Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  In fine weather the walk down the rugged track that began at Tormor was always an adventure. But at night, or in driving wind and rain, with a loaded rucksack on one’s back and only a tenuous foot-track over rough and treacherous ground to guide you, the final stage of the journey to the tiny enclosed paradise of Sandaig resembled some fiendish commando exercise. On one occasion Gavin was forced to crawl on his hands and knees to avoid being swept away like a leaf in the gale; on another, trying to climb up to Tormor in a blizzard, he stumbled on a stag sheltering from the driving snow behind a rock shelter, and when it ran off he gratefully took its place under the rock, the smell of the stag pungent in his nostrils.

  A sojourn at Sandaig in those days was not lightly undertaken. Kyle of Lochalsh, the nearest town with more than one shop, was some thirty to forty miles away by road. Supplies from Kyle reached Sandaig along the same complicated sea and land route that brought human visitors; but unlike the human visitors, the supplies – paraffin, potatoes, matches, sausages and virtually every essential that could not be gathered from the natural surroundings of Sandaig itself – had to be humped down the hill-track in a bulky and often exceedingly heavy rucksack. Orders for further provisions had to follow the same route in reverse, and were subject to unpredictable improvisation. Once, after sending an SOS for methylated spirits for the Primus stove, Gavin received in return a squidgy package and a note which read: ‘Sorry no methylated spirits but am sending two pounds of sausages instead.’

  In the early years, more from necessity than choice, Gavin attempted to live a life of at least partial self-sufficiency at Sandaig. Before myxomatosis wiped them out, rabbits were plentiful in the warren in the sand dunes behind the house, and Gavin could shoot them from the back scullery window. At other times he would forage the sea-shore for edible shellfish, the cockles, mussels, limpets and periwinkles that thrived there, or lower a lobster-pot below the tide line around the islands to catch not only lobsters but the big edible crabs that frequented the weedy jungle of the sea-bed. Each season brought its own harvest. In early summer there were gulls’ eggs to collect out on the bird islands, and for a few weeks in high summer mackerel could be caught in abundance with darrow-lines. Very rarely salmon and sea trout came into the lower reaches of the burn, though Gavin seldom succeeded in landing any. Autumn brought one last wild culinary treat for the Sandaig table – the huge shiny brown mushroom known as Bolitus edulis, which grew among the tangle of alder woods higher up the burn, and was the only kind of fungus which Gavin knew to be non-poisonous and worth the trouble to look for.

  When eventually Gavin’s account of life at Sandaig brought him fame and fortune as a champion of animals and the wild, a number of his readers were dismayed that he killed rabbits and gathered birds’ eggs and cockles for food, and wrote to him to protest. Aware of the paradox, Gavin defended himself strenuously:

  Some of these people totally failed to realise that when anybody lives under the conditions that I lived under at Sandaig, then you are part of the ecology and there will be times when you must kill for your food. I have letters from all over the world written in sometimes violent and hysterical terms asking me how I can condone this, that or the other – why do I catch fish, for example, or shoot rabbits, and isn’t it horrible? I could show you letters from people who happily feed processed whale or cow meat to their pet cats and dogs, and people who won’t use leather goods, and yet drink milk and don’t stop to think what happens to the bull calves that are born to dairy herds, and so on. I have a letter from a woman who wants to breed vegetarian lions and another from a Swedish spinster who will kill nothing – she even ushers flies out of the house, and the fact that she is ushering her flies out to die of cold is perhaps less significant than the fact that she has never lived as I have in countries where flies literally kill children.

  The nearer you are to some status in a local ecology the more you can understand the relationship between any one species – including your own – and other species. In a place like this you become part of the ecology and the nearer you can get back to an animal status the better. It’s a dangerous thing to be quoted on, but I am prepared to be quoted as saying this: ‘I am a predator by nature and by instinct and I keep my predatory instincts under control and I kill in the same way as an otter or a tiger or almost any other animal would kill.’

  Communications were as tenuous as the transport system at Sandaig. The mail followed the same frontier-style supply line, and an exchange of letters could take a week. Telegrams were speedier, but each telegram required a heroic safari – twelve miles by bike, three miles on foot – on the part of the Glenelg postmaster, and was not always worth the cost in human endeavour. The first telegram ever delivered to Gavin at Sandaig, for example, was brought by the exhausted postmaster on a blazing summer day, when the hills shimmered in the heat-haze and the cattle stood knee-deep in the motionless sea to escape the torment of the summer flies. It conveyed the message: ‘Many happy returns of the day.’ The nearest telephone was a public call box in Glenelg, over six miles away by land. Because of the surrounding mountains television reception was impossible at Sandaig, and for many years even the radio was virtually inaudible, emitting (as Gavin put it) ‘a furtive whisper, mouse-squeak reminders of far-off human frenzy’.

  This same isolation was both the cause of all the practical difficulties of daily life at Sandaig and the source of its immense attraction. For with it came a sense of absolute liberation from the cares of the world and all the ordinary nagging frets of man; a liberation not only from external pressures but from internal rules as well, and with that a regression to an earlier life-style, to the intensity, the absorption, the sense of discovery and fun that characterise childhood. In an environment that was entirely natural, with hardly a man-made object within sight or earshot, Gavin was intensely aware of the spiritual and emotional metamorphosis that Sandaig brought about in those that lived there, and wrote later: ‘To be quite alone where there are no other human beings is sharply exhilarating; it is as though some pressure had suddenly been lifted, allowing an intense awareness of one’s surroundings, a sharpening of the senses, and an intimate recognition of the teeming subhuman life around one … as though life were suddenly stripped of inessentials such as worries about money and small egotistical ambitions and one was left facing an ultimate essential.’

  It was not simply its isolation, but its location and its myriad combination of natural features within so small a compass – waterfall and burn, sand dunes and sand banks, hills and mountains, sea and islands – that made Sandaig almost unique among the old, disused houses that stood among the wild sea-lochs of the West Highlands. Cut off from the world by the peat bogs and moorland hills, and made almost an island by the encircling burn and the sea, Sandaig was set in the infinitely grander context of the sea and a wondrous, uplifting prospect down the sound to the isles of Eigg and Rhum – a confined microcosm on the edge of a nearly infinite macrocosm. It was the sea and its littoral that gave Sandaig its extra dimension and special meaning, as Gavin perceived: ‘There is a perpetual mystery and excitement in living on the seashore, which is in part a return to childhood and in part because for all of us the sea’s edge remains the edge of the unknown; the child sees the bright shells, the vivid weeds and red sea-anemones of the rock pools with wonder and the child’s eye for minutiae; the adult who retains wonder brings to his gaze some partial knowledge which can but increase it, and he brings, too, the eye of association and of symbolism, so that at the edge of the ocean he stands at the brink of his own unconscious.’

  The sea at Sandaig was a constant source of wonder and surprise. The beaches, especially the small beaches and sand bars of the Sandaig islands, were a treasure house of shells of bewildering variety and colour, from tiny fan-shells to great scallops, and out on the islands the shell sand and coral beaches were blindingly white under the sun.

  One natural feature that Sandaig notably lacked was a safe anchorage, so for many y
ears Gavin had no boat there, remaining oddly land-bound. Eventually he bought a little nine-foot flat-bottomed pram, and this was followed by a succession of ever bigger and more seaworthy craft. His horizon was vastly extended, and through the long summer days he was able to voyage and fish and explore the islands and bays and the deep chasm of Loch Hourn to the south, and even to reach the nearest shop at Glenelg without the long slog up to the road at Tormor. Above all he was able to become part of the pelagic life of his environment, where before he had only been a watcher on the shore.

  Sometimes dramas of extraordinary power and prodigality were enacted in the waters that encircled Sandaig. Gavin described one of the most miraculous of these in a letter he wrote to Raef Payne, then just embarking on a career as classics master at Eton, at the beginning of September 1952:

  One evening millions and millions of herring fry of about three inches got jammed in the bay, so thick one had to force one’s legs through them to move, and Tomas and Roderick [the MacLeods’ eldest son] ‘bathed’ in them in the sunset, throwing up bucketfuls of little silver fish with their hands and going quite mad with excitement. When they waded thigh-deep the fish shot up out of the water to shoulder height, so that they were like figures each standing in the middle of a fountain. Wonderfully beautiful …

  This incident was to form the basis of the synopsis of Ring of Bright Water which Gavin showed me on Canna and which was later incorporated, almost word for word, into the book itself, where it featured as one of its most celebrated episodes.

  No less fantastical as a spectacle, but far more awesome in its numbers and mysterious in its mechanism, was the annual mass migration of the elvers up the Sandaig burn. They arrived each spring to seek the upper reaches of the rivers and streams where they could feed and mature before embarking on the return journey to their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea. By the time the thin, steel-blue, three-inch eel fry reached the burn they had spent two years crossing the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean; and yet despite the extreme length of the journey and the apocalyptic toll taken by a multiplicity of predators every inch of the way, they arrived at Sandaig in their teeming billions, an unbroken mass of wriggling forms inches thick, driven by an overpowering instinct ever upwards against the current of the stream, up the vertical rock face of the first waterfall, up the eighty-foot second fall and then the third fall above that, till a few of them, millions out of billions, reached the mountainside where the burn had its source. So powerful was this upward urge that Gavin had found the diminutive, transparent bodies of a few of the most determined individuals as high as two thousand feet above the level of the sea from which they had arrived in such bewildering numbers.

  So the years rolled on and the seasons passed at Sandaig, and summers gave way to autumn, with the stags roaring on Skye and the wild geese calling high overhead as they flew out of the north, and the bracken and the berries turning red and scarlet on the hills all around, and the first frosts of winter turning the ground to iron, and the burn running to spate and the waterfall roaring, and the storms howling in from the sea and beating about the lonely house. And after every winter came another spring and promise again of a season of wonders on land and sea in and around the ring of bright water.

  Gavin had always had his springer spaniel Jonnie with him since he had first started coming to Sandaig. After Jonnie’s death in the summer of 1955 he had vowed never to have another dog, but he found Sandaig a lonely place without one, and after a while he began to cast about for a different species of pet – a badger was one idea – though none that he could think of seemed quite right. Oddly, an otter had never come into consideration. Throughout all the years he had been visiting Sandaig he had never set eyes on a wild native otter, nor had one made its presence known to him there. Otters he regarded as hopelessly non-domesticable; the call of the wild was too powerful an instinct in such a creature, he felt, for it to make a pet that could happily relate to man. It was therefore a curious turn of fate that less than six months after Jonnie’s death he should return to Sandaig bringing not just an otter, but an otter all the way from the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates that bore his name.

  With his arrival at Sandaig in June 1956 the house became Mij’s holt; from the house he ventured forth in total freedom during the day and to it he returned to sleep at night. Mij slept in Gavin’s bed, curled in the crook of Gavin’s knee, and woke punctually every morning at eight-twenty, waking Gavin at the same moment by nuzzling his face and neck with long, thin squeaks of pleasure and affection. If Gavin did not rise at once, Mij bullied him till he did, removing the bedclothes with a violent tug of his teeth and leaving Gavin naked and shivering on the bed. ‘Otters usually get their own way,’ he was to write; ‘they are not dogs, and they co-exist with humans rather than being owned by them.’

  Mij’s next objective was a tour of the ring of bright water, the three-quarter circle formed by the burn and the sea, starting with the eel-box by the bridge and proceeding down the freshwater burn in pursuit of fish and eels till he reached the saltwater world of the bay and the islands. As the weeks went by he stayed out longer and longer on these excursions, so that in time Gavin would not begin to worry until he had been gone for half a day. When Mij did return, carrying home with him half a gallon of water in his fur, he would always try and dry himself by rubbing himself vigorously all over the sofa or bed blankets, or preferably all over Gavin. Living with an otter, Gavin found, was a wrong-way-round sort of business. If you played ball with an otter, for example, it was usually the otter that threw the ball and the human being that fetched it.

  It was in the sea that Mij came into his own. When Gavin rowed out in a little dinghy he had the use of Mij would swim out alongside into the deep, crystal-clear waters of the bay. ‘I would watch him,’ Gavin wrote, ‘as he dived down, down, down through fathom after fathom to explore the gaudy sea forests at the bottom with their flowered shell glades and mysterious, shadowed caverns.’ Mij could walk on the bottom without buoyancy and stay down for at least six minutes searching for fish and Crustacea without coming up for air. Only on the surface did he seem clumsy in water, dog-paddling laboriously like any land animal; but even then he could display enviable prowess, as in the violent seas whipped up by the equinoctial gales, when he would hurl himself like a torpedo through the roaring walls of the breakers, seemingly invulnerable to the monstrous weight and momentum of the waves. ‘He would swim through wave after wave,’ Gavin wrote, ‘until the black dot of his head was lost among the distant white manes, and more than once I thought that some wild urge to seek new lands had seized him and that he would go on swimming into the Sea of the Hebrides and that I should not see him again.’

  Mij’s absences grew longer as the summer passed. Once, after he had been missing for nine hours, Gavin found him trapped on a narrow ledge high up the cliff of the dark, dank ravine beyond the lowest waterfall, the wild and sinister region which Mij made his special haunt. Gavin was only able to rescue him with great difficulty by lowering himself on a rope attached to the feebly-rooted stump of a tree at the top of the cliff. Then one night Mij did not come home at all. Gavin referred briefly to the incident in a letter he wrote on 23 September 1956: ‘Mij was lost all day yesterday, and I was grieving his death when he turned up with his harness broken, having obviously been caught like Absalom, tho’ where I can’t imagine as we searched for miles. Very harrowing.’

  He was later to write this incident up in a long narrative extrapolation of the basic facts. Quite apart from the power and brilliance of Gavin’s prose, this extended passage contains his clearest statement on his relationship to animals in general and Mij in particular.

  He had left Mij, he wrote, in the early morning at the burn side eating his eels, and began to be uneasy when he had not returned by mid-afternoon. He had been working hard at his book (A Reed Shaken by the Wind), and it was a shock to realise that he had been writing for some six hours. He went out and called for Mij down the burn and a
long the beach, and when he did not find him he went again to the ravine above the falls. But there was no trace of him anywhere, though he explored the whole dark length of it right to the high falls, which he knew that even Mij could not pass. He left the burn then, and went out to the nearer islands; it was low tide and there were exposed stretches and bars of soft white sand, and in the sand he saw the footprints of an otter leading out to the far lighthouse island, though whether they were the footprints of Mij he could not tell. All that evening he searched and called, and when dusk came and Mij still did not return he began to despair, for until now his otter had always come back by sundown.

  It was a cloudy night with a freshening wind and a big moon that swam muzzily through black rags of vapour. By eleven o’clock it was blowing strong to gale from the south, and on the windward side of the islands a heavy sea was beginning to pile up; enough, Gavin thought, for Mij to lose his bearings if he were trying to make his way homeward through it. He put a light in each window of the house, left the doors open, and dozed fitfully in front of the kitchen fire. By three o’clock in the morning there was the first faint paling of dawn, and he went out to get the boat, for by now he was convinced that Mij was on the lighthouse island.

  But the dinghy was soon half swamped in a beam sea and narrowly avoided being wrecked on the black cusps and molars of the foam-lashed rocks and skerries around the islands. Gavin, who could not swim a stroke, rowed well out to avoid the reefs, only to be confronted by one of his recurring nightmares – his zoological obsession and true bête noire, the Killer whale: ‘The Killer broke the surface no more than twenty yards to the north of me, a big bull whose sabre fin seemed to tower a man’s height out of the water; and, probably by chance, he turned straight for me. My nerves were strung and tensed; I swung and rowed for the nearest island as though man were a Killer’s only prey. I reached the tern island, and the birds rose screaming around me in a dancing canopy of ghostly wings, and I sat down on the rock in the dim windy dawn and felt as desolate as an abandoned child.’