The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

by Gavin Maxwell

  At the surgery, two hours later, we were confronted with fresh difficulties, for there was no anaesthetic chamber, and we were forced to improvise with a large tea chest. Into this we lowered her as we had lowered her into the rear compartment of the Land Rover, and then air-sealed the top with heavy towels before pumping in the anaesthetic. Edal took what was for me an almost intolerable time to lose consciousness, for all the while she wailed like a wounded hare, a sound so utterly piteous and abandoned that I found my hands unsteady and a cold sweat coming out on my forehead. Jimmy was unable to bear it, and took refuge in the Land Rover outside.

  When at last these dreadful cries had ceased we removed the towels and lifted her limp body out of the box and on to the operating table. Two vets worked upon her, but found it impossible to shift the molar. No ordinary practitioner could be expected to know the precise jaw and skull structure of an otter, much less of a foreign species; this tooth resisted every normal means of extraction, and, not knowing how high the roots were planted in the skull, they were afraid of inflicting fatal damage if they used greater force. Seeing Edal lying there limp upon the operating table, her mouth full of blood and her fur foul with her own excreta, I did not believe in her recovery. The one slender chance was that the mauling the tooth had received might have provided some drainage for the septic fluids.

  We carried her back into the Land Rover no more than seconds before she came round from the anaesthetic; through the rear window I could see her, dazed and blood-stained, walking round and round the narrow floor space in stumbling circles. The part of me that remains a child was very near to tears.

  At the end of the two-hour journey home I felt a small spark of hope, for she was able to walk down the hill, and though she was noticeably off balance I supposed this to be the after-effects of the anaesthetic. She would not eat, but in the circumstances this seemed no great cause for surprise. We contrived, again by dangling her from the end of a lead, to hoist her upstairs into her own quarters; there she appeared to go to sleep in her bed, and we left her for the night.

  Early the next morning Mr Donald MacLennan, the local vet, came – I use the word local for want of a better, for he lives at Broadford in Skye, more than fifty miles away by road and sea-ferry. I was totally unprepared for the rapid overnight deterioration in Edal’s condition, and I opened her door to bring her downstairs. She was partially paralysed and wholly mad. She fell rather than walked down the stairs, and stumbled out into the garden, where she toppled over on her side, kicking and twitching. I took this first convulsion for a death-agony, but after perhaps a minute she recovered from it, raised herself unsteadily, and looked around her with mad eyes for something to attack. Finally, for despite the paralysis she seemed enormously strong, she struggled into the living-room and dragged herself up into a low wooden armchair with a slot back. Here she was unapproachable, screaming and literally gnashing her teeth at the least sign of movement in the room.

  The vet looked at her and said nothing; I was unused then to the painstaking deliberation of his diagnoses, and I took his silence for a death-warrant. Yet I did not want him to shoulder the responsibility; I knew that in a month’s time, when Ring of Bright Water was to be published, Edal would become a famous animal, more famous, perhaps than Elsa the Lioness, and I felt it unfair to this young man to leave the decision to him alone. I telephoned to London, and the advice I received was unequivocal. Had I got a gun in the house? I had a pistol and only one remaining round; I searched for it and found it before returning to the living-room. It seemed to me now only a question of how Edal’s execution could be carried out with the least possible distress to herself and to the humans who had made a pet of her. But the young vet, with his soft, deliberate Highland speech, said: ‘It is not fair to consult a practitioner six hundred miles from the patient; he is not on the spot, and he has no opportunity to form an opinion as he would like. A bullet will prove nothing, and also it would spoil the body for post-mortem. I think there is a very faint chance, and if you are willing to try I am. We shall have to give her very massive injections of antibiotics daily for five days, and if there is no improvement then she will go into a coma and die quietly.’ I felt, and I expect looked, helpless; I could not see how we might approach Edal closely enough to touch her, let alone restrain and inject her.

  We had one small help – the slotted back to the chair on which she was sitting. While I distracted her attention from the front, Jimmy contrived somehow to clip a lead on to her harness through the gaps in the woodwork. Then, by using a shepherd’s crook, I managed to lift the lead through until it was on the same side of the chair-back as she was. Down this lead we slipped the hand loop of another, so that she could be held from two different directions; in this way we moved her slowly off the chair until we could take a turn of one lead round a table leg. Then we drew the other lead tight too, from a direction at right-angles to the first, and I took hold of her tail. Even when she was held from three points and could not turn her head she managed to lash her body like a wounded snake. It must have been little easier than injecting a flying bird, but that vet did it, as I was to see him do it so often in the future. Then we put on rubber thigh-boots, and half hoisted, half dangled her back upstairs and into her own room, leaving attached to her the two leads that would make further injections possible.

  For the following four days we repeated the same procedure, and each day Donald MacLennan showed the same extraordinary legerdemain in injecting his moving target. We entered that room only in thigh-boots – we did not know then how little protection these would have offered had Edal reached and attacked us with purpose – and always as we went about the daily routine of cleaning the floor and changing her water she would drag her paralysed hindquarters after her in pathetic attempts to attack.

  Then at last came a day when as I entered the room I seemed to sense something different in her appearance. She was curled up in her bed in the corner, so that only her head protruded from the blankets, and she seemed to look at me questioningly, as though I had been away for a long time and she was not sure whether it could be me. I came nearer to her, and suddenly she gave a little whimper of recognition as she had been used to when she was pleased to see Jimmy or myself. With great hesitation I gave her the back of my bare hand to sniff and the greeting sounds redoubled. I knew then that, however long her physical paralysis might remain, she was now mentally normal. I knelt down on the floor beside her and put my face down to her and stroked her, and she rubbed her whiskers over my cheeks and pushed her nose into my neck while all the time she whimpered her welcome and affection for someone who had been away for so long.

  Physically, her convalescence and recovery were protracted, but they progressed in precisely the sequence that the vet had hoped for; a returning power in her fore-quarters, then her hind limbs and, last of all, the ability to move her tail. It was early October before I was able to take her out of the house for the first time; that she had locomotive power was all that could be said, for her movements were awkward and ill-coordinated, each front foot raised high on the forward pace as if she were striking at something, and even in the hundred yards or so that I took her she lay down several times with a look of bewilderment and despair on her face. Very slowly, over a period of months, she regained the full use of all her muscles, began to play again, and to gallop and swim and dive. One day early in November I found her playing on the floor with a new toy that she had somewhere discovered; it was the single round of pistol ammunition with which I had been about to end her life on 8th August 1960.

  A little before Christmas 1960 I left Camusfeàrna for North Africa. Jimmy and Terry were in charge of the otters, and a friend who wanted sanctuary in which to write of an expedition from which he had recently returned had undertaken to run the household and deal with any emergency that might arise. I knew that I should not see Camusfeàrna again for several months.

  3

  All the Wild Summer Through

  With that
spring following the publication of Ring of Bright Water the privacy of Camusfeàrna came abruptly to an end. A great number of people who read the book accepted the disguise of place names as a challenge, and were determined to locate and visit the place; they came by their hundreds, and because at first we did not wish to appear churlish the once orderly routine of the house became chaotic. As spring turned to summer and the tourist season reached its height we became desperate, for the inroads upon our time meant that I was able to work only sporadically and without concentration. We erected Private notices on the two tracks by which the house may be approached, but these had little effect, and gradually our days became almost wholly occupied with warding off uninvited visitors. The number of notices that these had to pass before reaching Camusfeàrna was formidable; at the distance of more than a mile all gates already carried estate notices at the entry to the forestry ground, reading Strictly Private; after a further half-mile the hardy encountered the first of my own signboards – This Is A Private Footpath To Camusfeàrna – No Unannounced Visitors Please; then, for those who had penetrated all the outer defences, came an elaborate signboard with a drawing of a beseeching otter and the words: Visitors: There Are Pet Otters Here–Please Keep Dogs On Leash; and finally, at a range of two-hundred yards or so from the citadel, the single word PRIVATE, in foot-high red letters. Despite all these precautions, a steady stream of rubbernecks arrived daily, often with loose and undisciplined dogs, to bang on the single door of the house and demand, as if it were their right, to see the otters and all that had figured in the story.

  One of the most extraordinary and revealing aspects of this unconcerted invasion was the conviction of each that he or she, and he or she alone, was the pioneer; that it could not have been possible for any other to have discovered the true location of Camusfeàrna, or for any other to have wished to do so. Each claimed to have established the position by hours of labour with charts and deductive power worthy of Hercule Poirot; by a long past familiarity with the coastline that had yielded a sudden and vital clue; by private information given by a friend of a friend of an acquaintance; by some recognized piece of landscape in a published photograph – always, in sum, by some feat of mental or imaginative agility of which no other could be capable. After one long day, when we had wrestled many hours with such well-disguised angels, and when we were at last sitting down to eat for the first time since the previous evening, there came an authoritative rap on the door and a murmur of perceptibly transatlantic voices. I refused to move, and sent one of the boys to deal with the situation. The message he brought back was that the gentleman (the name eludes me) had travelled three thousand miles to see Camusfeàrna, and could not believe that I would be so inhospitable as to refuse him entry. For the first time since the beginning of the siege my temper broke; I replied that if indeed he had wished to travel three thousand miles to visit a total stranger he might have shown more courtesy than to arrive unannounced at half past nine in the evening. This churlish outburst set a precedent, and when a few days later I looked out from my window to see a party of five people leaning over the wooden palisade and baiting (I can find no other word) Teko, I found the instinct for battle strong in me. I went out and asked them with hostile civility from where they came. Manchester, I was told. ‘And in Manchester,’ I asked, with what coolness my rage could master, ‘is it the custom to treat your neighbour’s house and garden as a public exhibit?’ There was a shocked silence; then the paterfamilias said plaintively: ‘But this is not Manchester; in Scotland we’ve been told there’s no law of trespass!’

  This extraordinary situation does, in fact, obtain; in Scotland there is nothing but the unwritten rule of common civility to prevent any stranger entering the garden of a suburban or other house and making himself thoroughly at home. If he picks the flowers or otherwise damages the garden it is possible to secure an injunction against his future entry, but if he has a hundred friends lined up to repeat the performance it will be necessary to take out an injunction against each of them severally and in succession. An Englishman’s home is his castle, but not a Scotsman’s. Scottish law contains many such whimsical quirks; for example, a homicidal maniac may not be reincarcerated on the original findings if after escape he succeeds in remaining at liberty for three weeks. Research into the origins of such legal curiosities might be rewarding but not, one cannot help feeling, edifying.

  As month succeeded month we became, in self-defence, more and more ruthless, because the very life of the place was at stake. If one of the boys was at Druimfiaclach collecting the mail and happened there to encounter a party of prospective visitors, he would give elaborately misleading directions as to how to arrive at Camusfeàrna; by these ruses I suspect, our household has forfeited the sympathy of a section of the public, but in order to survive we had no alternative. To not one of these victims of our seeming misanthropy had it occurred, apparently, that they were on holiday and we were not, that each of us had a full day’s work to get through as much as, or more than, if we had been holding down an urban office job. We became, in the broadest sense, xenophobes, and resented any intrusion, because each day ended with work undone and a gradually increasing sense of handicap in earning our livings.

  There were more precise, definable irritations. Those who were deterred by our final, flaming PRIVATE notices diverted their routes to the surrounding hilltops overlooking Camusfeàrna from a distance of perhaps three hundred yards; from these vantage-points they would scrutinize the house and its environs with field-glasses, telescopes and long-focus ciné-camera lenses, and on one Sunday morning when it was possible to count the heads of five such parties a female guest came to me almost in tears. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you told me you’d got no sanitation and I said I didn’t mind using the countryside – but it’s a different thing when four pairs of field-glasses and a ciné-camera are trained on you from all angles.’

  What angered me perhaps more than anything else was an incident during the summer of 1961. A very smart small yacht came to anchor in the bay below the house, flying some pennant that was to me unrecognizable. There were three or four very fat men and women aboard. One of the men settled himself in some sort of deck chair in the stern, with a .22 rifle across his knees. His companion began to throw bread to the gulls, and as they alighted on the water in response to this invitation he shot them. We sat at the edge of the sand-dunes and watched. At the end of five minutes I began to grow exceedingly angry; as a blood sport this particular exercise seemed to me despicable. It is academically true that for the protection of other species the greater gulls should be kept within numerical limits, but the method of procedure outraged in me some quite illogical approach to the subject; it seemed wanton and destructive. I sent Jimmy to the house to fetch the .350 big game rifle. When he returned I waited until the fat man had shot a herring gull, and as it drifted away from his yacht, I shot at the dead bird. The noise of that rifle is considerable; the scene dissolved, figures hurried about the deck, the anchor was aweigh, and the yacht’s auxiliary engines started almost before I had made up my mind to fire another shot astern of her.

  The acquisition of my own present motor vessel Polar Star was one of the many minor follies with which my life has been sprinkled. When I began to find myself comparatively prosperous it was agreed by my new company, who took over the running of Camusfeàrna, that we had a strong case for a substantial and fast boat. High speed was an absolute necessity, for because of the otters we could never be absent for very long from the house, and distances in the West Highlands are great. Such a boat would, we felt, solve many of our transport and supply problems, and could also be used as emergency accommodation for guests, whose numbers seemed always to increase. The expenditure agreed for this project clearly precluded the purchase of a high-speed luxury yacht; in fact there seemed few craft that would satisfy our requirements for sale at any price. At length an advertisement from a Yorkshire shipyard caught my eye: it read, ‘Ex-R.A.F., T.S.D.Y. 1945. 40 × 9.5 ×
3 ft. draught, diagonal mah. hull, Transom stern, modern bow, twin Perkins 100 h.p. 1952, 2.0 knots, accommodation four, large cockpit, stated in very good condition, £2000.’ The fact that this miracle was within our agreed price limit should have warned me; I had once before, in the shark fishing years, bought a boat unseen on the strength of the surveyor’s report, and I should have remembered the deplorable results. It is aggravating to repeat a stupid mistake, and thus to demonstrate that one is slower to learn than many an animal. However, as I could not at the time leave Camusfeàrna I decided to rely upon an independent surveyor’s report, together with advice from expert friends as to the suitability of the type of craft. By them I was advised that no hard chine boat could be expected to stand heavy seas, but that round-bilge construction of equivalent size and speed would be very far beyond the agreed expenditure. I therefore decided to buy the Polar Star, subject to a satisfactory survey; apart from a misleading attention to unimportant details, the report was excellent, and on 14th July Jimmy Watt left Sandaig for Bridlington to accompany the boat north with her two Yorkshire crew.