The jet of extinguishing fluid lasted for something less than three seconds; then this pretentiously aggressive and brightly coloured instrument just began to dribble on to the floor. The only tap in the house lay beyond the wall of flames, and the nearest water out of doors was Teko’s pool. I grabbed two buckets and raced for it; the bolt on his gate was stuck, and when I finally forced it open Teko was waiting to slip past me. By the time I had the two buckets full and the gate closed behind me I thought there was little chance of saving the house; for it is entirely lined with the ideal tinder of Oregon pine-panelling, and I was already considering what should be salvaged and how two irreconcilable otters might be rescued simultaneously with Mossy and Monday, whose room would be the first to go. The first buckets had little effect beyond a blinding cloud of steam; eight times I ran to and fro between the pool and the kitchen, throwing the water to the ceiling in cupped hands, and eight times Teko did all that he knew to make ingress or egress from his enclosure impossible. After the last of these nightmare journeys, I was amazed to see that no flame remained; the walls and ceiling of the kitchen, which had been repainted a week before, were blackened and charred, but no living spark was left.
The first thing to catch my eye among the dismal debris was the remains of something that looked like the casing of a small home-made bomb, the ragged strips of thin, twisted metal that result from an explosion within a container. There were a considerable number of these scattered round the room, and then quite suddenly I saw their origin. Embedded in the basin of fat, now congealed by many gallons of water, was the warhead – the upper half of a deodorant spray of popular make. This tin, evidently, had stood too close to the hotplate on which I had prepared to cook my kippers; it had exploded, and with awful accuracy of aim the upper portion had travelled eight feet to slam into the basin of liquid fat. The force of the impact had sprayed fat all over the walls and ceiling; enough had fallen on the hot plate to start the fire, and this had in turn detonated two more deodorant cans, several pieces of which had also found their way into the fat and given fresh impetus to the flames.
Accident, fire and flood. Not long after the fire came the plague of rats. We had known for some months that for the first time in the history of Camusfeàrna there were a few in the house, but they did not appear to multiply, and caused us little trouble. Now there was a sudden population explosion and, far from our being able to ignore the rats, they became our major preoccupation. Whether they really numbered thousands I do not know, but certainly they gave that impression. Sleep became impossible at night as behind the panelling, they fought and mated, played and ran races, rolling, it seemed, some kind of resonant ball at high speed and for hours on end; food disappeared from the most inaccessible places, and floors and furniture became full with rat dung; they gnawed through the panelling to allow themselves multiple entry to every room and chewed the upholstery of soft furniture in order to build themselves nests; and, worst outrage of them all, one of their number bit my head twice during one night. Possibly he too was in search of nesting material. To add to their other nauseous characteristics, they were cannibals by apparent preference, for if one of their number was caught in a trap he was invariably eaten before morning.
At first I was unwilling to use rat poison, for the memory of an experience long ago remained fresh in my mind. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford there was a small enclosure in the park containing ornamental waterfowl such as Mandarin and Carolina ducks and a few comparative rarities; every year these birds laid eggs and every year they were eaten by rats, insolently and in daylight before spectators. Waterfowl were in those days one of my major interests and I felt this to be a waste. The park keeper gave me permission to exterminate the rats and, full of youthful enthusiasm, I bought a packet of widely advertised and well known rat poison. On this packet were printed the words ‘harmless to poultry and all domestic livestock’. I put poisoned bread and bran in the waterfowl enclosure, and the next morning every single bird in it was dead.
So at the beginning we tried every method of destruction other than poison. Outside, where we had refuse pits among the sand-dunes they had formed a honeycomb of interconnecting burrows having their entrances many yards apart; into these we poured large quantities of petrol and ignited it to form a heavy subterranean detonation. This certainly did kill a great number of rats but the birth rate evidently remained consistently higher than the death rate. We shot them with shotguns, rifles and pistols; we swiped at them with pokers, sticks and axes; we set for them snares and snap-traps and live-traps, but nothing made any impression upon their numbers.
The very first rat that we caught was in a live-trap on the living-room floor. None of us wanted the task of drowning it, and eventually it was left to me to carry the cage down to the stream. I submerged it immediately; the rat went on running round the cage as if it were in air and not water. No bubbles rose. After perhaps half a minute it put its paws up between the wire mesh of the trap and hung there, looking at me. It went on looking at me; it must have been a further minute or more before I realized that it was dead.
The live-traps were useless. The following day one trap held seven half-grown rats, and the day after there were another six; then no rat ever entered them again. By October the situation was unbearable and we consulted what the ungenteel used to call a rat-catcher, but is in fact a Rodent Operative.
There appeared to me to be only one possible poison, on grounds of safety, efficiency, and humanity, and even this, Warfarin, could not completely be guaranteed harmless to the otters. The risk, however, was comparatively small, and in the event our judgement was wholly vindicated, for at the end of a week the otters were in excellent health and there was not a single remaining rat at Camusfeàrna.
In the course of the Rodent Operative’s visit I learned much about rats that was strange to me. The common man, he said, tended to think of them as creatures of barnyard and building, in constant association with man; this was wholly fallacious and he would guarantee to find me rats on the pinnacles of the Cuillin Hills. As an example he cited the meteorological station on the summit of Ben Nevis; rats had arrived within a day or two of completion of the hutments, and it would be unreasonable to assume them to have climbed 4,000 feet from the rich refuses of Fort William. It was due to the perpetually wandering habits of the rat, he explained, that they had settled at Camusfeàrna; not a square yard of countryside was unvisited by some rats in the course of six months, and they would stop wherever they found food plentiful. An open refuse pit, which at Camusfeàrna was our only means of disposing of kitchen rubbish, was irresistible.
He also told me that I had been using the snap-traps, which were simply a larger version of the ordinary mousetrap, in a completely mistaken way. In my innocence I had asked him the best bait to use on these. ‘None,’ he replied. ‘You don’t bait them at all. I’ve never been able to understand why the makers put that little bait-peg on them – it gives people the wrong idea from the start.’ He expounded his own method, which he said was foolproof. A rat in a room will at some time during the night run round the whole perimeter of the walls, and an unbaited snap-trap placed with the spring-platform against the wall was therefore infallible. But, he added, all traps became obsolete with the introduction of Warfarin, and rodents need no longer present a problem to anybody.
Accident, fire and flood. Dirk the deerhound broke his leg. Any dog with a broken tibia produces many problems; when the dog weighs something like a hundredweight and the leg is the better part of a yard long, the problems are disproportionately increased. It had become a stereotype that after any absence from Camusfeàrna I would inevitably return to find that some disaster had taken place while I was away, and Dirk’s accident conformed precisely to that pattern. Lavinia and I had been visiting friends some fifteen sea miles or 120 road miles to the southward; we had travelled by car, and had formed an intricate plan by which both sea and road transport were available for other family projects. My stepson Nichol
as and Jimmy Watt had been invited to fish a salmon river the following day, in the area where we had been staying; we therefore decided to leave the car at the fishing port there, where the Polar Star had been undergoing some adjustments to her gear-box, and return to Camusfeàrna in her. We could then immediately transport Nicholas and Jimmy to the port by boat, leaving them the use of the car and ourselves returning to Camusfeàrna in the Polar Star.
This plan, surprisingly, we carried through without interference by weather or any of the many other factors that might have caused its dislocation, but when we dropped anchor in Camusfeàrna bay to take Nicholas and Jimmy on board, they brought the news that Dirk had broken his leg a few minutes before.
The dog had been in the house when Terry had announced that the Polar Star was on the horizon, and the whole party went out to watch her; Dirk, not in those days the best disciplined of dogs, had slipped out unnoticed and set out for a canter on the hill. No one was aware of his absence until a few minutes later, when a newly appointed estate manager who had been inspecting the forestry ground knocked at Camusfeàrna door and announced to Terry: ‘Your dog’s up there by the hill track, and he seems to have hurt himself pretty badly.’
Terry found Dirk at a distance of something like half a mile from the house, howling pitifully and unable to rise, each successive struggle causing him even intenser agony. It was obvious to Terry that Dirk had a fractured foreleg, and equally obvious to him that there was no way to get the dog home but to carry him, for to construct a stretcher would mean leaving Dirk for a long time in his present plight. It was fortunate that Terry, though past his sixteenth birthday by only four days, was constructed to the same Goliath specification as Dirk; two years at Camusfeàrna had transformed him from a pallid London child into a Hercules of six foot two and thirteen stone. Dirk has never been accurately weighed, but Dell’s The Scottish Deerhound gives the weight of a dog standing thirty inches at the shoulders as 95 to 105 lb, and Dirk is very considerably over thirty inches. Terry simply picked him up, one hand under his chest and the other under his haunches, and carried him home.
The vet arrived soon after Lavinia and I had returned from our southward journey with the Polar Star, and in half an hour the dog’s leg was set and plastered, but we were barely at the beginning of our troubles. Even an able-bodied dog of Dirk’s proportions occupies a surprising amount of space in a cottage the size of Camusfeàrna; but only now, immobilized by his injury, did his vast extended frame reveal the enormity of his stature. In broad terms he occupies three feet by five, and the slightest attempt at movement of any kind caused him an agony so acute that he could not contain his voice, so that night and day became hideous with his screams. To move him out of doors so that he might relieve himself was the work of two men, carrying and manoeuvring through doorways his vast forequarters and thereafter supporting him in this helpless position until necessity overcame his inhibitions and he allowed his sphincters to relax. He required constant nursing night and day, and after the first two nights it was clear that we could not keep him at Camusfeàrna throughout his convalescence. We made arrangements for his reception at a hospital kennel in Inverness the following day and addressed ourselves to the problems of his transport. We spent the morning building a stretcher; this we covered with foam rubber cushioning and over it we nailed an army blanket, the free portion of which would be passed over the prostrate dog and in turn nailed down to hold him in position.
It was just after we had succeeded in carrying Dirk from the house and laying him on the stretcher that a party of unannounced visitors arrived. They were, they told Terry, friends of some people whom I had received earlier in the year, and who had told this party that they were sure I would not mind if they called. To the best of my recollection there were five or six of them, a comparatively modest invasion, for families holidaying in the West Highlands seemed often to consist of double that number. I told Terry to explain that I could not see them at present, but that if they cared to go for a walk and return in an hour it was possible that the present crisis would be over. They did not choose to leave immediately, but stayed to annoy Teko by peering at him over the paling, thus adding his penetrating voice to Dirk’s pathetic howls as we arranged his sprawling carcass upon the stretcher.
We manoeuvred the huge wooden structure though the rear door of the Land Rover with the greatest difficulty, for the door itself was narrow, and we had to tip the stretcher at an angle of forty-five degrees before it would pass through and lie flat across the seats. The nailed blanket, however, held Dirk from sliding, and the stretcher settled neatly into its position.
The Land Rover set off very slowly up the steep track. At the end of half an hour it had progressed less than two hundred yards, for the tyres found no grip upon the slippery mud of the steep gradient, and Jimmy and Terry were once more reduced to hauling the car up by her own winch.
At this point the visitors returned; my apologies for inability to receive them after all evoked no other response than unconcealed and boorish anger that they had been sent on a fruitless walk instead of being informed of the fact when they first arrived. The very gaucherie of their egregious presumption deprived me of words. They retired huffily to a neighbouring hilltop, from where they watched with sour satisfaction our struggles with the improvised ambulance.
When at length Jimmy and Terry reached the metalled road their real troubles began. The braking power of the Land Rover being greater than her acceleration, Dirk was perpetually shifted forward and downward on his stretcher; since he could use only his hind limbs in an effort to rise or readjust his position, their pushing movements only propelled him further towards the bulkhead between him and the driving cab. Each one of these movements pressed the strained blanket against his plastered foreleg. Jimmy remembers the eighty-mile journey as a nightmare, Dirk screaming and helplessly defecating where he lay, so that the stench in the car became almost as unbearable as the pitiful sounds of the dog’s distress. A score of times they halted to rearrange him, and by the time they arrived at their distant destination both Dirk and his stretcher were anchored by a spider’s web of string and rope to every stable object in the rear of the Land Rover. Accident, fire and flood.
7
The Tides Return
I travelled in the autumn of 1962 to southern Europe and North Africa, and when I returned to Camusfeàrna I found much change. The house now had many of the amenities of civilization, including sanitation, a bath and showers, and the tiny kitchen was now all-electric. Every one of these innovations dependent upon water was, however, functionless, for at the date of my return the supply had been frozen for more than a month, and remains frozen at the time of writing five weeks later.
My arrival at the house had a curious, almost surrealistic flavour. During my absence a jeep had been added to the Camusfeàrna transport fleet, and in this we bucked and jolted in the dark down the frozen track whose mud mountains and ruts had become as hard as rock. At the house the headlights showed a single greylag goose standing outside the door, and Jimmy explained to me that of the five that we had imported in the late summer to replace those that had left us in July this was the sole survivor. Two had disappeared only a week ago, fallen prey, probably, to foxes or wildcats whose more usual sources of food supply were cut off by the snow and the cold. Now this single goose tried to push past us into the house, and having succeeded in entering the living-room tried immediately to jump up on to the sofa whose entire surface was occupied by the sprawling form of Dirk the deerhound. Deterred from this enterprise by Dirk’s uncooperative spirit, the goose then hopped into an armchair. At no time in the past had the bird even tried to enter the house. We removed it to the bathroom, and Jimmy had just remarked that despite all the many inconveniences of the month-long freeze we could at least be thankful that there had never been even the briefest power cut, when all the lights went off. We had very little coal, very little paraffin, and no cut wood.
Thus it was sitting in overcoats
by candlelight in the freezing living-room that I learned in detail of recent happenings at Camusfeàrna, happenings of which I had heard only in the barest outline.
Terry Nutkins had left Camusfeàrna to become a zoo keeper in London, and Jimmy was now in sole charge of an increasingly complicated ménage.
A few weeks before, a mate for Teko had arrived from Griqualand in South-East Africa. This otter proved to be an enormous animal, bigger than Teko himself, extremely domesticated and affectionate towards human beings, and her introduction to Teko had presented none of the problems we had anticipated. Placed in accommodation adjoining his, so that they might become accustomed to each other’s voices and smells before closer acquaintance, she had brushed aside these formalities by climbing into his enclosure during the night, and in the morning they were curled up together in his bed. This happy and promising situation was cut short by her sudden and then unexplained death only two days before my homecoming. She had been healthy and in high spirits in the evening, and when Jimmy had gone in to her in the morning he had found her dead but still perceptibly warm, curled up in Teko’s bed under the infra-red lamp, the tip of her tail in her mouth as though she had been sucking it – a habit, like that of Edal sucking her bib, that she had in life.
During the short weeks of her life with Teko, Mossy and Monday had discovered their unrivalled powers of escape from any enclosure in which they might be confined, and on more than one occasion all four animals had been found together in Teko’s pool. It would, perhaps be truer to say that Monday had discovered her powers of escape and had somehow coerced her moronic consort into cooperation in such matters as combining their strength to move heavy stones and taking alternate shifts in digging the long tunnels that she planned. Even then, owing to his greater size and absolute absence of initiative, Mossy often found himself left behind while she made her escape through some aperture too small to permit his passage. On this first evening of my return he was alone in the enclosure, but during the night she returned for him and from outside enlarged her latest tunnel until he could squeeze through. From then on, for the first three weeks of my stay, their capture and recapture became our major preoccupation, until at length I was forced to realize that nothing but a zoo cage could confine her, and I accepted defeat.
The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy Page 27