The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

by Gavin Maxwell

  [She had indeed; it is a sliding door, and during my efforts to confine her four years earlier she had learned its difficult mechanism by heart.]

  It was difficult to get her to swim in the bath. All other enticements having failed, I got her to get her teeth firmly into a fish and just lifted her in by it. She immediately found herself facing the big mirror above the bath, and was fascinated by the otter she saw reflected there. She moved from side to side and chattered her teeth with annoyance when the other otter she saw did the same thing; then she started patting the glass with her hands. She seemed to have very definite ideas about how an otter hotel should be run. When she messed on the floor she would keep on tapping at the edge of it until, looking up at me and chattering her teeth, she persuaded me to clean it up.

  When she is well fed and contented she lies on her back and nibbles and sucks her ‘bib’, the loose skin on her throat, like Edal does and which you photographed so successfully in your previous books about the otters at Camusfeàrna. Then she goes to sleep on her back, with her legs in the air. Whatever has happened, she seems to consider herself a member of the household by right.

  Having a bath has been very difficult, because she has a habit of nipping one’s toes; not, I think, from aggression but from mischief – so I go into the bathroom only in Wellington boots. Having undressed down to these, one removes one boot and puts that foot in the bath. Have you ever tried balancing on one leg in a bathful of hot water trying to get an uncooperative boot off the other foot? It’s an experience only equalled by trying to get out of the bath afterwards.

  It was not until she had been in the bathroom for four days that she seemed to wake up to her surroundings and began a tour of inspection. By this time she had put on a lot of weight, and she was much stronger and remarkably agile. She started by climbing up and throwing everything off the shelves, trying everything with her teeth and then scrutinizing it before disdainfully discarding it. Her face when she bit into a cake of soap is something I shall always remember.

  Her tour de force was her assault on the mirror-fronted cupboard above the washhand basin. Having got on to the basin, she paused for quite a long time to examine the new otter face confronting her, apparently comparing it with the other otter face she had seen in the mirror above the bath. Then, finding that it smelt of nothing ottery, she opened the cupboard door. She held on to one of the shelves with her left hand, and used her right to throw out all the contents on to the floor. She wore the expression of a small child, who, strapped into a pram, throws out all its toys to see what effect it will have.

  Nothing would make her leave the bathroom, and she seemed frightened of going out, so I cut a hole in the wall [plaster board and wood] so that she could come and go without fear of being shut out. For the next two weeks, that is up till now, she and her mate have been away all of each day, returning at night – she to the bathroom and he to his quarters under the floor.

  It was some time before I found out how she had come to be wounded. I had suspected that she had been caught in a trap, but I didn’t know anything definite until I was having a cup of coffee with the new people at Druimfiaclach. The lady of the house told me about an otter that her son had trapped. He had set a trap at the edge of the lochan below the house, and one day they saw something moving in it. Her son went down to investigate, and found that it was an otter. As soon as he opened the trap, instead of trying to run away she flew at him, and he fought her off with a stick. She returned to the attack, and again he defended himself with the stick. Then she made off, but turned round several times, as if trying to make up her mind whether to have another go at him. All this was five days before she arrived at Camusfeàrna, and she must have been unable to fend for herself all that time, because the trapper said that when he saw her she was in good condition, but she was very thin when she got here. How lucky that she remembered where to go in time of trouble, and that I was here to look after her.

  It was, as nearly as I can calculate, just four years since either Monday or Mossy had visited Camusfeàrna house or come within sighting distance of it – for that brief appearance at the waterfall in the summer of 1964 had clearly been contrary to Monday’s intentions – but the description contained in this letter left me in no possible doubt that these were the same two otters that I described in detail in The Rocks Remain. Mossy, with his stupid, timorous, egotistical nature; Monday with her miraculous powers of climbing and her apparent comprehension of all basic mechanical principles. In the very last sentence of that book I had written, ‘If I ever again write of Camusfeàrna, I hope that I shall not have to write of the death of Monday, her whole dynamic personality wiped out as a result of the inner emptiness that is the desire to kill.’ I have not, at least, had to do that. Injured and unable to fend for herself she had remembered and returned; she must have recalled that besides the free fish and the affection there had been prolonged and forcible confinement to fight against, but in seeking the sanctuary of Camusfeàrna in her present distress she had perhaps remembered also how constantly and contemptuously she had outwitted us, and felt confident of doing so again should the necessity arise.

  So far away from Camusfeàrna, the last paragraph of the letter gave me a deep nostalgia for what I had once known. ‘Camusfeàrna is more beautiful than ever now; there are great banks of primroses, bluebells, violets, and a great profusion of wild flowers everywhere.’

  But the letter had a PS. ‘A poltergeist has come here; yesterday it broke two windows; one while I was sitting on the corner of the sofa you yourself normally occupy, and one in the kitchen while I was washing up.’

  Watchman, what of the rowan tree?

  13

  Many Maladies

  I came back to England on 18 June 1967, having engaged by correspondence only and without interview a temporary employee to help me at Camusfeàrna during my final summer there with the otters. This was Andrew Scot, a boy who had written to us periodically over the past five years, but whom I had never met, and who was now leaving school at the age of seventeen. Meanwhile I had to wait in London while the young lady who had been occupying Camusfeàrna arranged to move with her small daughter and her innumerable livestock (which now included two female donkeys said to be in foal – or is it in hinny? – to her pony which had been erroneously believed to be a gelding) to a house near to the village.

  I began immediately to attack the problem of a final home for the otters, for the experiences of the previous year, and the final collapse of arrangements with the chosen zoo, had taught me that time could not, in this respect, be treated as expendable. I thought that Camusfeàrna as a household must be closed before the onset of winter, and negotiations must be begun at once.

  I had given many hours of thought to this while I was still abroad, and I had returned with the outline of a plan. I did not now believe any zoo to be the answer; the great majority suffer from space restriction, and even with the sum of money voted by that council it would be difficult anywhere to secure what I would regard as ideal conditions. So I ruled out all zoos, and I had simultaneously to dismiss the possibility of a private home, for the necessary type of eccentric millionaire just did not exist.

  This seemed to leave me with one possibility only – someone who would invest money in giving the animals perfect living conditions because they would earn him high dividends which would be immediately calculable – unlike a zoo, in which it is of necessity difficult to assess the earning value of any particular animal exhibited.

  Lord Bath’s lions at Longleat… the Duke of Bedford’s great park at Woburn – but what had Woburn in the animal line that could really compete with Longleat’s lions? I doubted whether the Longleat lions would have been so great a draw had not the public become lion-conscious through the story of Joy Adamson’s lioness Elsa and after all, Edal had come near to outselling Elsa, and Edal was still alive whereas Elsa was dead. True there were very great rarities at Woburn – European bison and almost the whole world’s popula
tion of the otherwise extinct Pere David’s deer, but these were not individually famous animals with a fan public of thousands as were Edal and Teko.

  So I came home with the half-formed plan of approaching Woburn, a plan strongly reinforced by two happenings during my first few days in England. The first was being told of a cartoon in a daily paper showing two vans arriving at Woburn, one labelled ‘lions’ and the other ‘Christians’, with the caption ‘Anything Bath can do Bedford can do better’. The second was the discovery that an acquaintance, Michael Alexander, held certain concessions, specifically to do with animals, at Woburn, and that there was at least a chance of these concessions being extended.

  Michael was enthusiastic, and he drove me down to Woburn little more than a week after I had returned from abroad. He led me through Pets’ Corner, where an improbable miscellany of animals both wild and domestic – but all sublimely ignoring the public who threaded their way between them – were brooded over by a benign and motionless vulture perched majestically upon the wooden railings of a small central enclosure. Three glorious macaws, free and untrammelled, flew from tree to tree above us or around us, the fantastic splendour of their plumage lit by a bright afternoon sun. We passed through Pets’ Corner and out beyond it to an undeveloped site that Michael had visualized as a possible home for the otters. The moment I saw it I knew that here, if it was obtainable, could be the otters’ paradise. We were looking out over a small lake, heavily over-grown with waterlilies, a roundish but not quite round lake perhaps 65 yards one way by 50 the other. The water, I was told, was some twelve feet deep in the middle, shelving to five feet at the edges. There was plainly a water system of inlet and outlet somewhere, for among the waterlilies near to us I caught sight of a golden orfe, and further out there were some small fish jumping, too far away for identification. We were standing in a colonnade of wooden pillars and arches, decorated in the Chinese manner, that stretched round almost half the lake’s circumference, an ornamental covered passageway separated from the lake by a few feet of grass bank. The official name of this spectacular ‘folly’ was the Chinese Dairy, built in spacious days of long ago, as a separate jewel in the Bedford coronet; and just behind us where we stood a large room opened off the colonnade. Here was the perfect situation in which even the most cautious businessman would surely feel justified in a lavish outlay, because the otters would be an isolated exhibit which the public would pay individually to see. It was only unfortunate that the incompatibility of Edal and Teko presented its own problem, for the lake would have to be divided in two.

  We planned artificial islands and fountains, the position of the heated sleeping quarters; in fact, though this was no more than a reconnaissance, we covered almost every detail. It remained for Michael to acquire concessions over this part of the estate that was not at the moment earning any significant money.

  Having reached the stage at which there was little left to discuss, Michael took me on one of his safari trips through the great park. This vast and magnificently unspoilt piece of countryside, 3,000 acres enclosed by no less than thirteen miles of high brick wall, contained ten species of deer, living in a completely wild state in beautiful surroundings – to say nothing of both European and American bison, wallabies, llamas, alpacas, guanacos, breeding pairs of the ostrich-like rhea, and sarus cranes. The running of safari trips in huge four-wheel drive vehicles, so that the public could see all these splendours at close quarters, much as they might do in an African game reserve, had been Michael’s earliest venture at Woburn, and met with a richly deserved popularity. I felt as though I were slipping back into an earlier century, a century before the beginning of industrialization, when much of England must have been like this, great sweeps of grassland with noble oaks and herds of grazing deer. Robin Hood and his green-clad men would have seemed no more out of place here than the deer themselves. Apart from the fascination of the animals, many allowing the safari car to approach within a few yards of them, it was the lack of any carving up of this great piece of land that held its own exhilaration – that and its silence; and I could well understand how even those with no intrinsic interest in animals could find in a half-hour’s safari tour a magic world in complete contrast to the wasteland of brick and stone and mechanical noise in which so many are condemned to live. On my return from the safari through that green parkland of quiet and peaceful animals, I felt that even though this was basically a commercial enterprise it was also a deeply-needed public service.

  Meanwhile I had begun to produce a succession of curious and alarming physical disorders. Not long after my return from North Africa I sat down at my desk one morning to make some telephone calls. When the first number answered I was astonished to find that, with no premonitory symptoms, I had literally no voice at all; I could not even whisper. The next day I felt thoroughly ill, with headache and sickness and digestive troubles. I began to treat myself with antibiotics, but when after five days Ledermycin had proved ineffective I sent for the doctor. While he was examining me I noticed that he spent a great deal of time over my left lung, and when he had finished he said, ‘I’ve no doubt that a change of antibiotic will soon clear up the general condition, but there are some crepitations from the base of your left lung and I think you have an early pneumonia. I should like an X-ray report as soon as possible.’

  I replied, ‘Well, I suppose I’m a classic for lung cancer; I’m the right age, and I smoke eighty cigarettes a day.’

  He said, ‘I’d like to make an appointment with the chest clinic by telephone now.’ He did so, but he could not obtain one until Friday, and it would be the following Tuesday before he would know the results. I asked him what was the worst that the X-ray could reveal, and he answered, ‘Well, just what you said yourself.’ Pressed upon the probability of this finding he would say neither that it was unlikely nor likely, but when I asked him whether he would tell me the absolute truth after the results were in his hands, he replied, ‘Yes – you are one of my patients with whom I should feel that to be the right course of action.’

  The time between Wednesday and Friday passed very slowly indeed, and during those two days I became absolutely convinced in myself that the findings would be positive. I was, as I had said to the doctor, a classic case for the disease, and now that the idea was in my mind I recognized that I had many of the textbook symptoms. Millions of people have been through this time of suspense and for very much longer periods than I, but I have never seen any subjective account of it, so it is perhaps worth recording my own reactions. Primarily, I felt it impossible to see or to talk to anyone who was not or had not been a cancer patient – this seemed a private, shut-off world that would be bewildering and frightening to anyone who had not shared it. To a few people whom it might affect I told the bare facts, but I did not feel able to discuss them. Because of this feeling of being outside and shut off from the normal world I cancelled all engagements until after the following Tuesday, when I should know the details and the prognosis. Unexpectedly, a complete resignation, one which I suppose might well have proved temporary, came very early on; I was concerned less with the fact that I had cancer (as I had convinced myself beyond all reasonable doubt) than with the alterations to plan and programme that this would involve; how Camusfeàrna would be run until the otters were moved to Woburn; who would move them; the general ordering of my affairs. Fear and despair would, I suppose, have come later, but during those forty-eight hours I felt neither.

  At half past one on Friday afternoon I presented myself at the chest clinic, and after the X-ray photographs had been taken I was on the point of leaving when the radiologist said, ‘Normally speaking you would have to wait for the findings until next week, when you would receive them from your own doctor. But that would keep you in suspense for another four days, so if you would care to wait for a while we may be able to tell you something today. That is if you would prefer it.’

  I said that I would certainly prefer it and that I was very grateful indeed, which was a
n understatement. I sat in the waiting room reading back numbers of Punch; most of them contained political jokes whose significance was unintelligible to me, for I had been unable to follow home news during my six months in North Africa. There was a ‘No Smoking’ sign; I very much wanted a cigarette, arguing to myself that if I had cancer of the lung one more could not make any difference, and if I had not the same applied. But to walk even as far as the door to the street might mean that I missed the news when it came, and I sat on. As I considered my position I realized that only in the case of a negative result would the clinic be likely to tell me anything; if it were positive, it seemed to me, they would somehow arrange matters so that the news was broken to me by my own doctor. In this case, therefore, no news would be bad news. At the end of half an hour nothing had happened. There were three other patients in the room; looking at them I tried to determine from their demeanours whether they too were waiting for news all-important to them, but their faces told me nothing. I hoped that mine was as impassive.

  After a little more than three-quarters of an hour a nurse came in and looked questioningly round. ‘Mr Maxwell?’ I stood up and she beckoned me into the corridor.

  ‘Doctor said to tell you that your X-ray plates are perfectly satisfactory.’

  There was a Delphic quality to this utterance, and I was desperate for certainty.

  ‘Does he mean,’ I said carefully, trying very hard to keep my voice to a casual tone, ‘that the quality of the plates is satisfactory, or that my condition is satisfactory?’

  She beamed at me from behind heavy horn-rimmed spectacles. ‘He means that he can find no trace of any pathological condition. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with you.