The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

by Gavin Maxwell

  I resisted the temptation to hug her or to do a jig where I stood. I thanked her, and walked out into the summer sunshine and the streets busy with people into whose world I seemed suddenly to have re-entered.

  14

  Return to Camusfeàrna

  Coming back to Camusfeàrna after so long I was conscious of two impressions, though by their very nature one was very much quicker to register than the second.

  It did not take long for me to realize that in the nineteen years of my occupancy I had never seen the house and its surrounds in such a state of damage and dereliction. An unusually wild and wet winter had combined with the presence of the host of livestock to leave hardly a single sheet of plaster boarding intact in the rooms we had built on to the old pine-panelled cottage, and even there the woodwork was in places deeply scarred by the marks of petulant paws. The plaster boarding was studded with actual holes, as though it had been under shell fire; only the claw and tooth marks surrounding these apertures showed that, by some curious feat of engineering difficult to comprehend, they too could be ascribed only to the drilling of determined dogs. The bathroom ceiling had collapsed under the weight of a cache of poodles temporarily stored in the loft above it; there were ten broken window panes and twelve broken window catches; not only the keys to all three outside doors were missing, but even those of the bathroom and the lavatory. Carpets and rugs had been so fouled that they had to be burnt; it was as though some omnivorous locust swarm had passed through the house on a mission of destruction.

  Outside, the situation was little better. The sea winds had whipped the white walls to a dirty grey, grown over in places with a powdery green fungus; the white post-and-rail fence in front of the house was broken in a score of places, and all along the dunes between the house and the sea lay rubbish dumps of rusty cans and bottles, exposed, perhaps, by the wind’s lifting of the sand that had originally covered our deep-dug pits. It had been a long time, too, since Camusfeàrna had housed a lusty male capable of digging one of those great graves for the unburnable detritus of the tinned food era. Worse, much worse, was a horror to which I am even more susceptible than most people – a remembered nausea going back over the long years to the Soay Shark Fishery and the day we discovered that sixteen tons of salted shark flesh had turned rotten in the closed brine tank. Here at Camusfeàrna someone had switched off the electric current to the largest of our deep freezes, and the fish inside were putrescent. In a final analysis I know now that it would take a finer olfactory sense than mine to distinguish between sixteen tons of rotten shark flesh and eight hundredweight of rotten haddock.

  A visible touch of squalor was added by the presence and activities, both excremental and by ‘footwork’, of some forty head of heavy black cattle, great gravid creatures who trampled every soft piece of ground into a squelchy mire of dung and mud. They forced the flimsy gates protecting our tiny enclave and munched the few remaining gladioli that persisted among the weeds of once orderly flower beds below the windows; they leaned or scratched themselves upon everything that could – and did – give way beneath their weight; they, or something equally heavy, had broken the timbers of the bridge that spanned the burn; they escaped into the surrounding forestry ground, so that Andrew Scot spent the great part of his time rounding them up and ejecting them. Camusfeàrna was in a mess, and the prevailing images were of mud, rust, and decay.

  So pervasive were these depressing pigments that it was some days before I began to see that there were others, completely conflicting with this scene, that could form quite another picture. By engaging, at a distance of thousands of miles, a temporary assistant whom I had neither interviewed nor even met, I had somehow stumbled upon perhaps the one person who could confront the whole situation not only without dismay but with confidence and even relish. Andrew Scot, whose letters over five years had been filed under the heading of ‘juvenile fan’ (they had not differed greatly in content from others whose authors I now know would have proved patently unsuitable) began to take shape as the ideal rescuer of Camusfeàrna in its sickness. The wild weather and the wet and the wind; the living conditions that had by now returned to the primitive; the absence of cinemas and social life; the enormously hard and often unpleasant work that every day involved; the daily weary plod up the steep hill path to Druimfiaclach, often ankle deep in mud and water, to collect our mail and heavy stores ordered from the village shop; the search for firewood along the desolate and chilling beaches in driving rain – these things were meat and drink to him, and never once did he complain or suggest that he might be happier elsewhere. To him everything seemed easy.

  Nor was this all. Despite his detailed knowledge of the terrible injuries that both Edal and Teko had inflicted upon people in the past, and the obvious risk to himself, his aim and desire was to be able to handle them, to take them for walks, to be on terms with them that would not be those of a zoo-keeper in charge of dangerous animals. This knowledge came to me by a then not unexpected, but still disconcerting question: ‘When do I start taking the otters out for walks?’ I replied, ‘Never, as far as I’m concerned – I’m the only person they’ve never threatened and has no fear of them. I’m not going to expose anyone else to what might be terrible injury.’

  But he wouldn’t take no for an answer; in fact he fought to achieve a situation of grave potential danger. He won his parents’ permission, and the only remaining obstacle was my own. In the end I too had to give it.

  It was eight months since I had had any personal contact with either Edal or Teko, and I myself was far from certain of my reception. I began with Teko; because, as I described very early in this book, I had a strange and reassuring momentary reunion with him in November 1966. So after the first few days at Camusfeàrna, days devoted to reorganizing my forces after the multiple mishaps of the past weeks, I went out one blustery but sunny morning to re-establish contact with Teko.

  He was not visible in his enclosure, so I knew that he must be asleep in his house. I opened the gate and called him, and an answering, welcoming chirrup came from the darkness beyond his half-closed door. I waited and called again, and after a minute or so he walked out a little uncertainly into the unconfined world that he had not seen for more than four years. The right hand side of his face was swollen and his right eye completely closed; he looked a sick animal, unhealthily fat, and plainly suffering from an exacerbation of one of the tooth socket infections that had periodically bedevilled the lives of both these West African otters. He appeared bewildered and lost, but as he came nearer and caught my smell he began talking again – the little joyful, affectionate cries that I had not heard for so long. I bent down and put out my hands to him, and a moment later he was nuzzling my face with his wet nose and bristly whiskers, pushing his little monkey fingers into my ears and nose, and redoubling his cries of love and joy. I responded to him emotionally; what, I thought, had I done to deserve this warmth of continuing trust and devotion. I had confined him for four years; I had deprived him of the human society to which as a baby he had been conditioned by no will of his own; I had even at one point determined to send him to a zoo and into the possibly unloving care of strangers. I had betrayed him, and because our common language was so limited I had not even been able to explain to him the reasons for which I had done all these things.

  This, our first walk together for so long, was a sad and guilt-ridden half-hour. Teko, clearly in pain with something akin to acute toothache as we know it, was confused and bewildered by the half-remembered outside world, and would hardly stray from my feet. Every few yards he would stop me to seek fresh reassurance, fresh loving conversation; he would not swim nor take delight in any of his old haunts, whether still, placid pools to explore or the stimulus of white water in cataract. At that moment it was me he needed and me only, and all else was subordinate. When I took him home to his house his only concern was that I should not leave him alone again. What torture the human species inflict upon their ‘pets’.

  In an
y other community it might seem strange to call upon a distinguished doctor to advise upon the condition and treatment of an animal, but this would be to ignore the personality of Dr Dunlop. Our local (fifty miles by road and sea-ferry) vet, Donald MacLennan, who had tended the otters with such miraculous skill for eight years, was on holiday, and so it was the doctor whom I consulted. He made a characteristically quick and accurate decision as to the antibiotic to be used, and in five days Teko was once more a healthy and active otter with an interest in all around him.

  Thus my second walk with him was very different from the first. True, he stayed closer to me than he had once been used to do, but he remembered his old haunts and he made for them, he chased fish and porpoised in the calm reaches of the river, emerging every few minutes to stand up against me and apparently thank me with squeaks of pleasure, depositing a heavy skin-load of water on my already soaking trousers.

  It was only when I brought him back to the house that difficulties began. It was a conflict of wills, and one that took me more than an hour to resolve. Teko simply would not re-enter his enclosure. He was tired, having taken more exercise than he had done for four years, and it was plain that he wanted nothing more than to curl up in his blankets under the infra-red lamp, but he would not voluntarily become a captive again. Time and time again he would come to the gate in the wooden paling and put his face in, talking all the time in low whimpering tones either to himself or to me, but nothing I could do would persuade him to come far enough in for the gate to be closed behind him. Gone were the days of harnesses and of leads; nothing could succeed but cajolery, and cajole I did, using every ruse I knew. Every time that I called to him he answered, with a small variation on his usual welcoming note, a variation I had not heard before, and which registered as plainly as articulate speech both protest and reproof. Just outside the gate he rolled and rubbed himself in the grass, movements that had always been a prelude to sleep, while I called and called, and Andrew Scot, sitting as sentinel on the steep hillside above us, was driven almost demented by devouring hordes of midges.

  Some change of tactics was clearly a necessity; I stopped calling, went into his house and sat down on his bed below the heating lamp. After a few minutes the initiative had significantly changed; now it was he who was calling to me with increasing urgency, and I would not answer. His voice changed to the note, between a whistle and a squeak, with which an otter cub calls for parents whom it cannot find. It came nearer and nearer, and it held an audible and anxious question mark. I remained obstinately silent, and suddenly his face looked round the door. Instead of retreating again now that he had established my whereabouts, as I had half feared, he came bouncing across the floor, chattering with pleasure, and climbed up beside me, going through all his rituals of love and affection as though it were months since he had seen me. I fell in with his mood, and gave the full repertoire of reassurance that he had known in the distant days when he was a cub; blowing into his fur as though it were a woollen glove on a white winter’s day; taking the tips of his little monkey fingers between my lips; responding to his nose against my mouth by an exchange of saliva. All very well, I thought, as his heavy, shiny body squirmed and wriggled all over me, but how was I to get myself out without employing some trick that would destroy his confidence in me. But I had completely misjudged the situation; he was like a child who, scarcely stifling its yawns, protests that it is far too early to go to bed, but who will when tucked up by a parent figure fall instantly asleep. Teko was in bed, he had received his equivalent of being tucked up and kissed goodnight, and I doubt whether I could have called him out again had I tried. My cautious, stealthy attempt to leave unnoticed was wholly unnecessary; he was occupied only with the question of finding the most comfortable position for sleep, and he had found it before ever I closed the gate behind me.

  I had achieved at least part of what I had dreamed of on that wild autumn evening the year before; I had restored at least a measure of freedom and contentment to this creature that had once been a companion at Camusfeàrna, and neither he nor I were captives any longer. From that day on, as I took him up to the waterfall or out to the island beaches of white sand, watching him swim and dive in the glass-clear water of the ebb tide, some of the colour of the Camusfeàrna landscape began to come back for me.

  Within a week of this total reunion with Teko I began to realize that my own image of Camusfeàrna could not be truly re-created without a similar restoration of my relationship with Edal. I did not know whether this was possible, but I was prepared to risk much to find out. For five and a half years no human being had touched her, for five and a half years she had not seen beyond the confines of her small enclosure. No one understood what had caused the explosions of rage and violence that had periodically punctuated her record of affection and good humour. Yet the facts were there; she had inflicted terrible injuries, and had at last, early in 1962, broken even Jimmy Watt’s nerve, by chasing him into the rafters of his own room and holding him there, screaming her rage at every attempt he made to move. From then on the history of Camusfeàrna with all its vicissitudes and its multiple occupants, had left me no opportunity to try to reestablish contact with her myself; and if I am to be honest I must confess that I think that when Jimmy became afraid of her I did too, because I knew that in all other things but this one Jimmy feared so little. But I knew, too, that she had never given me, personally, any cause to fear her, and I knew clearly that I could not respect myself or see Camusfeàrna whole again if I did not try to do for her what I had succeeded in doing for Teko. Both had, by the human killing of their parents when they were infants, been conditioned to unnatural dependence upon humans and their company, and both had been deprived of it because when they became adult they had behaved like wild animals instead of like well brought up Pekinese dogs. If their behaviour had been bewildering to us, ours must have been even more so to them; they had both received life sentences for actions, which by the very hysteria that characterized them, were probably unremembered.

  I thought about all this, and I saw that if I postponed from day to day any positive action towards restoring her old status the project would become part of the pervading decline, the atmosphere of business unfinished and abandoned, that had stained the whole Camusfeàrna picture over the past five years. So on Sunday 10 September I determined to take her out the next day.

  The decision may have been compulsive, but I think the preparations and safeguards showed an adequate degree of foresight. It would have been irresponsible, in view of her history, to risk her meeting strangers on the beaches, so we arranged that Andrew should sit on the hillside in a position to command visually both approaches to the Camusfeàrna bay and warn any unexpected visitors that there was a potentially dangerous animal loose on the beaches. He was to follow my progress with binoculars, and in the event of my receiving any gross injury he was to regain the house and telephone to the doctor at the village five miles away. For my own safety I laid out dressings, including surgical needle and thread, on the bathroom table. As an afterthought I added a hypodermic syringe and cocaine solution. As an emergency measure, that proved so mercifully unnecessary, I equipped myself with an item which I cannot understand why we never thought of before – a pot of pepper. Any attacking animal of Edal’s size could, I thought, be rendered completely helpless by this means.

  There were three ways to take Edal from her quarters into the outside world. One, which was out of the question because of the amount of objects that could be destroyed by an interested and inquisitive otter, was through the long prefabricated room that had been Jimmy’s, and which led into the lobby. The second led directly into the lobby itself, and thence to the open air. The third was a new gate in the wooden paling, leading out on to the sand dunes, which Alan MacDiarmaid had made a few days before – while I was bringing myself to the boil, as it were, about the liberation of Edal.

  When Andrew was positioned and the moment came to open this gate and call her out I rememb
ered what Malcolm and Paula Macdonald had said to me when Edal first came to Camusfeàrna eight long, wild years before: ‘Let her come to you; don’t force yourself on her. Just ignore her, and she’ll make friends with you.’

  So I opened the gate to the dunes and called her as I had used to long ago – ‘Whee-ee! Ee-eedal! Whee-ee!’ There was a pattering of paws in the tunnel that protected her sleeping quarters from the wind, and suddenly she was there beside me – but much more interested in the mechanism of the gate than in me. She felt all around the hinges with her hands, went inside again to investigate them from another angle, and then suddenly set off on a tour of inspection of the premises of the house. Everything was new to her, everything had to be investigated with the thoroughness and attention to detail of an insurance company’s detective. After only a few yards she arrived at the broken down jeep standing at the end of the work shed. She went underneath it and remained there for a long time, feeling everything with her fingers as if she were about to prepare a report on the condition of the vehicle. It must have been five minutes before she emerged, emitting one of her refined and lady-like sneezes (often actually stifled by the hand), and climbed up into the driver’s seat. She fumbled with switches, descended to the floor to insert her fingers round the shafts of the brake and clutch pedals, and suddenly appeared standing on the driver’s seat, her hands on the steering wheel, peering over the bonnet as if to test visibility. She left the car with an expression that suggested the words, ‘Make a note to censure whoever was in charge of that one’, and went on to an upturned dinghy that had suffered damage to several planks during a winter storm. She disappeared underneath it and was out of sight for several minutes; only an occasional probing finger appeared to be testing damaged woodwork. At last she emerged, climbed up, and made her way along the keel ridge, using both fingers and face to assess the situation. Satisfied anew that someone had blundered, she left the dinghy and began to follow me toward the sea, but suddenly she turned back. The work shed itself, which she had never even seen, demanded a full survey.