The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

by Gavin Maxwell

  Teko was an animal accustomed to living in human houses, and to lodge him in accommodation that did not in some sense resemble a human room would have been as inappropriate as to chain a drawing-room Pekinese to a barrel of straw in the open. In that week, then, we were required to reclaim, repaint and furnish the outhouse; to enclose a piece of land with wooden paling; to sink wire-netting deep into the ground against the possibility of Teko digging his way out; to construct some form of lavatory for him that would be easy to keep clean (the specialist would have been hard pressed to do better), to dig and cement a pool in which he could play, and to lead running water to it. With these basic conditions as his background, Teko could then be entertained in the living-room at any time when Edal was confined to her own quarters, and he could accompany us for walks or swims behind the dinghies after she had been exercised. The keeping of these two otters did, it is true, appear likely to become a full-time job; but as a visitor remarked, not without malice, this was perhaps as good a way of earning an anti-social living as any other.

  All this work we completed in the week at our disposal, and though the cement was still damp enough to take the imprint of Teko’s feet as he entered, and the paint was barely dry upon the walls of his house, he appeared entranced with his new quarters; never once did he whimper or call or behave otherwise than as if the place had always been his home. I put a camp-bed in his house and for the first few nights I slept there myself, for sharing sleeping quarters with an animal is the most certain way of establishing mutual confidence. It was not, in this case, an entirely comfortable procedure, for no sooner had I manoeuvred myself into the sleeping-bag than he would begin to explore my face with his simian fingers, pushing mobile digits between my lips and into my nostrils and ears, uttering the while a curious snuffle that led me to believe he had contracted a cold; only after the first few days did I discover that this was a sound of pleasure and contentment, like the purring of a cat. After some half-hour of this demonstrative affection he would squirm down into the warmth of the sleeping-bag and slumber peacefully through the night. Or so I had thought, but on the third morning I awoke to find myself engulfed in a smother of liberated kapok, blocking my nose, eyes and ears; Teko had spent the greater part of the night happily chewing holes in the lining of the sleeping-bag. I have contended, and continue to do so, that otters have a keen sense of humour, almost in the way that these words are used of human beings; the action equivalent to human laughter is for the otter to lie on its back and wriggle while keeping its mouth wide open.

  Teko clearly found the result of his handiwork extremely funny.

  Teko at that time was a weighty ball of very soft dark brown fur and fat and bonhomie; in character he was like neither Mijbil nor Edal, for he was (and still is) basically a clown. It is now nearly three years since he came to Camusfeàrna, and in that time he has grown to be the largest otter that I personally have seen, weighing perhaps fifty pounds. But his character is au fond unchanged, despite the two acts of violence with which his record is now stained. He has always been content to play by himself for hours at a time; in those days, when he had only a small pool, he would adapt any floatable object, a stick or an empty tin, for his water games, dragging it under water and pouncing on it as it rose again, and occasionally leaping with it on to terra firma and racing round and round the pool in circles; later, when he had a large and deep fibreglass swimming-pool of his own, he spurned all other toys in favour of a football, and with this he elaborated techniques to which Edal had never aspired. At the beginning the basic game was to try to keep the football under water; the impossibility of this project fascinated him, and round the original theme he wove a host of variations. He would shoot out of the water like a dolphin and land upon the football, trying to bear it under with him; release it suddenly so that it shot up high in the air; stalk it from the back and perform a thunderous belly-flopper upon it with clasping arms; dribble it round the grass enclosure using nose, four feet and tail – it was his mascot, his totem, his alter ego, and without it he seemed lost. His most surprising feat I should not have believed had I not witnessed it many times. The edges of the fibreglass pool were on all sides at the top of a small bank, so that from them led down a grass declivity of two or three feet. When, therefore, his antics shot the football out of the pool, it would inevitably roll down this slope; in the early stages he was content to try to push it and manhandle it back by any means he could. This was necessarily a slow and frustrating process, and quite suddenly he discovered that he could just clasp it in his arms and walk upright on his webbed hind feet. Almost always, however, either balance or the ball would begin to slip before he reached the top of the incline, and watching him from the window one morning as this began to happen I was astonished to see him actually throw the ball up into the pool, with a swinging, upward motion of both arms.

  His most popular indoor parlour trick, in those days when he was allowed to meet visitors freely, was to play with the dancing beam of a torch shone upon the floor. Finding this to be elusive, intangible to nose or paws, he seemed to conceive of his tail as possessing some magic power for the capture of will-o’-the-wisps; thus he would reverse towards the spot of light, trying to scoop at it with his tail, executing the while a quick jig step to keep pace with its movement, a highly individual step that came to be known as the pas de loutre.

  Like Edal when she first arrived, Teko was at the outset an indifferent, barely adequate swimmer, but he lost his fears more quickly than she had done, and soon he was at home in the deepest of waters or the wildest of waves. His first day with bathers appeared utterly fascinating to him; it had not apparently crossed his mind that this curious upright foster-race who tended him could upon occasion be aquatic too. When Raef Payne, who had restored and occupied the old croft opposite to mine, accompanied him to the sea with snorkel and flippers, Teko was wild with delighted amusement. At first he was content to dive when Raef dived, and perform intricate aquabatics around him deep under water; then he discovered that he could ride the swimmer’s back and go down with him; lastly, he found that he could embarrass the human considerably by removing the snorkel mask when it was least expected. After such a joke he would porpoise round and round the swimmer with the rhythmic grace of a ballet dancer; he seemed to laugh at his own antics and all those of all the world around him. I am glad that one coloured film was made of Teko that summer, before anyone had any cause to fear him.

  Alas, Edal’s only reaction to this splendid beast remained one of violent jealousy against an interloper. Like the Marquis of Mon-trose, her heart did evermore disdain a rival to her throne, as it was plainly as such rather than a consort that she viewed him.

  Exercising the two animals separately occupied much time, and I found my writing falling sadly behind. I decided to engage a second otter keeper, and in July Terry Nutkins arrived by way, so to speak, of the London Zoo. He was not employed there, but spent much of his free time about the Elephant House; his ambition was to be a mahout. This project presenting patent difficulties, he was inclined to accept any employment involving the care of animals outside an urban area. He came to Camusfeàrna as Teko’s keeper, and the two established immediate rapport.

  2

  Peace Dropping Slow

  In the autumn of 1959, soon after the narrative of Ring of Bright Water had been brought to a close, my mother had undergone a serious operation in London, and it was clear that the timelessness of Camusfeàrna, its isolation from the outside world, must be regarded as an essentially egotistical aspect of my life. Camusfeàrna was a haven and refuge, but with the necessity of spending an ever-increasing part of each year so far from responsibility came, too, the necessity for communication. I had expected the telephone to be beyond my means, brought, as it would have to be by a separate line of posts all the weary distance from the road at Druimfiaclach; I was unfamiliar with the whimsical vagaries of the Postmaster-General’s office, and the quotation of a mere five pounds installation fee I t
ook at first sight for an unusually crass clerical error. In this I was wrong, and beyond a slightly increased rent for the instrument, the miracle was unqualified.

  For some time before the installation of the actual telephone itself the effect was that of being under siege from a slowly approaching army. The advance began out of sight, far away up the hill, with a series of muffled but menacing explosions that grew daily heavier; the attackers themselves remained as yet invisible, though after the fourth day their hoarse and seemingly ferocious cries drifted down to us on the wind between distant detonations. Then one morning they were upon us; a mighty bang and a patter of falling rock-chips brought us bounding from our beds early one morning to see their heads upon the horizon three hundred yards away. They stood motionless in a group, regarding our defencelessness; one of them held before him a small uprooted birch tree.

  ‘Birnam Wood,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry, these people only attack at dusk.’

  How often I have wished that were true of the telephone itself. The large outside bell above the door of the house jangles arrogantly at all hours, and often at what Terry Nutkins might, with unusual aptness, have termed ‘the most undignified moment of the day’.

  The first incoming telephone call was received at Camusfeàrna on 11th April 1960, and in retrospect the bell seems seldom to have been silent since. While the presence of the telephone has removed from Camusfeàrna a little of our sense of security, it has substituted another, for as a place of permanent residence it is a house of crisis, particularly in the winter; and in the frequent emergencies of human and animal health, of shipwreck and the accidents of fire and flood, there is the knowledge that help, however remote, can be summoned. Now, too, we could telephone for the household food supplies, as opposed to ordering them by letter two days in advance; it brought, in however small a quantity, relief from the exigence of a routine that left ever less time either to write or to enjoy Camusfeàrna. The next logical step towards buying back a little of the leisure I had lost by treating the house as a permanent home rather than a temporary haven, seemed the installation of electricity to take over at least a few of the endless chores which kept us house-bound during long days of summer, or cold and comfortless in the twilight of winter. Like the telephone line, the power wires also followed the roadside at Druimfiaclach; the distance was the same, and in my innocence it even appeared to me possible that the same poles might carry both lines. I knew little of departmentalism. Not only was it impossible for the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board to use the same poles but even to use the same route of approach. The telephone line branches to Camusfeàrna from Druimfiaclach – now I received a plan showing the proposed electrical supply starting from a full half-mile farther to the southward, and an estimate for installation into which that for the telephone would have divided nearly two hundred times. But I was determined upon it, determined to avoid the transport of ponderous Calor-gas containers and paraffin drums through the winter hurricanes; in my mind, too, were shining, ill-defined images of labour-saving devices; visions of placid hours of writing uninterrupted by the recurrent oppression of household tasks undone. So there came again the distant din of an advancing army, and at length a new group reached the southern horizon and stood looking down upon us with, it seemed, a wild surmise. On 4th July a party of the raiders approached the house itself, staggering across the green field under the weight of what appeared to be an enormous battering-ram; to complete the illusion of warfare they began immediately and feverishly to dig slit-trenches. At length the battering-ram was hoisted upright and revealed itself as the feed-post to stand beside the house, the slit-trenches as recipients of vast baulks of timber to anchor its guy-wires.

  When Teko was plainly settled into his new home we tried again, with all the caution born of experience, to introduce him to Edal. Some part of our difficulty lay in the fact that we did not know whether Edal had a greater affection for her keeper, Jimmy Watt, or for myself; Edal, it was clear, considered herself polyandrously married to both of us, and apparent infidelity by either of us towards another otter could touch off the full fury of a Lutra cornuta. The question posed itself simply as to who should lead which animal on these trial walks; nor did her behaviour do much to elucidate the problem, for she was furious if either of us led Teko, and even more furious if he stopped for a second to pick up some shell or other piece of jetsam that struck him as ” desirable toy. Habituation by proximity had already proved a failure; we had constructed a small window in the wall of Teko’s enclosure, a mere six inches square and formed of two thicknesses of fine-mesh wire netting two inches apart, through which they could see and smell each other but could inflict no damage. But soon we had to close this hatch in order to preserve reason. Daylong Edal would stand at the grill and with all the force contained in her small frame she projected the unearthly ear-splitting expression of her enmity; no other sub-human sound that I know is so baring to the nerves, unless it be the screaming of a falcon that has been mishandled in transference to its foster-parents. But while Edal’s screaming window was an unqualified failure as a factor in her acclimatization to Teko, I did, as the weeks passed, begin to entertain some small hope for their future; when exercised together on leashes her attention was not so perpetually concentrated upon him, nor, when Jimmy and I separated and unleashed our respective otters, did she seem so keenly inclined to pursue Teko and put him to rout.

  Then, early in August, all experiments stopped together, for it became not a question of whether we could save this situation but, for the second time that year, whether we could save Edal’s life. Edal, who had for so long played marbles on the kitchen floor, slept on our pillows, and displayed all the intense affection of which an otter is capable, developed an infection of the brain arising from a septic tooth. In twenty-four hours she became a mad, savage, half-paralysed but unapproachable creature, recognizing no one, as dangerous as a wounded leopard yet to me as pathetic as a child mortally sick. I can still see her crazed head weaving in search of something to attack, her useless hindquarters dragging behind her before she would collapse in a twitching rigor. Perhaps I may not be blamed too much for having hoped that each of these might be the end of an animal that now bore no resemblance to Edal.

  It had started, as I have said, with a septic tooth, and as soon as we saw that she was in pain we arranged to have the tooth extracted on the following day. This involved taking her by car to a far-distant town, and, as always upon such emergency occasions, the next day was a Sunday. The vet was, however, prepared to perform the operation at any time, and we arranged by telephone that Edal should be at his surgery by eleven o’clock in the morning. (A long succession of crises such as this and worse than this have made me wonder how Camusfeàrna was ever supportable without the telephone; Parkinson’s Law that expenditure rises to meet income may evidently be extended to the theorem that crises rise to meet communication.)

  Early in the morning we set off up the hill on foot, for there is no road to Camusfeàrna. At this stage Edal seemed normal, though once or twice it struck me fleetingly that there were moments when she found balance difficult. This suggested to me a derangement of her cerebellum, the hind part of the brain responsible for controlling movement, and with my limited knowledge it appeared no more than sensible to take some precaution against a similar disturbance of the cerebrum, the fore-brain controlling behaviour. I insisted, therefore, that Jimmy, in whose charge she would be while I drove, should wear thick gloves.

  The car was a hard-top Land Rover, with a full division between front and rear. We had not as yet any precise reason to be afraid of her, and with a sheepskin coat we made for her a bed on the centre seat of the front cab, so that she was between us. Trouble started within the first half mile. Without any warning she flew at Jimmy’s hands, and had they not been heavily gloved the damage would have been great. Again and again she repeated these attacks, and I thought my own ungloved hands would be her next target, for she seemed to r
esent movement, and I had to reach directly in front of her in order to use the gear lever. But in her confused brain it was Jimmy that she hated at that moment, and she treated me as if I did not exist. After three miles of acute nervous tension it became plain that the situation was untenable, and that one or other of us would be seriously hurt long before we had completed the eighty miles in front of us.

  In her present condition it was not easy to see how to transfer her to the rear compartment, much less close the door upon her. We had to dangle her down out of the front cab on the end of her lead, taking care all the while that she could not come within range of us, and then to hoist her over the rear drop-board, a very much more difficult procedure. When, after some ten minutes of effort, we had at last completed the task and closed the door upon her we argued that her behaviour might in fact be no more than the effect of the tranquillizers we had given her before we started; they had, it is true, been of a variety that we had not tried before, but in all my previous experience tranquillizers administered to otters had produced the reverse of the desired and expected effect. They seemed to act much as alcohol affects the majority of human beings, leading to breakdown of all inhibitions and the collapse of learned behaviour; a wild animal in acute pain and without inhibitions could hardly be expected to display tranquillity and good humour.