where Mr and Mrs Davin were lodging twelve miles away. Here it seemed to me that she had begun to tolerate his presence a little, and her hymn of hate was not quite so continuous. There were, to use a printer’s metaphor, more white spaces in the previously unbroken text of vituperation. She was, consciously, I think, lulling us into a sense of false security, hoping all the while for an opportunity which when it came left no doubt of her intentions. We were at the moment in single file, and she was walking beside me quite silently a few paces behind Teko and his owners, when he lagged a little behind them and gave her the chance for which she had been waiting so patiently. With a bound and a scream she had him by the tail and was worrying it like a dog trying to ki
ll a rat. I contrived to haul her off almost in the same instant as it happened, and Teko fled whimpering pathetically to the consoling hands of his foster parents, while Edal’s voice rose to a positive paean of hate and triumph.
The following day I watched Teko’s departure with profound disappointment; Edal’s intransigent attitude to the question of consorts had posed a problem to which I could see no solution. Time was short and Teko’s owners were wasting their leave in searching for a home for him; while they did so I offered them the use of my London house with its otter room and tunnel to the garden.
Suitable homes for otters are not, however, easy to find, and it was no very great surprise to me when, little more than a fortnight later, they approached me again to ask how long it would take us to prepare separate quarters for Teko, who, they pointed out, had never been accustomed to freedom, and was conspicuously easy to entertain. I did not yet fully believe in Edal’s permanent hostility towards him. Teko seemed to me an infinitely desirable creature, and I disliked the thought of his being placed in hands less tender and experienced than my own. I replied that it would take between a fortnight and three weeks.
In the event, however, no more than a week was available, and though fortunately most of the necessary materials were to hand, Jimmy and I had to work far into every night and begin again at dawn. I had foreseen that after the publication of Ring of Bright Water more and more uninvited visitors would find their way to the house, and visualizing that these might be accompanied by dogs unfriendly to otters I had decided to enclose a small piece of land surrounding the house with a continuous five-foot-high wooden paling. The wood for this formidable undertaking had been delivered by sea (the twine tying the planks into bundles of forty had in many cases broken as the cargo was lowered overboard and the whole bay had been bobbing with timber as difficult to round up as had been my Shetland sheep on Soay years before), and now lay above the tide-line on the beach below the house. With this wood we decided to construct for Teko a separate enclosure at one end of the cottage, where was also a small lean-to outhouse that might be converted to his use. Even in the early days storage space at Camusfeàrna had always been a problem, and over the years the contents of this modest building had become an inextricable jumble of lobster pots, ropes, paint tins, tools, boxes of nails and every imaginable form of junk, so that to extract any desired object from it had long since become a major task, necessitating both time and patience. Below this entangled miscellany the floor was covered several inches deep in coal-dust and debris.
The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy Page 20