Terry was taken to the house of the hospital doctor for an examination. The tops of the two half-severed fingers were only too evidently dead and gangrenous.
‘Chop ’em off, doctor,’ said Terry. ‘That ruddy lot’s no good to anyone.’
The doctor went to work. It did not take long. Gavin stared in horror at the two black fingertips lying in the white enamel basin. ‘Nothing on earth could ever restore them,’ he was to write later. ‘In some way they had been more terrible to look at than a corpse.’
The plan now was for Gavin to take Terry back to Sandaig that day, then drive him to Glasgow the following morning for plastic surgery at the Bon Secours Hospital, a private clinic run by nuns. The drive to Glasgow, Terry recalled, was a sensational one.
Gavin drove like a bat out of hell. He loved drama and for him this was real drama. My hands had swollen up like balloons because of the gangrene, and the gangrene had already begun to spread up into my arms. For Gavin the drive to Glasgow was a race against death – he had to get there before the gangrene spread. He drove incredibly fast in the red Mercedes – and incredibly well. No expense was spared with the surgeons. They treated my hands, put skin-grafts over my finger-ends and slung my arms up in slings for six weeks to drain away the gangrene. I was lucky to have both arms left, really. I suppose, all things considered, I was lucky to be alive.
When eventually Terry returned to Sandaig it was put about that his injuries had been caused when the chain of a petrol-driven saw hit a nail in a piece of wood he had been cutting. On no account did Gavin wish the true story to be leaked to the press or reach the ears of the local inhabitants. To Constance McNab he sent an urgent note: ‘There has been an otter crisis here, the details of which are highly confidential. To save writing it all down I’ve suggested that Caroline Jarvis explain it to you. It has vastly complicated life here, and while before there were few moments in the day there are now none!’
As Terry’s employer and guardian Gavin accepted liability for the injuries Edal had inflicted, and arranged for the sum of £1000 to be paid to Terry as compensation once he had reached the age of twenty-one. At the same time he took steps to prevent Edal from ever attacking a human being again. Gavin felt sure that Edal had attacked Terry for the simple reason that he had been wearing Caroline Jarvis’s sweater. But such was the ferocity of the attack and the extent of Terry’s injuries that he was reluctantly forced to accept that Edal could never be allowed to roam free again. From now on she would have to be kept permanently confined, and only Jimmy and himself would be allowed to go near her. Gavin’s solution was to have a prefabricated wooden house, thirty feet long by twelve feet wide, erected at right-angles to the seaward end of the main house, with direct access to a large fenced-off enclosure containing two swimming pools and every kind of waterworks that could be devised. In other words, Edal was henceforth to be confined like a zoo animal – but in a zoo as large and luxurious as money could buy.
In a short while the wooden house arrived by sea in half a gale of wind. Its floating sections were poled ashore like rafts by Gavin and Jimmy and then hauled painfully up on shore. Once again, just as on Soay seventeen years before, Gavin was establishing a complex organisation on a hopelessly remote site.
When it was finally erected and furnished in September the wooden house made an imposing room, with eight large windows looking out over the sea and the hills, permanent access to the otter’s enclosure, and an infra-red lamp hanging over a bed of towels on which Edal could dry herself when she came inside. But the elements make trifles of presumptuous human endeavours, and the house was no sooner put up than it was almost blown flat in a violent storm on 15 September. ‘Yesterday God in his wrath sent down a hurricane on Camusfeàrna,’ Jimmy wrote to a friend, ‘and the sea boiled like only God can make it boil. The hurricane got underneath the new house and lifted its floor up about three inches. In Glenelg lots of trees fell, two boats were smashed and the mail boat only just made it in. The electricity here went off for nine hours, the telephone is out of order, all the rowan berries are blown – and some horrible sheep have eaten all my cabbages.’
The next day Gavin departed for a long weekend at the Sutherland home of his friend James Robertson-Justice, whose other house guests included Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. On his return he arranged to have three free-standing swimming-pools despatched by sea to Sandaig at enormous cost and filled by polythene piping laid from the waterfall nearby. One of the smaller pools was partially sunk into the ground in the enclosure surrounding Teko’s little coalshed, for Gavin had decided that preparations should be made for Teko’s confinement as well, should it prove necessary at any time in the future. Teko’s pool, however, burst the moment it was filled, flooding the house to a depth of six inches with four thousand tons of water. But within a week a replacement pool was delivered by hired launch – the fibreglass tank underneath which Michael Powell and Bill Paton crouched so uncomfortably on their visit to Sandaig.
The calamities of that disastrous summer were not yet at an end. Gavin had recently bought a forty-foot ex-RAF high-speed rescue launch called the Polar Star. Though she was twenty-five years old she was capable of a good twenty knots, throwing up a spectacular bow wave which made her, in Gavin’s eyes, the highly desirable equivalent at sea of his impressive Mercedes roadster on land. The considerable capital outlay and heavy running costs of such a specialist vessel he justified on the grounds that she would greatly extend the radius of his horizon at Sandaig and dramatically shorten the time taken on sea trips away from home – an important factor with the otters requiring full-time attention every day.
But Gavin had a fatal talent for standing logic on its head, and in the light of subsequent events he was forced to admit that the Polar Star was ‘one of the many minor follies with which my life has been sprinkled’. Exactly as he had done with the Dove in the shark-fishing days, he bought the new boat without having set eyes on her beforehand. ‘It is aggravating to repeat a stupid mistake,’ he confessed, ‘and thus to demonstrate that one is slower to learn than many an animal.’ When the boat was finally delivered to Sandaig by sea (having caught fire off the Yorkshire coast and run at full speed into the perilous whirlpools and overfalls of the Corryvreckan off the west of Scotland) Gavin was deeply disappointed at what he saw. ‘Everything about her reeked of neglect and indifference,’ he reported. ‘She had little but speed and a sound hull; for the rest she was dirty, neglected, squalid in appearance inside and out.’ It cost him almost as much to replace her engines and transmission and restore her interior woodwork and fittings as it did to buy her; and it cost almost as much again to salvage and repair her after he wrecked her on a reef in Sandaig Bay on practically his first outing.
Returning from Glenelg with Jimmy Watt and Terry Nutkins late in the evening of 7 October, Gavin ran into heavy rain and patches of dense grey mist off the Sandaig islands, then discovered there was no dinghy on the Polar Star’s moorings – just a cut end of rope. He realised that the rope must have been cut by one of the propellers when he set out earlier in the evening, and that unless the missing dinghy was found there was no obvious way of getting ashore again. Judging that the dinghy must have drifted ashore on the Lighthouse Island, he put Terry ashore to search for it, with instructions that if it could not be found, Terry was to wait until low tide at about midnight and then wade across from island to island until he reached the mainland. There he could collect the small dinghy and row back – a good two-mile haul – to pick up Gavin and Jimmy.
By the time Terry, his injured fingers still bandaged after Edal’s attack, scrambled ashore on the Lighthouse Island – an inhospitable, trackless terrain of weed-covered outcrops, treacherous crevices and impenetrable scrub – it was pitch dark. For more than an hour the Polar Star waited at anchor on the north side of the island, but nothing was seen or heard of Terry. After a while the wind and sea began to get up and Gavin decided to take the Polar Star round to the south side of the island an
d anchor in Sandaig Bay, so that Terry would have a shorter, safer row out to the boat in the worsening weather. But the blackness of the night was all-enveloping and the boat’s searchlight illuminated nothing but an impenetrable wall of rain; nudging forward at slow ahead in almost zero visibility, Gavin had a split-second glimpse of solid rock a few feet from the bow, and then the boat struck, the bows reared, and the propellers grated on the granite rock.
In the middle of a black night, a rising wind and an ebbing tide, the Polar Star was hard aground on an island or a reef or any one of fifty rocks – there was no knowing what or which. Holding the boat’s bow and stern lines, Gavin and Jimmy clambered overboard to try and explore their surroundings – a perilous operation, for neither could swim and there was only one life-jacket between them – but they could feel only weed-covered wet rock shelving steeply upwards. As the wind rose, the waves came out of the dark and broke over them and over the boat’s starboard quarter, so that she began to ship green water into the after cockpit, and then to bump and slam on the rock on which she was fast. It was clear she would break up if she remained where she was.
Gavin and Jimmy clambered back on board and tried to back her off with the engines, and when she would not move Gavin decided they should go ashore again to lighten her, and then push her off on the crest of a wave, hoping she might drift off and beach on a sand or gravel shore. For a despairing half hour they wrestled with the boat in the slimy seaweed, and then suddenly she was free and drifting away into the night. They watched her go, feeling desolate and forlorn, until soon her mast-light was obscured, and nothing could be seen of boat or land or sea. It was about eleven o’clock now, and almost dead low tide; for all Gavin and Jimmy could tell they might be on a reef which would be submerged when the tide came in again before dawn. All they had salvaged from the Polar Star was the boathook.
In fact they were below the gull colony on the south face of the Lighthouse Island. So dark was the night, so rough the terrain and so deep the water they had to wade through as they crossed from island to island that it was nearly one in the morning before they reached Sandaig. Terry came in half an hour later, cheerful but far gone from cold and hypothermia after trying to swim out to the drifting Polar Star.
The Polar Star was successfully salvaged by Bruce Watt, Gavin’s former shark-boat skipper, who was now coxswain of the Mallaig lifeboat and ran several charter vessels of his own. She was found abandoned and aground on a submerged rock ten yards from the main reef in Sandaig Bay, and after being towed back to Mallaig she was found to have buckled propellers, a badly strained keel, deeply chafed planking, and a leaking hull. It was some months before Gavin put to sea in her again – and a little while longer before he felt confident enough to run her on to the rocks a second time.
Terry Nutkins had been in regular employment at Sandaig for only about six months, but in that short time he had probably experienced more adventures and endured more threats to life and limb than any other fifteen-year-old boy in Britain.
When Terry had entered full-time employment at Sandaig in April 1961, Gavin had given the educational authorities a written assurance that he would take over his education himself and personally provide him with a course of instruction for at least three hours a day. This marked the beginning of Gavin’s intense interest in the education of the young, about which he had many unusual theories. Terry recalled:
He kept his word, except he didn’t teach me what the local authorities wanted him to teach but what he thought was best for me, which was natural history mainly. So instead of lessons in maths or science I got lessons about wildlife and life in general and the ways of the world. Gavin was a very good teacher because he was interested in encouraging people to become involved with life and the world, so in addition to natural history he taught me about psychology and sociology and such-like, which was not the usual fare for people of my age. His instruction in natural history wasn’t the foundation of my knowledge, but it put me more on the right tracks, especially in marine zoology. But in a strange way the otters didn’t come into it, because Gavin didn’t seem to class them as animals at all. To him they were part of the family, they were special kind of people, creatures he could relate to much more closely than he could to a dog, say, or a wild animal, or even a human being.
In Terry’s view, although Gavin appeared to be a fierce, combative person, he was in reality gentle and timid, and life in the human world was frightening to him. Terry felt that Gavin was very unhappy, and that he couldn’t get to grips with people or create relationships with them. He tried too hard, put too much pressure on people, so that he seemed overpowering and demanding. Whenever he was in a group he became guarded and defensive, and sometimes bitterly jealous. But he didn’t like being alone. He might like his own company in his room at Sandaig, but he always needed the assurance that another member of the household was on the other side of the door. Terry remembered that sometimes, when the fire was blazing in the hearth and the pressure lamp was hissing on the table, Gavin could be totally relaxed, fascinating company – he’d cook the dinner, drink his whisky, talk about the shark-fishing days and all the other things he’d done, laugh and joke into the early hours.
‘I grew up very quickly at Sandaig,’ Terry recalled:
When you’re as young as I was and you’re with someone as mentally alert as Gavin was and with as many personal problems as he had, you grow up very quickly – to cope with such a complex person you have to, you have to learn how to listen, how to deal with the situation. Childhood stopped the moment I got on the train to go up to Sandaig. There was not much play up there. It was work, really – and survival. Life wasn’t easy – the isolation, the ruggedness of it, all those rucksacks up and down the hill in the rain. There were days when I was absolutely fed up. I used to look at the ships going by down the Sound of Sleat and the scattered houses far away on Skye, and I’d think: ‘They’re all with their families and we haven’t got anything.’ There was an emptiness there, and I used to love it when people came to stay.
But I am grateful to Gavin in many ways. I had a life unlike any other boy in Britain, Jimmy excepted. We climbed three-thousand-foot mountains. We were shipwrecked. We saw wonderful things. We met remarkable people like Peter Scott. And I became a much tougher and more independent man.
If I knew then what I know now about life and how to handle people I think I could have done a lot of good up at Sandaig. I could have helped Gavin, made him happier by being a friend to him, not a bewildered child who didn’t understand how an adult mind was working. But then I couldn’t cope with his intelligence, nor all those days of gloom and whisky. Gavin was striving for something, I’m not sure what, but whatever it was he never found it, and never could. That was his tragedy.
The days of relative liberty for the still unconfined Teko did not last much longer. Shortly before Christmas 1961, Lavinia Renton, a long-standing, close friend of Gavin’s from London, was staying at Sandaig with her two sons. While on a walk to the island beaches with Terry Nutkins, Teko flew into a sudden inexplicable frenzy and attacked Lavinia’s younger son, Simon. A month later, when Gavin was in London, Teko attacked a second time, again while on a walk. This time the victim was Jimmy Watt, who was bitten in the calf, shin and foot before he managed to escape by jumping down the sand martin cliff and floundering across to the other side of the burn. On both occasions it was Terry Nutkins, already minus two fingers following Edal’s earlier attack, who bravely recovered the manic Teko and led him home.
Gavin decided that Teko, too, would have to be confined. From now on, apart from himself, the only human being who would be allowed near Edal would be Jimmy, and the only person who would be allowed near Teko would be Terry. But a few weeks later, when Gavin was again away from Sandaig, Edal turned on Jimmy, who had tended her since the day she had first arrived, forcing him to seek safety in the rafters of the wooden house while she wailed in fury below. Gavin now had no option but to treat both otters as wild, d
angerous and untrustworthy creatures, to be tended like zoo animals without human contact. It was the end of the pioneering experiment in living with pet otters, the end of the dream of an idealised animal friendship that had first formed in Gavin’s mind on the banks of the Tigris River in Iraq more than five years before.
Why had the otters, who had never lacked for love and care from their human keepers, and had displayed such intense devotion and affection in return, suddenly turned so savage? In Gavin’s opinion the attacks were momentary and instinctive, and carried out within the framework of a heritage in which violence was necessary for survival and reproduction: ‘I am convinced that the emotion is basically that which we describe as jealousy,’ he was to record. ‘The otters sensed that something they had regarded as being their exclusive right was being shared with a stranger … I do not believe that any fully adult otter is to be trusted completely with any human other than its acknowledged foster-parents. The emotions are too intense, the degree of affection afforded by the otter too profound.’
This may well be true, though it may be only part of the explanation. Gavin’s repeated absences from Sandaig could not have helped, nor could the consequent confusion over the identity of the otters’ foster-parents and the interruptions to their precious daily routine. Terry Nutkins, who witnessed almost all of the otter attacks at Sandaig, and has worked closely with animals ever since, has a somewhat different view to Gavin’s:
My experience with otters since those days is that adult otters can undoubtedly be explosive, unreliable, untrustworthy animals. But in the case of Gavin’s pet otters there was an extra dimension. Edal and Teko – and Mij, too, for that matter – were subject to unusual pressures. They were humanised otters, kept under unnatural, domestic conditions with the pressures of humans on them all the time. This may have been bearable to them when they were young cubs, but once they had grown up it could well have been too much for them. Otters react to people’s feelings, and Gavin heaped all his feelings on his otters. He used to get terribly childish in their company. ‘Eeedal, Eeedal!’ he would croon. ‘Who’s a lovely dog?’ He had a very odd look on his face when he rolled around with them on the floor, exchanging saliva with them, blowing in their fur, desperately trying to communicate with them and make them become part of him. I think the jealousy theory may possibly have accounted for Edal’s attack on Caroline Jarvis, and for her attack on me when I was wearing Caroline’s pullover. But it doesn’t account for Teko’s attack on the woman visitor whom he tore to bits. I mean, Teko may not have wanted to be woken up and taken out of his hut and brought in and shown to a complete stranger that evening. Maybe she was terrified of him and he sensed it. Maybe he had just reached the age when dog otters become explosive in temper. And he probably had sexual urges by then – the male otter’s temper is terribly uncertain during the period of the rut. But who knows? Certainly nobody knew a thing about these animals in those days.
Gavin Maxwell Page 43