The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

by Gavin Maxwell

  During all this time we had, as I have said, little use from the Polar Star, yet one glorious morning will always stand out in my memory. Since the roads were still blocked by snow when the time came for a visiting friend to return to Sicily, we could only reach the distant station by sea. The winter sun was just up in a bare blue sky, the shadows still long and blue upon the snow, and the great white hills all about us were salmon-pink above a smooth enamel sea of beetle-wing blue. On every side so little showed through the snow that the only colours of which one was aware were those of its varying tones, from shadows to sunlit brilliance, and the two blues of sea and sky. The Polar Star roared north between the frozen mountains, and her great leaping seething wake held the reflected light of the sun and the snows; to us on board her the racing boat seemed the only moving thing in a world of ice-cold colour, her speed the direct expression of human exhilaration.

  In February 1962 Malcolm and Paula Macdonald, who had given Edal to me in the spring of 1959 came to Camusfeàrna to visit her after an absence of nearly three years. I had told them of all that had happened during the past six months, of her attack upon Terry and of her apparent hatred of women, and they both agreed that it would be inadvisable for Paula to meet Edal face to face. Malcolm would go into her room with Jimmy, and Paula would watch over the waist-high partition that separated Jimmy’s sitting-room from Edal’s quarters. We were in the living-room when we reached this sensible decision, and a moment or two later I was called to the telephone to take a long-distance call. The telephone conversation was prolonged, and it was some quarter of an hour later that I returned, to find the living-room empty. I went across to Jimmy’s house, and as I entered his sitting-room I at first saw nobody. Then I heard voices from beyond Edal’s partition, and hurried forward. Sitting on the bed were Jimmy, Malcolm and Paula, and to the last two Edal was making every demonstration of the profoundest welcome and affection. It might have been thought surprising that Edal should remember them at all after that long lapse of time and the mental and physical crises through which she had passed; this, however, was not a question of mere recognition but of positive joy. She squirmed and beamed and pushed her fingers into their mouths; then, as Paula talked to Edal the baby language to which she had been accustomed as an infant, Edal reverted to behaviour that she had not displayed for a full two years. When Paula had first brought her to Camusfeàrna Edal had a well-established and slightly inconvenient method of displaying her affection for her foster-parent, that of sucking and nibbling at Paula’s neck. This she had reserved for Paula only, and had never transferred the pattern to Jimmy or myself; now she climbed up on Paula’s lap and went into her old ritual as though it were days rather than years that Paula had been away.

  It was, in some respects, a heart-rending reunion, for some six weeks before, the two West African otter cubs that Malcolm and Paula had brought back from Nigeria to replace Edal had been killed. These two were without exception the most domesticated and endearing otters I had ever seen, living totally free and behaving like very well brought-up but extremely playful dogs. A minister of the Church of Scotland, mooching along the foreshore with a shotgun, found them at play by the tide’s edge and shot them. One was killed outright, the other died of her wounds in the water. The Lord gave man control over the beasts of the field, as this minister reminded a journalist.

  In the course of that winter of 1961–62. we fortuitously acquired two more otters, and once again with the element of coincidence that would seem by now to have become a stereotype. First, a gamekeeper telephoned from the south of Scotland. That afternoon, he told me, he had been walking along a river bank when he had come unexpectedly upon a bitch otter with four very small cubs; one had been farther ashore than the others and found his route to the river blocked by a man and a dog. He just squatted and blinked, as though considering at leisure the correct course of action in these totally unfamiliar circumstances. Probably it was this certain gormlessness of personality which has to some extent characterized his existence ever since, that saved his life – for the gamekeeper, seeing this very small creature just sitting there and blinking hopelessly at him, threw a game-bag over it and picked it up. He took it home, put it in a box with some wire-netting over the top, and telephoned to me.

  Despite the complications of the existing otter ménage at Camusfeàrna, I did not hesitate. I had always wanted a British otter, and had come near to realizing this ambition when in a previous summer a local keeper had brought me a small female cub that his terriers had caught, but alas she proved to have a double compound fracture of the lower jaw, and were it to remain unset she would for all her life have been unable to feed herself. Jimmy and I bottle-fed her and tended her wound for a few weeks, but when at last the necessary surgery was carried out in a distant town she died of post-operational shock. Now this completely undamaged cub was more than I could resist.

  Transport, however, presented problems. As nobody knew whether or not the cub was weaned it clearly could not be sent unaccompanied on a long train journey; Jimmy was on holiday in the south, Terry was not yet old enough to drive a car, and I could not leave him in sole charge at Camusfeàrna. I hired a driver and my neighbour, Morag MacKinnon, volunteered to make the three hundred mile journey in my Land Rover.

  When two days later I went up the hill to Druimfiaclach to meet them I carried on my back a wicker fishing creel, thinking this to be an ideal container for a small and possibly very active creature intent upon escape. This picture, however, proved entirely false. When I entered the kitchen at Druimfiaclach, Morag was sitting with the cub on her knee, and it looked remarkably domesticated if not particularly intelligent. I carried it down to Camusfeàrna inside my shirt, and it fed contentedly from a bottle immediately after arrival.

  A few weeks later, after I had gone to London to be married, another unweaned cub arrived. The first had been a male, the second, to dot the i’s of the coincidence, was a female. Jimmy received a telephone call from the Isle of Skye, to say that a bitch otter in milk had been shot a few days before and now a roadmender had found a tiny unweaned female cub in a ditch. Within three days the two were together in the upstairs room that Edal used to occupy.

  The male we had named Mossy, after the earlier cub that died; the female was christened in my absence by the day of her arrival, Monday. How the characters of each of these two would have developed in the absence of the other, it is impossible to say. Mossy, certainly, would have demanded a great deal of patience. As long as he was kept in a large box and only lifted from it to take his bottle he appeared docile and promising, but when he was liberated in the room he did not display the confidence I had expected. I had to sleep on a mattress on the floor before he would consent to curl up in the crook of my knee as all my other otters had liked to do, and he would avoid being handled if he could. It took a fortnight of patience before he would allow us to begin to handle him again and before he started to play with such moving objects as a screwed-up ball of paper on the end of a string. Perhaps he would have developed into a truly dog-like creature had I not had to go south to London and had Monday not arrived a few days later, but I fancy that his IQ would always have remained noticeably low.

  Monday, by contrast, was from the beginning utterly confident and of a very high degree of intelligence. She was visibly the younger of the two, being little larger than a big rat when she arrived. At the start Jimmy kept her separate from Mossy; she lived in a large basket by the kitchen fire, and if she had remained alone there can be no doubt that she would have become an apotheosis among domesticated otters. When, however, after a few days, she climbed from her basket, explored her new surroundings, and fell wolfishly upon a plate of roast mutton, Jimmy decided that the time had come to introduce her to her future mate.

  Carried upstairs to Mossy’s room she at first stayed quite still, while Mossy advanced and withdrew from her again and again. At last she followed him, a little uncertainly, as he moved away from her, and from that moment he
took possession of her. He nuzzled her and climbed all over her, making a small, high wickering sound in the back of his throat, and when Jimmy went to pick her up Mossy made an angry dart at him with the explosive breathing noise in the cheeks that is his sound of aggression.

  Every day Monday spent a little time in that room, before being returned to the kitchen, and each day Mossy became more possessive and more angry when she was removed. In less than a week she took up permanent quarters with him, and from then on Mossy took no interest in human beings except as purveyors of eel meat. Though Monday remained confiding, the two were self-sufficient. They indulged in endless mutual grooming, though in this as in all else Monday remained the subservient partner and Mossy retained his demanding male arrogance. A typical and oft-repeated tableau was that of Mossy lying at ease upon his back, preening, in a desultory way, his chest and forearms, while at the lower end of his body Monday performed for him services that afforded him the greatest evident delight. They slept much throughout the day, showing a preference for darkness; sometimes they would curl up together underneath a chest of drawers, but more often they appeared as a conspicuous and faintly stirring lump under the carpet. Towards evening they would awake and begin to play games that gathered tempo until from the living-room the noise above resembled nothing so much as a couple of toy trains running on the rimless spokes of their wheels. Round and round the bare boarding next to the walls they would race tirelessly, the thunder of their progress interrupted only by Mossy’s inevitable catching of Monday, when the sounds of galloping feet would change to prolonged and concerted wickering. This wickering is extremely difficult to describe; it is a very rapidly repeated staccato but musical note of which the effect is almost of something mechanical. It is in the treble key; perhaps the nearest parallel would be the concept of a motor-mower whose voice had not yet broken, and the nearest approach to accurate reproduction is to rub a wetted finger-tip quickly to and fro over half an inch of glass surface.

  Humans, in their role of providers, remained creatures of enormous importance to Mossy and Monday, and at the sound of a step on the stairway they would make a single competitive rush for the half-door that separated them from the landing. After the first few weeks we had removed the carpet until such time as outdoor quarters could be arranged for Mossy and Monday, so that by now there was nothing to deaden the patter, or thunder, of their tiny feet on bare linoleum. We tape-recorded the noise of this race from one corner of the room to that diagonally opposite, and the effect is that of a soundtrack deliberately speeded up, so that it becomes simply a solid roar, without perceptible impact of individual feet. At the end one can distinguish one single tap on the drum, so to speak – the sound of their forepaws hitting the door as they stood up against it in frenzied anticipation.

  Sometimes Dirk the deerhound would accompany whoever went up to feed them; he would put his paws up on the half-door and gaze down with benign interest at the sharp little faces looking up at his.

  At this time we fed Mossy and Monday by hand upon pieces of chopped eel, partly so that they could thus be forced daily into human contact and so retain some domesticity, but partly, also, in order to ensure that each received a due share; for Mossy, despite his possessiveness towards his consort, had proved himself an apostle of enlightened self-interest, and ungallant to the ultimate degree. Anything he could possibly snatch from her he did, and when we had first offered them whole eels he had contrived to carry the whole lot, in one journey to a distant corner, where while eating the first he snarlingly guarded the remainder. If during this display of anti-feminism one gave another eel to Monday, he would shoot across the room from his corner, whisk it away from her, and add it to his own defended store. There was no solution but to feed each with inch-long lengths of eel from a pair of tweezers; these were necessary because, while Monday took these bonbons with all the gentleness of a well-trained dog, Mossy was by instinct a grabber, and cared nothing whether or not his needle-sharp teeth enclosed more than a piece of eel. At the time I resented Mossy, and thought only what a rewarding animal to domesticate Monday would have been without him, for it was not until some three months later that we moved them outside and had all the unwearying joy of watching two wild otters at play in a glass tank.

  Meanwhile both these otters had to receive the injections necessary to ensure their future health. The injections were in two doses at a fortnight’s interval, and in this matter, too, Monday displayed most strikingly the quality of intelligence that Mossy lacked. Neither of them was handleable in the sense that they could be held still while being injected with a hypodermic needle; but to this problem the same resourceful vet, Donald MacLennan, who had saved Edal’s life, had as always brought answers. He introduced us to an instrument I had never seen, a dog-catcher; a long metal tube from the distal end of which protrudes a noose that can be drawn tight from the butt. Neither animal being familiar with the function or potentialities of this device, the first injections produced no difficulty at all, and the work was completed in five minutes. We began with Monday, because she was the first to go into a corner where she could be walled off and confined by a piece of boarding some three feet high and four feet long. After that initial mistake on her part, she displayed, however, a cunning in avoiding the noose that no human brain in the same body could possibly have surpassed. She had, after all, only her jaws and her two forepaws at her disposal, for after the first quarter of an hour we had closed her in so completely that she had no room to manoeuvre. Again and again as the noose descended towards her head she would anticipate trouble by going to meet it – she would spring up and seize it between her teeth, worry it, and throw it back over her shoulder with a flick of the neck. More than once, when someone had momentarily succeeded in distracting her attention and we had the noose almost in position, she would get her paws inside it and pull it open with that extraordinary strength which even very small otters can display. It took three-quarters of an hour, and the cooperation of three people, before we finally secured her; it had been a hateful proceeding, and I dreaded its repetition with Mossy.

  I need not have worried. While Monday had clearly retained an acute recollection of the noose – almost, one is tempted to write, an understanding of its mechanical principle – that great booby Mossy, although angry and blustering at being boarded off into a narrow corner of the room, had no more idea of how to avoid capture than he had shown on the river bank in his extreme infancy. With him it was all over in three minutes.

  For both of them, in however varying degree, I felt that the experience must have been traumatic, and I expected that it would be a long time before they recovered their trust in us, even as providers of food. I thought it would be weeks before we again heard that rush of scampering feet at the sound of a boot on the stair. In fact it was less than an hour; neither seemed to bear us any ill-will for the outrages we had committed upon their persons.

  They were, however, rapidly growing up, and both our own pressure upon the limited accommodation of the house and their increasing agility made it necessary to move them to outdoor quarters. It was, perhaps, the second factor that forced the decision upon us, for one incident made it evident that we could no longer ventilate the room by leaving the top of the window open without running the risk of their exit. We had removed a top drawer from the chest of drawers in order to sort through its contents, and immediately Mossy and Monday saw the resulting dark cavern as an ideal retreat from unwelcome human visitors. That this new den was some four feet from the ground troubled them not at all; the exact process by which they progressed from the floor to invisibility was too quick for the eye to follow, but the fact remained that the vertical distance was greater than that which they would have to ascend to reach the window. We made somewhat hasty preparations for their removal to an enclosure immediately outside the living-room window.

  This was the autumn; both Lavinia and I were abroad during the early winter months, and we did not see Mossy and Monday again until the Ne
w Year of 1963.

  Conventional insurance policies cover accident, fire and flood, and in a year of miscellaneous mishaps which included the first and last of these items it would perhaps have been unreasonable to expect fire not to have been attracted to Camusfeàrna by its general aura of crisis and vulnerability. I was, of course, alone in the house when it happened. I had been rendering down a great quantity of beef fat; when I had finished I placed the very large basin of liquid fat on the kitchen floor, put a frying pan of water on the electric hotplate with the intention of cooking myself some kippers, and then went to answer the telephone. The conversation lasted some ten minutes; I had a mental eye on the frying pan of water, but I did not think that, starting from cold, it could have evaporated in that time.

  Exactly as I put the receiver down there was a muffled but heavy explosion from the kitchen, heavy enough to send a shiver through the pine-panelling of the whole ground-floor. Tearing through into the living-room I looked aghast at the entrance to the small kitchen – the whole doorway was blotted out in a roaring mass of flames whose tongues were even now shooting along the living-room rafters and devouring small pendant objects in their progress. Just inside the main door of the house was a large new fire extinguisher; with this knowledge I felt quietly confident. I seized this impressive weapon rapidly, carried out the simple instructions printed upon it, advanced as near to the flames as the heat allowed me, and directed the nozzle toward the kitchen ceiling, for this, I thought, was the point from which the flames might take over the rest of the house.