Monday could climb like a monkey, balance like a tight-rope walker, dig like a badger, move stones that were heavy to a human, jump like a squirrel, make herself thin as an eel or flat as a flounder; no device nor ingenuity of ours could make her once relent her first avowed intent to be a pilgrim. But most of all it was her brain, the systematic application of her many skills and her single-minded pertinacity, that convinced me of the uselessness of the struggle.
She had tasted freedom and she would have no more of prison. It was not, in the prevailing circumstances, an inviting prison or one calculated to lead to resignation; the glass tank frozen, all running water stopped, the small patch of ground now hard as rock and without vegetation. Outside were the sea and the islands with their many habitable lairs among the rocks and the bracken and the rooty heather; outside was the freedom of the waves and the white sands and the weedy rock pools. There was nothing I wanted more than to let her go free, but with the knowledge of all the other tame otters that because of their confidence in man had been shot or bludgeoned to death by the first strange human being they approached, I felt that I must confine her. It took three weeks to convince me that this was not only an impossibility but would be more cruel than any death she could meet in freedom.
One wall of their enclosure was formed by the Camusfeàrna house itself; the other three were of continuous, smooth, wooden paling five feet high. The only points at which the woodwork did present a completely smooth face were the right-angles formed by their own house, of the same height as the paling, and a further right-angle where a heavy straining-post had been boarded round. At the base of the fence we had sunk fine-mesh wire-netting into the ground, extending six inches vertically into the ground and then two and a half feet horizontally inwards. As a further safeguard against tunnelling, we had placed heavy stones along the greater part of the perimeter. This was the prison from which, during a time of bitter frost when the ground was frozen as hard as iron four feet underground, Monday escaped time and again with contemptuous ease.
At the beginning I thought naively that our only problem was to catch them, for I could not seriously believe in the impossibility of making the enclosure proof against escape. We constructed in the paling a foot-square drop-hatch that could be closed by the release of a string from an upper-storey window. I disposed a number of eels temptingly a yard or two inside the trap, and at dusk I sat down with the release-string in my hand to await developments. The otters arrived very soon after dark; they came and went between the eels and the hatch so that there was never a clear moment when both of them were inside simultaneously. Eventually I decided that to catch one was better than to catch neither, and I released the string when only Mossy was in the enclosure. I felt certain that Monday would come in to him during the night; in this I was right, but at the time I did not know that she would as certainly perform a rescue, and contrive somehow to extract her clottish companion from captivity before dawn.
During the night I could hear her whistling impatiently to him from outside and his peevish and fretful responses as he explained the patent impossibility of reaching her; at some time in the small hours these sounds ceased, and in my innocence I imagined her to have joined him in their house and settled down for the night.
In the morning they had both gone. She had indeed climbed into the enclosure, but only in order to move a few massive stones, tunnel under the wire-netting and liberate the captive.
The following night, having as I thought made all tunnelling projects impossible, I reset the trap and again sat at the window with the string in my hand. This time I had to wait much longer and it was Monday that I caught. The front door of the house, in temporary disuse, led directly into the enclosure, and I went out to her carrying peace offerings. She ran straight up to me, emitted a breathy, explosive sound of challenge, and gave my boot a sharp, symbolic nip. She then ran to the corner where the paling formed a convex right-angle, and began to shin rapidly up it with the powerful hunching movements of a bear climbing a tree. I had literally to push her down, while Jimmy ran for materials wherewith to form an unscaleable overhang at the top of this corner. In the end it looked as if it would challenge even a monkey’s capacities.
The next morning she had gone again. I attached pieces of slippery Formica to the paling at the points where she was wont to climb. Miraculously they gave her no pause. Every night she came brazenly into the trap, insolently confident of her ability to overcome or undermine any obstacle that I might set in the way of her escape before morning. Every day my preparations became more elaborate, and every day she mocked me. The trap was by this time automatic; an ingenious system of strings ensured that when she pulled at eels the hatch would close itself and at the same time ring the ship’s bell upon the gatepost. The whole of the area on which she had exercised her feats of climbing was covered by a great sheet of smooth metal, a relic of Teko’s first ill-fated pool, and the night after the appearance of this fresh puzzle we caught both Mossy and Monday. They were still there in the morning, and all the day through they slept in their house. I had no doubt in my mind that they were now captive for as long as we wished them to remain so. Twenty-four hours later they had once more vanished, this time by an ambitious tunnelling scheme that involved the moving of a stone weighing some sixty or seventy pounds.
We made only one more attempt. The following evening, just before dusk, Jimmy called to me that Monday had come in through the door of our new extension building and that he had closed it behind her. She came through into the living-room and began to explore, briskly and impatiently, ignoring us altogether, rather in the manner of a testy colonel inspecting company lines. Having exhausted the possibilities of floor-level she moved upwards, displaying a degree of acrobatic power that appeared hardly credible. In the same way that water finds its way downward between and around all obstacles by force of gravity, so she appeared to be borne upward by some like but contrary force concealed within her. High on the shelves she stepped daintily and gracefully amongst the bottles and tins and groceries; finding little to her liking, she returned to the floor with the same sinuously effortless movements, climbed on to the sofa and said something exceedingly rude to Dirk, and finally moved off to continue her researches in the new wing. When she entered the bathroom we closed the door behind her, intending to confine her there until we had secured Mossy. It was a sliding door; in less than three minutes she had discovered the principle of its operation and was back in the living-room.
We coaxed her back into the bathroom and this time secured the door so that there was no means of opening it.
Mossy did not return that night, and in the morning we found that Monday had chewed her way through the bathroom plaster-boarding and had already got to work on the woodwork that lay beyond it. She was, however, still captive against her will, and for the first time.
In the evening we caught Mossy, and brought Monday through to join him in their enclosure, which I believed to be now proof against any attempt at escape. During the night there was much whistling and the sounds of heavy stones being moved; at dawn I looked out from my window and saw Monday doing a high rope-walk along the top of the paling. She had not climbed up from inside, but had contrived her escape at ground-level and was now returning for her consort. In a further five minutes they were both on their way to the sea.
It was at this point that I abandoned the struggle, as much on humanitarian grounds as in the knowledge that by one means or another she would always outwit me. I hoped, but with little conviction, that Mossy and Monday would remain in the vicinity of Camusfeàrna and its islands, where they would be at least relatively safe from death at human hands. It was not until several days later, and after Lavinia had joined me from London, that I discovered how little grudge they appeared to bear us for our determination to make them captive, for they had taken up permanent residence under the floor of the new wing.
Their entry to this improbable refuge was under the door that now formed the principal e
ntrance to the house; here immediately below the threshold, was a small unboarded portion giving access to the space between floor and foundations. From this slit, some two feet long and four inches high, Lavinia found that she could call them at will to take food from her hand. The slit was divided in the middle by an upright plank; invariably at her call the two small faces, one blunt and one sharp, would peer out as though from letter boxes, and invariably it would be Mossy who was to the left of the upright and Monday to the right. This position they would assume at the first sound of her calling voice, and they remained completely indifferent to the tramp of human feet stepping over them to enter or leave the house.
Now that their freedom was established, it seemed to me that to encourage this unexpected domesticity we should take every possible step to make their self-elected quarters as luxurious as possible. Choosing a time at which they were both engaged with Lavinia outside, we cut a rectangle in the wooden floor of the room beneath which they had chosen to set up house, and sunk between it and the foundations a well-bedded and draughtproof kennel whose roof was formed by a raisable hatch in the floor of the room. This, to my surprise, they took possession of immediately, but they did not accord a like approval to other arrangements we had made for their comfort. With the idea of protecting them from the prevailing sea-winds we had built up earthworks that covered all the seaward-facing space between the new wooden wing and its foundations, thus leaving the otters only one common entrance and exit. We had forgotten an otter’s insistence upon alternative means of egress; the next morning earthworks had been efficiently tunnelled in two different places. The amount of labour that they had put into this work was, however, an encouragement to believe that they considered themselves to be perfecting otherwise ideal and permanent quarters.
At morning and before dusk they would, as I have said, come out to Lavinia’s call and take food from her hand, but as to where they went at night we had no knowledge until she followed them. It was a season of bitter cold; the days were for the most part still and bright with winter sunshine, but the nights were Arctic, and the burn was frozen right down into its tidal reaches, with a layer of ice that capsized as the tide went out and floated up to form a new and thicker layer as it returned. A little before dusk one evening Lavinia, who had been down to the burn to break the ice and draw water, heard them calling to each other at some little distance from the house. Following Monday’s small, urgent voice, she came upon them playing in a partly frozen pool, shooting under stretches of ice, and bobbing up where it ended, climbing on to it and rolling upon it, diving back and splashing as they sported together. Fearing that they would resent her intrusion, and read into it some further attempt at capture, Lavinia had approached them by stealth, crawling upon all-fours; only when they began to move on down the stream did she stand up and call to them, but they found in her presence no cause for any alarm. As they neared the tide she walked beside them, their heads now no more than silhouettes on a sea blanched by sunset colours, until suddenly a curlew rose before them with its rasping cry of warning, and in a panic they turned and raced back upstream and into the darkness. The next night again she followed them down the burn in the dusk, and lost them in the thickening darkness as they swam out towards the islands.
With the liberation of Mossy and Monday, something seemed to me restored to Camusfeàrna, something that had been lost for many months, for once again these were wild creatures free without fear of man and choosing to make their homes with him. As if to reinforce this mood, two of the wild geese suddenly returned after an absence of seven months; one of them was the great gander who had sired all the young of the previous year, and now on the very day of his arrival came straight up to us to take food from our hands. Somehow, with all this unwary confidence in mankind he had survived the autumn and the winter months and fallen prey to no wildfowler’s gun; perhaps he had joined some vast flock of wild grey geese and during his long absence from Camusfeàrna had taken his reactions from them. It is sad that for the otters there is no such safety in numbers; sad to think that Monday’s whole dynamic personality may be blotted out to appease momentarily the inner emptiness and frustration that causes the desire to kill.
Before me is a letter from Norway, telling of yet another pet otter done to death:
She was tame and she would follow me like a dog. The last days we used to go fishing in a nearby loch. She jumped about in the rowboat while I was pulling the oars. Now and again I left her alone in the loch, sure to pick her up again when I wanted her to stay at home. But this very morning a mason passing the loch on his way to work saw the kind and confident animal and gave her a kick with his heavy boot. I found her dead, resting on a pile of branches out in the water.
Destruction, empty and purposeless, unmitigated even by the strange intimacy that binds the archetypal hunter to his quarry. I hope that if ever again I write of Camusfeàrna the murder of Mossy and Monday may not mar the pages of my book.
RAVEN SEEK THY BROTHER
Foreword
This has been a difficult, sometimes painful, story to tell in its entirety, but I have done my best to be accurate both in fact and in date. Anyone who reads this will realize that the immediate sequel to Ring of Bright Water, The Rocks Remain, contained a certain amount of dissimulation which was unavoidable at that time, and which I hope to have dispelled by this full narrative. This is the history of Camusfeàrna and its satellite lighthouses during the past five years. It is easier, for many reasons, to write truthfully about animals than about human beings (and not only because the animals can’t retort that they are misrepresented) but with the minimal reservations and reticences that are only decent to the human species, I have done my best to tell the whole story.
To avoid confusion I have retained the name Camusfeàrna throughout, though with the necessarily precise placing of the two other lighthouses of Ornsay and Kyleakin it will be obvious to any interested reader that Camusfeàrna is Sandaig, by Sandaig Lighthouse, on the mainland of Scotland some five miles south of Glenelg village. The real name of the house on the road a mile and more above my coastal cottage is not Druimfiaclach (which means ‘the ridge of the teeth’) but Tormor, and the family who used to live there was called MacLeod – John Donald and Mary MacLeod and their children. The MacLeods have gone now and their sons are children no more, married and with families of their own. With the dropping of these aliases there goes, so to speak, the last of the open secrets.
Lastly, I should like to say that, despite apparent and almost uncanny evidence to the contrary, no part of this book was written with hindsight from the events described in the brief epilogue. This actual paragraph, the epilogue itself, and the title of the last Chapter, are all that have been added since 20 January 1968.
Gavin Maxwell
Kyleakin Lighthouse, ]uly 1968
1
The Rowan Tree
On a wild blustery afternoon in the late autumn of 1966 I stood on the steep hillside above the Highland seaboard cottage that I had written of in Ring of Bright Water as Camusfeàrna, and that had once been my home. The sky, the sea, and the white sand beaches between the islands half uncovered by the ebb tide, I recognized as from long ago, but only visually; they held for me nothing that I wanted to remember. The sharp, penetrating past images that knocked on the door of my conscious mind were almost wholly painful, and I tried hard to ignore them.
The sea was so dark a blue as to be almost black, the wave-crests short, white and vicious. A force nine wind was blowing in from the south-west, hustling great grey clouds that seemed to outrun each other so that they left between them gaps though which a bright white sunlight spotlit here a beach, here a hill, there an island. Across the Sound of Sleat, where a fishing boat was plunging deep with a high white foam about her bows, the foothills of Skye were dusted with snow, their summits dead-white against a dark grey sky. Gulls drifted on the wet wind, white too, but the air was too strong for them to pursue a steady course; they slanted, lifted, bank
ed and wheeled, calling raucously to each other as the wind-blasts blew them about. Out in the Sound, foam amid foam, a small school of whales passed – little creatures perhaps thirty feet long. Once I would have been intent, interested to recognize their species, their scientific name. As I looked at them now they seemed no more than a passing disturbance in the water, almost an intrusion.
I was looking down upon Camusfeàrna, and I believed that I was saying goodbye to it after eighteen years. Suddenly there came a sharp flurry of hail, I pulled up the hood of my duffel coat, and crouched back into the steep hillside. It gave no shelter; there was no shelter from any wind, and I knew it, suddenly and completely.
Abruptly a shaft of pallid but finely focused sunlight lit the house and the field below me; the house that I was leaving, as I thought, for ever. I tried, with a great effort, to remember it as I had first seen it – a weather-worn cottage within a stone’s throw of the sea, standing unf enced upon a green grass field, only the low marram-grown dunes between it and the breaking waves. Untenanted, deserted, waiting. I remembered how I had first come to live there; relying for furniture upon fish boxes and all the extraordinary riches that the sea would throw up after a south-westerly gale. Then, there was no water supply to the house, no telephone, no electricity, no road. I was a mile and a half below my nearest neighbours on the single track road, the family whom I have called MacKinnon, at Druimfiaclach. Like everybody and everything else they had gone; their little house of green corrugated iron stood empty, the once carefully tended flower garden overgrown with weeds and nettles, and now there was no occupied human habitation within five miles of Camusfeàrna.
The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy Page 28