The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

by Gavin Maxwell

  So, in the afternoon, we returned from Kyle on one engine. This gave us eleven or twelve knots; enough, anyway to confront the north-running flood tide in the narrows of Kylerhea. We came down past Glenelg, and a mile or two north of Polar Star’s moorings, close in under the huge cliffs, we saw mackerel ‘rushing’ at the surface. This happens when their great shoals have pushed up their prey, the fry of their own and other species – called in this part of the world ‘soil’ – to the absolute limit, so that the pursuit is taking place almost above water. The effect to the onlooker is that of an intermittent moving flurry of white spray, often iridescent, and to those who depend upon fish for food, it holds an irresistible and intrinsic excitement.

  This was the first evidence we had had that the mackerel were still in the area; they arrive in June or early July and leave, with the tourists, in early or late September, according to weather conditions. Apart from salmon heads and tails, and leaving aside a staple diet of eels, mackerel were the favourite food of the otters, and since the mackerel were still there, and I had invested in deep freezes, I had obviously to make the most of this opportunity.

  We had two ‘darrow’ lines aboard (thirty fathoms of line, with a tail of twenty hooks on cat-gut, baited with dyed hens’ feathers) and we set to work to take what mackerel we might from that shoal that was possibly the last of the season – so that the deep freezes would be full for the winter.

  The results of that twenty minutes’ fishing were little short of fantastic. There were moments when we lost the shoal, but always we found it again after a slow quartering of the ground, and time and time again we hauled in a wildly gyrating darrow holding between ten and nineteen (this was Alan’s, and, I think, a Camus-fearna record) flipping, flapping, fish whose coloured bars of lapis lazuli blue and emerald green took me back to my childhood in Galloway, where we trolled for these same fish with a single bait and a day’s catch of thirty was worthy of note. Now we were sometimes taking in thirty mackerel in one minute, and by the time we were finished and had finally lost the shoal we had more than a hundredweight of fish.

  We started off on our one engine for the mile-distant moorings of Polar Star. About halfway we found a fulmar petrel in our path on the still sea, and he seemed unable to rise. He paddled awkwardly away from the Polar Star’s course, but seemed incapable of taking wing. I said to Alan that we ought to rescue this derelict, and he set off in pursuit of it in an inflatable rubber dinghy while I stood off with Polar Star. It was, by any standards, a comic performance; no matter how closely the rubber dinghy could approach the fulmar, the bird could turn quicker than the boat and I could hear Alan’s rich flow of invective across the few hundred yards of smooth sea that separated us. But in this situation, as in all others, Alan would not accept defeat, and after a quarter of an hour he was back on board Polar Star with the helpless but protesting fulmar. Protest, with fulmars, is direct and unequivocal – they shoot out from their mouths a liquid so nauseating and noxious in smell as to deter all but the most hardened ornithologist or would-be helper. While I was tying the bird’s legs and wings he ejected a liberal dose of this hideous substance both over me and over the seat cushions of Polar Star’scabin, but at length I had him secured in a cardboard box, and we headed home for our moorings.

  We had more than a hundredweight of fish on board, and no very obvious means of carrying them to Camusfeàrna, a distance of half a mile by dinghy and half a mile on foot. I had a canvas yachting smock, and apart from my trousers that was all. We knotted the sleeves and the neck, slithered the great mass of fish inside this brimming receptacle and set off for Camusfeàrna, Alan carrying the fish on his heavily bowed shoulders, and I hugging tenderly to my breast the cardboard box containing the fulmar.

  We were less than fifty yards from the house, passing over the sand dunes, when Alan said, ‘Well, this certainly is an odd day – just look at that!’ Almost at our feet, shuffling helplessly among the rank bent grass of the dunes, was a Manx shearwater, the enormous scimitar wings appropriate to the long glide and wave-swoop of the albatross family to which both the shearwater and the fulmar belonged used now as a means of terrestrial locomotion. ‘Blown ashore,’ said Alan, ‘and they can’t take off except either from water or a height. Better take him in too, until we can let them both go in decent condition.’

  So we arrived, that evening at Camusfeàrna, with a fulmar in a cardboard box, and a Manx shearwater held in greaseproof paper (for the contact of human hand can remove the ‘water-proofness’ of a seabird’s plumage, so that it remains sodden after the bath it so ardently yearns for).

  We put them both in the bathroom, the shearwater in the shower compartment, and the fulmar at liberty. It was a very messy performance, the fulmar excreting, it seemed, far more than it ingested, and to the human nurses it was a painful one too. To start with, neither bird would eat of its own freewill; both were force fed, while one person held the beak open the other crammed in food and forced it down into the unwilling crop. The diet I had selected for each was different; I gave the fulmar fish and fish-liver and great quantities of bacon fat (remembering from the past how they had swarmed round sharks’ and whales’ livers and any fatty substance available) and the shearwater I fed upon mussels, fish-liver, and the black proteinous heads of limpets. We avoided all direct contact between their plumage and human hands, but despite this they refused to become waterproof. (A situation of shock or trauma is often responsible for this condition.) The fulmar – awkward, gauche, clumsy, and entirely without fear – would bathe with relish, stamping about in the water and making ritualistic gestures towards total submersion, but emerged completely sodden and draggled. The shearwater had forcibly to be bathed, appearing to loathe the water and everything to do with it; but they shared one characteristic in common – their twice-daily feeding was extremely painful. As the human ringers withdrew from the bird’s crop, the hooked, parrot-bill tips of their beaks would snap to with an entirely unexpected force, more than enough to draw blood, before one could snatch one’s hand away, and at the end of the first week my right hand was covered with innumerable scars.

  Since these two ocean-living birds were rarely if ever seen by the zoo-frequenting public, I suggested to a Scottish zoo that they should now take over from us until the birds were fit for liberation. The reply was that they might be prepared to take the fulmar for a time, but not the shearwater, as they were impossible to keep alive in captivity. At length we found an RSPCA official who was prepared to try; by that time we were apparently the only people to have kept a shearwater in good and increasing health for more than three weeks. In our case, too, both birds had to be defended from all the other predatory livestock at Camusfeàrna, and they added their own problems to a household that had become nothing less than an ill-ordered menagerie. We drove the birds 200 miles to the RSPCA in Aberdeen.

  Seaweed in the bathroom, banked up so that the fulmar’s breast could rest against it as he preferred, great sploshy, white, slimy bird-droppings between oneself and the bath, scattered fragments of fish liver underfoot, the stamping clumsy gait of the fulmar whenever he felt like moving; these are my recollections of the two birds whose triumphal release by the RSPCA a few weeks later was perhaps a vindication of all we had suffered on their behalf.

  The animal situation, with the added presence of these birds in the bathroom, was really extraordinary. There were so many creatures that one just couldn’t move. Any opened door was an automatic invitation to a vast and vocal avalanche of dogs, of all sizes and shapes, but with patently conflicting desires. The fantastic fertility of the household was crystallized for me by the discovery one day, previously unknown to anyone, of a litter of weaned kittens living in the loft above the lobby.

  With the necessity to make immediate and practical plans for the few animals that were my own, I circularized a short list of zoos with the following letter, every word I wrote rending me, for this was the overt end of Camusfeàrna:

  Dear X

&n
bsp; I am writing to you because it seems likely that this autumn I shall have to find a home for my two otters Edal and Teko, and I should like to donate them to a zoo which would keep them in the style to which they are accustomed.

  I suppose that, since the lioness Elsa’s death, Edal (of Ring of Bright Water) is probably the most famous living individual animal, and she would no doubt be a considerable draw to any zoo that owned her. Teko, also, has a very considerable fan public. Edal is Aonyx Capensis from Nigeria: Teko, from Sierra Leone, would appear to be of some unrecognized sub-species. They are not mated, and have to be kept separately.

  I am naturally anxious to secure ideal conditions for them. This means, basically, what they have now – indoor quarters heated with overhead infra-red lamps, and extensive and varied water-works outside. They are not happy with only static water, and require some system of fountains, waterfalls, etc. to keep them content, besides deep water to dive in. As these things are not easy for everyone to provide, I am writing now to a short list of zoos to find out who would be keen to try.

  Teko is fed mainly on fish and a few eels, though he is almost omnivorous; Edal will not eat sea fish other than mackerel, and is fed mainly on live eels. Though Teko is now the more playful of the two, they will both play for hours with any suitable object presented to them.

  I should be most grateful for your first reactions to the idea, so that I may narrow the field.

  The response to this circular was enthusiastic, and in August 1966 I chose a zoo whose council, I understood, had undertaken to provide completely suitable accommodation for the two otters Edal and Teko. This was to include a fountain in each pool, and numerous other amenities that would safeguard both the public and the otters. It seemed to me then that, even if this solution was distressing, I had solved the problem of how to close Camusfeàrna and ensure the welfare of the animals. These two things were by now my only targets, and I wanted to do them efficiently and cleanly.

  At first the zoo asked for the otters at the end of September; then, owing to labour difficulties, the date was postponed until mid-October. I left Camusfeàrna, and went to live within an hour’s drive of the zoo. In October the date was again postponed for a month, for the same reasons. It was December before I realized that the project had finally broken down.

  A zoo committee, I was now informed, had cancelled the expenditure necessary to construct even one fountain. I was also made aware for the first time that our original understanding that Edal would be ‘deposited’ for six months and then donated if she had settled into contentment in this new environment, was not acceptable to the zoo, who would now only take her as a direct and immediate donation, despite the entirely inadequate accommodation provided. Originally this was not a decision of the council but an untimely inspiration on the part of an official. It represented, anyway, a deadlock, and for me a peculiarly unpleasant one; I had screwed myself up to the point of parting with Edal after years of mutual esteem, and now I had to unwind on the instant like a broken watch spring.

  I did not feel that I had any choice other than to cancel all our arrangements, and to postpone the question of the otters’ future home for a further year. Only my absolute faith in Richard Frere’s ability to fight a financial rearguard action made this possible. The young lady, who, with her daughter and her uncountable animals, was in tumultuous occupation of Camusfeàrna, consented to tend the otters until some satisfactory and permanent alternative had been achieved; they were thus still at Camusfeàrna when I came back in August 1967.

  12

  Return of Mossy and Monday

  The otters were to remain at Camusfeàrna until some true solution had been found; it was on this unhappy but temporarily reassuring note that I left what little remained of the old Camusfeàrna in December 1966. So far I have written this factual narrative thousands of miles from the centre of its subject; living alone and abroad in a town previously unknown to me I have tried to reassemble in sequence the happenings that led to the disintegration of the Camusfeàrna myth, and, at the same time, to my determination to return to there at least for a last summer; to restore for a little while the situation as it once had been.

  In late April of 1967, far from the focus of my story, I received two telegrams from Camusfeàrna. The first read ‘Monday came home with the dogs today let me know what to do’; and the second, two days later, ‘Feeding female indoors pink spots nose injured by trap feeding male under lobby Alan [Alan MacDiar-maid, who had looked after Tibby] does not recognize stop confinement unnecessary writing.’

  She wrote, three times, but changes of address and postal uncertainties to a distant country made her narrative tantalizingly fragmentary; the first of her letters, describing the miraculous return after four years of two of our liberated indigenous otters, did not reach me.

  So it was with a sense of unreality that I read the second, as one might read an isolated serial of a detective story whose beginning one has missed.

  I often see them over at the islands and in the river estuary. The strange thing about them is that they are so active by day, return to the house at night to eat and to sleep. How wonderful it is to see them swimming and playing naturally in the sea and dashing around with each other quite free. Monday is always the leader. One good thing is that I think she would be far too clever to be caught in a trap for a second time… I have persuaded the owner of the trap at the lochan by Druimfiaclach to have it removed; which is as well, because the otters often go fishing in that loch. Her leg is quite healed now – only a small lump on the bone where it was broken. They have been like phantom otters for the last two weeks. I had a guest staying, and they only came to the bathroom at night for the fish. But after the guest left Monday came back to sleep, and on Sunday morning I got up very early and found her still sleeping in the shower compartment of the bathroom, on her back like Edal does, and her belly was moving – I thought she was pregnant before, but now I am certain. I don’t think she will have her cubs in the shower now, because there have been so many people about, and also I don’t think that the male (which we think is Mossy) would go in there to her, but I am hoping she will have them under the coatroom floor, where they spend a lot of time, but I do not know if they are using that box. [Four years before, we had cut a hatch in the coatroom floor and constructed below it a box for their benefit.] I dare not lift the hatch to see, in case they feel that I am invading their privacy.

  Monday eats as much fish as she wants in the bathroom, and then drags the rest out to Mossy. He is a bit of a glutton; he didn’t feed her when her leg was broken by the trap and she couldn’t fend for herself. Now she makes sure of her share; she eats hers first, taking no notice of us watching, and then drags the remains of a fish almost as big as herself across the linoleum, out of the door and then through the hole under it that leads to her quarters below the floor…

  Besides the tantalizing speculations as to what the first and missing letter might have contained (beyond the lines quoted above there were hints that Druimfiaclach was no longer untenanted, and that there had been a further and even more spectacular population explosion among dogs and donkeys at Camusfeàrna), I read this letter with mixed feelings, because about halfway through it I began to realize that the implications were far-reaching and contrary to the policy that I had formed with difficulty – the policy of spending one last summer at Camusfeàrna and then closing it completely, with the two original otters Edal and Teko as well provided for by a public institution as I was able to contrive. Now I was faced with the possibility that the returned and wounded wanderer, Monday, had come back to Camusfeàrna, still unafraid of man, with the intention of giving birth to her cubs in what had once been her home and shelter before she was even weaned – a home which I had intended to vacate with all its animals and leave to the wild winds of heaven. If a further race of domesticated otters, unafraid of their worst enemy, were to be reared there, I could not shed this aftermath of a past responsibility and leave them to be slaughter
ed for their skins as they assuredly would be. It seemed that Camusfeàrna would not let me go.

  In response to a telegram, a substitute for the missing letter arrived:

  The female otter arrived on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 18. The coatroom door to the field was open, and also the connecting door from the coatroom to the living room. Two of my dogs were coming and going, and the otter just walked in with them. I hurriedly fetched two omelettes which I had already cooked for Edal and Teko, and shut the doors. Then I sent you a cable to find out what you wanted done.

  [I had replied, ‘Please encourage and feed but make no attempt confine.’]

  I enticed her into the bathroom with a fish, and made her a bed in the shower compartment. She took up residence in this bed, and drank water from a bowl I held out to her. She was quite tame and unafraid; she allowed me to touch her, and I managed to put some chloromycetin cream on a large pus-discharging swelling on her right foreleg.

  Later that evening when I was outside I saw another otter’s head looking out from under the coatroom doorway. I went in and checked, but the female was still asleep in the shower compartment in the bathroom. The second otter couldn’t be tempted to come into the house but he (it was a male) was tame enough to take food from the hand. Now that there were two I at first thought I should open the bathroom door and let the female out, but on second thoughts I felt that her leg might require more attention, and I saw that her mate would not leave the house while she was inside. When I got your cable I did let her out, but she just ate her fish as usual and then went back to sleep. She seemed completely unconcerned about her mate. She would go to the bathroom door and look out and then push it shut before retiring to bed – from which I had the impression that she had used it before.