Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  A couple of days later, at the end of nearly half a year at Camusfeàrna, I set off on my long journey south. Through the dark days and stormy winds of the Haywire Winter, Avalon and its wild creatures had prevailed. But these had been the final months. With the coming of summer, Avalon was to prevail no more.

  PART III

  AVALON LOST

  TWENTY-FIVE

  End of the idyll

  I have looked upon these brilliant creatures,

  And now my heart is sore.

  All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,

  The first time on this shore,

  The bell beat of their wings above my head,

  Trod with a lighter tread.

  W.B. YEATS, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’

  All through his African winter Gavin had pined for Sandaig in the spring; but six long weeks were to pass before he could return to the peace and seclusion (as he hoped) of his Highland home. First, he had pressing business in the south.

  Muttering darkly and fantastically about a Jewish plot, he set off for Holland to sort out once and for all the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Ahmed, but he was obliged to return home empty-handed, and passed the case over to Margaret Pope and a private detective agency (who found Ahmed living contentedly with a Dutch family in a suburb of Amsterdam). Then, as a matter of urgency, he needed a medical examination of his eyes, for he had damaged a cornea and contracted some kind of chronic conjunctivitis in a sandstorm in the Moroccan Sahara. Though there proved to be no serious damage to his sight, his eyes remained red and inflamed, and would swell and weep in strong light, so that from now on he took to wearing black-tinted glasses, which gave him a rather sinister look.

  He also needed to put his financial affairs in order. The sudden wealth generated by the worldwide success of Ring of Bright Water had put him in the topmost tax bracket (at that time running at a punitive 90 per cent of annual income). On his agent’s advice he turned himself into a tax-efficient limited company, Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd, with himself as Chairman, and his agent, his accountant and his trusted friend Raef Payne as directors. To relieve himself of the burden of the routine paperwork he appointed a twenty-one-year-old former management trainee, Michael Cuddy, to look after the day-to-day business of the new company as his London manager. At the same time, to cash in on the popularity of Ring, he contracted with his publishers to produce a condensed, lavishly illustrated children’s version to be called The Otters’ Tale. The condensation was soon done and the new book was off his hands before he finally returned to Sandaig on 23 May 1961.

  During his troubled sojourn in Morocco Gavin had dreamed of Camusfeàrna as a parched man dreams of an oasis in a waterless desert. But on his return he was dismayed to find that the peace and seclusion for which he had yearned were no more. In Ring of Bright Water he had gone to some pains to conceal the true identity and location of Sandaig – fearing, he said, a betrayal of its remoteness and isolation. But with casual prescience he had added: ‘It will be easy enough for the curious to discover where I live.’

  What he had not foreseen was that the book would be a runaway bestseller, and that with the coming of the first fine weather since its publication hundreds of its readers from both sides of the Atlantic would be up and about along the West Highland coast, searching for clues to Camusfeàrna’s whereabouts – a lighthouse on an island, a sandy bay, a burn running into the sea, a view of Skye … A trickle of unannounced visitors had already found their way down to the house even in the depths of the winter I had just spent there, some of them from as far away as Texas and Maine. But no one had foreseen the flood brought by the warm days of spring. This wholesale intrusion marked the beginning of a long series of setbacks which would in the end destroy Camusfeàrna and much more besides.

  As spring turned to summer and the tourist season reached its height the swarm of visitors who succeeded in cracking the code that concealed Sandaig’s location grew so great that the routine of the household was turned topsy-turvy. To deter the invading army Gavin posted warning notices at strategic points along the tracks which led over the hills and down to the house.

  All in vain. The fans of Ring left their cars and tramped through peat bogs, over hill and down dale, through gates and over fences, until they stood at last at Gavin’s door, proud and breathless, and announced: ‘Look, we’ve found you! We’ve read your book – and how we envy you your way of life!’ Those who were deterred by the uncompromising warning of the final signboard – the word PRIVATE in bold red lettering a foot high – merely diverted their approach and took up positions on the slope of the hill, where they sat for hours peering intently through their telescopes and binoculars at all the activity that went on around the house.

  Finally, Gavin lost patience. Late one evening, when the incumbents at Sandaig had at last managed to sit down to dinner after a long and bothersome day, Gavin heard a murmur of voices outside and was informed that a party of Americans who had travelled three thousand miles to visit Camusfeàrna would like to come in. This was the last straw. Gavin stormed to the door. If they had indeed travelled three thousand miles to visit a total stranger, he railed, they might have shown more courtesy than to arrive unannounced in the middle of dinner at half past nine in the evening. With barely concealed ill-temper he bade them good evening and slammed the door in their faces.

  While Gavin’s efforts were directed to repelling invaders by land, he neglected to protect his seaward flank. One day a smart yacht sidled into the bay and dropped anchor. According to Gavin’s published version of the incident (in The Rocks Remain), one of the men on board settled himself into a seat at the stern with a .22 rifle across his knees while his companions threw bread to the gulls. Whenever a gull alighted on the water to take the bread the man in the stern would shoot it with his rifle – or so it seemed to Gavin watching from the dunes below the house with Jimmy Watt and Terry Nutkins. Gavin soon grew angry at what he believed to be the wanton and destructive killing that was taking place on his domain. After five minutes he asked Jimmy to fetch his .350 Magnum Rigby big-game rifle from the house, and the next time the man appeared to shoot a gull Gavin loosed a single round at the floating corpse on the water. So great was the noise of the gun going off and the large-calibre bullet zipping past the yacht that in a second or two the figures on the deck were scuttling about in a frenzy, and the anchor was weighed and the engine started before Gavin had made up his mind to fire a second shot. (The man who had been firing from the boat later protested that he had not been shooting at gulls, but at empty bottles which he had kept for target practice.)

  * * *

  The public invasion of Sandaig led to another, infinitely more serious incident – one which had ominous implications for the future of the Sandaig household in its current form. Gavin was not present on this occasion, nor did he ever refer to it subsequently. It took place on 6 May, barely three weeks after I had left Sandaig following my winter stint, and before Gavin had come up from London after his return from Morocco. In view of the friendly and docile behaviour of the two otters during the previous six months, I was dumbfounded to receive a letter from Jimmy which announced: ‘All’s well except that Teko bit a woman visitor yesterday! There was the most almighty yell from Teko and quick as a flash this woman was lying on the sofa with her wrist and side of shin open.’

  The woman had arrived the previous evening with her husband, saying she wished to see the elvers which at that time of the year swarmed up the Sandaig burn on their spectacular annual migration. After a visit to the burn she came to the door of the house and asked if she and her husband could see one of the otters, claiming that Gavin had said that whenever they were passing they could come and have a look at his pets. The couple were invited into the kitchen-parlour and the woman sat on the sofa while Terry Nutkins went out to fetch Teko, who was considered the friendlier and more trustworthy of the two animals, from his quarters in the coalshed where he was sleeping. Terry recalled vi
vidly what happened next:

  Teko jumped on to the woman’s lap and started playing around and sniffing her hair. Then he began to make that horrible angry wailing sound and I knew something was going to happen; but before I could get him away from her he launched into her. It lasted only a few seconds but it was a most horrific attack. He went for her face first and then worked his way down her arms and legs. Her calf muscle was ripped to pieces and I could see the fat coming out of her leg. There was blood everywhere and the woman was just lying there hysterical. Well, I made a dive at Teko and picked him up by the root of his tail and rushed out of the room with him to his shed. It never occurred to me that I risked being attacked myself. Teko just lay there on his back with his paws over his face going ‘Wah wah wah!’ His white bib was bloodstained and there were bits of flesh and fat round his mouth.

  While the woman lay bleeding and screaming on the sofa, Jimmy telephoned Dr Beveridge, the young woman who was now general practitioner at Glenelg, forty minutes away. The boys did the best they could for the victim, wrapping her in bandages and towels and giving her tea and aspirins. When Dr Beveridge finally arrived she stitched the woman up but decided that she should be taken to hospital in Inverness as quickly as possible. The first stage of the journey was to Glenelg, and the quickest – indeed, under the circumstances, the only – way of getting her there was in Gavin’s little dinghy. So the woman was carried down to the beach and laid in the bottom of the boat for the second part of her nightmare adventure.

  It was getting dark now, a Force 8 was blowing and the sea was roaring into Sandaig Bay. Terry had to stand up to his neck in water holding the boat steady while Jimmy tried to start the outboard. Then they were off, into the teeth of the wind and waves. They rounded the lighthouse island and took course down the sound, rolling and heaving in a big following sea, with the wind howling and the spray breaking into the boat and the woman crying and groaning as she was tossed from side to side. ‘It was the worst sea I’ve ever been on,’ Jimmy wrote. ‘We couldn’t get to Glenelg so we dropped her off at Eilanreach.’

  The woman, who had suffered terrible injuries, might have sued Gavin for damages. But she did not. Gavin, who was dismayed when he heard the news, claimed that he had never met the woman and had certainly never given her permission to visit the otters. Whatever the reason, the victim of the attack made no complaint and no word of the incident reached the ears of the public or the press.

  But why had Teko, of all creatures, attacked a human being for the first time? Edal’s attack on Margaret Pope in the previous summer had been ascribed to the jealousy of a female otter for a female human being. But this could not explain Teko’s attack, for Teko was a male, and had hitherto displayed no aggressive feelings whatsoever. Were these one-off attacks, unlikely to recur? There was no way of knowing. Gavin at this stage was an otter pioneer, an explorer in all things luterine. There was no data, no corpus of knowledge on otter behaviour to which he could refer. Perhaps an error of some kind had precipitated Teko’s attack, perhaps not. In the meantime the otters would continue to live and be cared for as they had previously – as more or less free and integral members of the Sandaig ‘family’.

  For the next three months all was well. But early in August, while Gavin was out walking Edal in the company of Jimmy Watt and Caroline Jarvis, an attractive young zoologist who helped edit the International Zoo Year Book at London Zoo, Edal, in a sudden unprovoked attack, buried her teeth in Caroline’s ankle, fortunately without inflicting permanent injury. Edal’s attack, Gavin concluded, was due to an explosion of jealousy. In his view Edal considered herself married to both Jimmy and himself, and this put Caroline in the position of a rival. The consequences were plain. ‘Alas, Edal has taken strongly against all females,’ he wrote to Constance McNab a few days later, ‘and (between you and me and whoever else has to know) is no longer to be trusted with them.’ But a few weeks later Edal attacked again, with infinitely greater ferocity – and this time the victim was a male.

  It was late in the afternoon of Sunday, 27 August 1961. Only Terry Nutkins was in the house. Gavin was in London on business and not due back at Sandaig until the following night. Jimmy Watt was collecting the mail from Tormor and Raef Payne was in the croft near the shore, which he used as a summer holiday home. Terry recalled:

  I could hear Edal upstairs scrabbling on the door of her room, something she often used to do, so I went up to play with her, wearing a sweater which had been given to me by Caroline Jarvis. I sat on the side of her bed and Edal jumped up beside me and started to sniff the sweater and make that grunting noise that otters make. I sensed that something was wrong but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. When the noise began to get louder I felt very uneasy and put her down on the floor and stood up. And as I stood up she made a sudden lunge straight for my foot and tore the whole of the front of my Wellington boot off in one go. She was making this high-pitched screaming noise which otters make when they are fighting mad, and tearing into my foot, and I thought: ‘Well, I’ve got to do something about this – my foot’s bleeding, the door’s closed, and I’m trapped in here with an enraged otter.’

  So I bent down to pick her up and as I did so she got hold of the second finger of my right hand between her jaws and began pulling and chewing it as if it was an eel, and I could feel as well as hear the crunching of the bones. Then she got hold of my thumb and was mangling the whole of my hand in her jaws and I thought: ‘I’m never going to get away from this animal!’ So I jumped on top of her and pinned her head down with my left hand as I tried to move my right hand out of her mouth. I remembered what Gavin had told me to do if ever the otters got too rough – repeat the words ‘softly … softly … softly’ over and over again to them in a gentle, reassuring voice. So that’s what I did, trying to stay as calm as possible, and she stopped and just looked at me, so I started to move my hand out of her mouth, and I had just got it out when she started screaming again. So I automatically picked her up and flung her across the room, and as I flung her she twisted round and bit clean through the second finger of my left hand. Well, she landed over on the other side of the room and I made a dive for the door, and just as I slammed the door behind me she was back, trying to get me, screaming her head off.

  Dazed and shocked, Terry wandered round the downstairs of the house. His right hand was in a dreadful state, mangled and punctured with teethmarks; the thumb hung half off and the top two joints of the second finger had been chewed through and were simply hanging by a sinew. A slightly smaller proportion of the second finger of his left hand had been bitten off and was attached only by the skin. Holding on to a finger that might otherwise have dropped off, Terry ran over to Raef’s croft, a hundred yards away. Aghast, Raef did what he could to help. He wrapped Terry’s hands in towels, brewed tea, proffered whisky, and summoned the Glenelg doctor. But the towels didn’t stop the bleeding – nor the intense pain that now began to come welling through.

  Terry was standing by the door of the croft looking puzzled and lost when Jimmy returned from Tormor. ‘His hands were like something out of a horror movie,’ Jimmy remembered. ‘All red and pulpy and bleeding.’ When Dr Beveridge arrived she attempted, by dint of rather desperate kitchen-parlour surgery, to stitch Terry’s finger back on again, with Jimmy holding the lamp close to give her a better light. ‘It was hopeless – like sewing mince,’ Jimmy remembered of that horrendous scene. ‘Afterwards I lay in the wet grass, rolled in it, getting wet, trying to get rid of the memory.’

  It was clear that Terry needed urgent hospital attention, but the nearest hospital was at Broadford on the Isle of Skye, and there was no ferry across till the morning, so Terry had to stick it out through a long and agonising night. ‘The pain was a hundred times greater than if you’d had a car door slam on your fingers,’ he remembered. ‘By three in the morning I was crying and groaning and screaming because the pain was unbelievable.’

  All night long Raef walked Terry up and down in Gavin’s s
tudy-bedroom, trying to help him get through the night, and when morning came at last he helped him up the track over the hill to Tormor. ‘When I got there,’ Terry recalled, ‘I just collapsed – I couldn’t stand it any more. Shock and loss of blood and sheer exhaustion, I suppose.’

  That night Gavin returned to Sandaig and heard the news. He caught the first ferry across to Skye the next morning and raced over to Broadford in his new red Mercedes roadster. He was surprised to find Terry sitting up in bed in the hospital ward, signalling wildly with his pyjama top.

  ‘When do I get out of here?’ he asked. ‘Are you going to take me away? You won’t leave me here?’

  Gavin sniffed the air. Terry, too, was aware of a peculiar odour around the bed. Gavin sniffed Terry’s bandages. At close quarters the smell was overpowering.

  ‘My God!’ Gavin exclaimed. ‘That’s gangrene! Here, smell.’

  He lifted Terry’s hands to his nose. Terry sniffed and noticed the same horrible, putrescent stench.

  ‘We’ve got to do something about this,’ Gavin said, his voice unsteady, for the implications were clear.

  ‘I could see he was very genuinely shocked and concerned,’ Terry recalled. ‘Whether this was because it was me who had been attacked or because it was Edal that had done the attacking I’m not sure. It might have been both. I think he was shocked that the creature on which he had relied so much had done such a horrific thing, and wondered whether it would do the same to him.’