The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

  As soon as I had reached the house I had telephoned to Bruce Watt, who had long ago been skipper of my shark-fishing vessel, the Sea Leopard, and who now possessed three sizeable boats for the diversion of tourists. He was also coxswain of Mallaig lifeboat.

  I do not know how Bruce effected the salvage, but at first light in the morning he had the Polar Star alongside his boat, Western Isles, on my moorings. He then removed Polar Star to Mallaig.

  The dinghy was recovered 4½ miles N on the afternoon of the same day.

  5

  Teko Revisited

  It was well that we had given thought to the possibility, however improbable it appeared then, that the friendly, bouncing, affectionate Teko might one day commit the same outrage as had Edal, for by the time it did happen we were entirely prepared. He had his own heated house, his own enclosure and pool, and it had been planned in such a way that a dividing gate could exclude him from either one or the other. In emergency, he could be tended by the most timorous.

  The emergency was not, in fact, long in coming. In November I became engaged to be married, and in December my future wife, Lavinia, and stepchildren Nicholas and Simon Renton came to Camusfeàrna for part of the Christmas holidays.

  Terry was at that time still looking after Teko and taking him for his daily walk, in company with the deerhound Dirk. Dirk was a comparatively recent acquisition, a gigantic yearling standing nearly forty inches at the shoulder, and it had been a joy to discover that he and Teko regarded each other as natural playmates, Dirk making rings of dazzling speed around the otter, or leaping over him high in the air. Simon, then aged thirteen, had accompanied the party more than once, and Teko had given him more than a casual and friendly greeting as they set off.

  As in the case of Edal and Caroline, the attack came without warning or apparent reason, and not long after they had left the house. They were on their way to the island beaches, and Simon was walking a little in front; the two animals, who had not yet begun to romp seriously, were walking sedately between him and Terry. Suddenly something detonated in Teko’s brain – akin, I am certain, to Edal’s past explosions of jealousy. He flew at Simon from behind, knocked him down (it must be remembered that Teko weighed little less than fifty pounds) and bit him savagely in the thigh. It was not just a single bite, it was a sustained attack, that might have been extremely serious had not Terry done a flying rugger tackle and pulled him off by the tail. It was the first of two rescues carried out by Terry after he had lost his own fingers. Teko responded instantly to Terry’s authority; there was at no moment any sign of the attack changing direction from Simon to himself.

  From what emotional rag-bag these outbursts are pulled it is impossible to say with any certainty, but I am convinced that the emotion is basically that which we describe as jealousy. To the otters, Caroline and Simon were interlopers; the otters sensed, if it is permissible to anthropomorphize so far, that something they had regarded as being their exclusive right was being shared with a stranger.

  The immediate consequences of this incident were less grave than might have been feared, and were greatly helped toward this end by Simon’s cavalier attitude to his injuries. He was unable to play football for a week after going back to school, and he will never lose the scars, but, like Terry, he shed no tear and made no complaint.

  I left Camusfeàrna for London on 19th January, to be married on 1st February, and on the 22nd Teko attacked Jimmy. He and Terry had taken Teko and Dirk for a walk, and as usual the dog and the otter had indulged in wild games in and out of the sea. They had begun to walk home, Jimmy leading with Dirk and Terry following with Teko. Jimmy stopped for a moment to pat and caress the dog, and in that instant Teko flew at him from behind. The first deep bite was in the calf of the leg, but by the time Jimmy had realized that Teko’s rage was too great to yield to any persuasion, he had received other severe bites in the shin and the foot. Jimmy did the only thing he could do; he ran for it, with Teko in close pursuit. Normally he would have outdistanced Teko quickly, but he was handicapped both by his injuries and by heavy boots, and he fell once, to realize as he recovered himself that Teko was almost upon him and that Terry was still some yards behind. By now this demoniac and breathless procession had reached a point immediately above the small sand cliff where the sand martins breed, the point from which I had fallen on the night we abandoned the Polar Star; and Jimmy, remembering that Teko had always evinced a dislike of heights, jumped from this cliff and floundered across the burn. The moment’s pause that this manoeuvre had given Teko had been time enough for Terry to overtake him and attach his lead. Jimmy was in a state of virtual collapse at the other side of the burn.

  All this was kept secret from me until my return to Camusfeàrna sixteen days later.

  Terry is convinced that this disaster too was due to jealousy, that there existed some close bond between dog and otter, and that Teko saw this relationship threatened by Jimmy’s apparent affection for the dog. It was Jimmy, in any case, who was in that situation the outsider; both Teko and Dirk were specifically under Terry’s charge, and the three formed in some sense an independent unit.

  Whatever the reason, I was faced on my return with a situation not easy of solution. I was to leave for North Africa in the near future; during my absence only Terry could look after Teko, and only Jimmy could look after Edal. If either of them were ill one otter would have to be treated as a zoo animal, tended without contact. I had become, and remain, the only person who trusted both otters and had no reason to fear either of them.

  There have been times when, despite their consistently affectionate attitude to me, it has been difficult to forget the terrible injuries they have inflicted upon others. These moments have risen mainly with Teko. He has always possessed a genius for removing his harness and an intense dislike for having it refitted, which is in itself an exceedingly difficult task when the otter is uncooperative. Teko resists the operation with all his really enormous strength and eel-like sinuosity, accompanying his motor actions with vocalization calculated to intimidate the most courageous. His sound of displeasure is an essentially cockney vowel sound ‘wow-wow-wow’, each syllable prolonged and yelled out somewhere in the middle range of a tenor’s voice; there have been times when I have almost expected this to change suddenly into the scream that accompanies an attack, but I have at no moment truly lost the sensation of mastery in which lies my salvation. The occasion when I have come nearest to doing so was in the autumn of 1962, when Terry, who had by that time given up looking after otters and was engaged entirely upon the construction of new buildings, came to tell me that Teko had a terrible wound. This proved not to be an exaggeration – it was an enormous incision that looked as if it could only have been made with a scalpel as a first stage to removing the limb, and it stretched from under the arm almost to the shoulder. Behind the elbow, where the forelimb joins the body, an otter has a great baggy fold of skin which becomes almost like a wing when the limb is extended forward; this had been cut right through to reveal not only flesh but sinew. The wound was at least three inches deep and, because a side-strap of the harness had sunk right into its depths, it was gaping four inches wide. Seen in profile as he stood on his hind legs, the whole animal looked as if he had virtually been cut in two.

  The first task was clearly to remove the harness, and I was the only one of us who could attempt it. Knowing that Teko must be in great pain, and remembering how much he hated his harness being handled even without this added stimulus to anger, I thought it very probable that my moment had come; it was, however, impossible to leave him in his present condition. (It may be worth mentioning that no form of thigh-boot or glove provides any protection, as armour, against an otter that is attacking with serious intent.) It would clearly be impracticable to hold him in such a way as to undo the two buckles securing the harness, and the material itself was of extremely hard nylon so that I did not think it possible to cut through with a single stroke of any blade that I had; moreover, any
sawing action would necessarily drag the strap deeper and deeper into the flesh. In the end I settled for the kitchen scissors, and I entered his enclosure trying consciously to repress the fear that I felt, for however the emotion of fear is communicated to an animal the fact of its communication is unquestionable and disastrous.

  Teko stood up and put his forepaws against me – they reached almost to my hip – and whimpered. I put my face down to his and spoke consoling, caressing words to him while my hands were busy about his shoulder, trying to work the scissor blade under the nylon. It cut slowly, but it cut; after the first strap gave way there was a second, and then finally I had to pull the shoulder-strap out of the wound in which it was deeply embedded – throughout all this Teko made not one single angry sound.

  For eight days thereafter I had to go into his house and treat the wound by blowing powder deep into the sulcus, and though my manipulations must have been exceedingly painful he made no demonstration of protest whatsoever. (As a further safeguard against infection we put an enormous hunk of rock salt in his pool; this fascinated him beyond measure, and at the end of the first hour he had somehow contrived to hoist the whole forty-pound lump to the surface and to manhandle it out of the water on to the bank. Then he put it back and repeated the performance.)

  Whereas Teko always gives me delighted welcome when I return after absence from Camusfeàrna, repeating again and again his greeting sound of ‘whack-o, whack-o’, Edal would as invariably shrill her rebukes to myself or Jimmy for a desertion of even a day or two. (At first I was at a loss to interpret this phenomenon, and it was not until recently that I learnt that it is commonly recognized among human infants, the form of protest ranging between behaviour superficially akin to Edal’s and enuresis; the rebuke, when it is not overtly expressed, is implicit.) Edal would wail and snarl and lie on her back scrabbling at the air with her hands, her voice a shrewish and feminine variation upon Teko’s, lacking the consonant but retaining the cockney intonation, so that it emerges as ‘ow-ow-ow’, with a richness of disyllabic vowel-sound that might have baffled Professor Higgins had he encountered it in Eliza Doolittle. It was not until whichever of us had been absent had adequately apologized for his inconstancy that she would abandon her outraged attitude and seek the reassurance of caressing hands. What, one asks oneself, would Lovelace have felt had Lucasta’s only reaction to his poem (and, after all, Edal enjoyed not only four brief verses but several thousand words of prose) been ‘ow-ow-ow’ until he said it was all untrue and he was never going away again?

  It is an appropriate moment to place on record an unpalatable opinion, in which I hope that I may be proved wrong. Whatever may be true of other species, I do not believe that any fully adult otter of that to which Edal and Teko belong is to be trusted completely with any human other than its acknowledged foster-parents. The emotions are too intense, the degree of affection accorded by the otter too profound. To achieve placidity, to enjoy to the full the company of one of these wholly fascinating creatures one would have perforce to live the life of a hermit, with only animal companionship.

  Edal and Teko will not, I think, have forfeited final sympathy by the momentary violence that I have described. They acted instinctively and within the framework of their heritage, a framework in which violence was essential to survival and reproduction. It is not the existence of these explosions that should excite attention and comment, but that a carnivorous wild animal, never domesticated in the early history of mankind as were the wild dogs, should in the first generation of captivity or other association with man display so much that he finds acceptable and approvable.

  6

  Accident, Fire and Flood

  We had little use from the Polar Star during the autumn months; what time was not taken up by repairs after her wreck and the fitting of her new engines was filled, for the most part, by gales and heavy seas.

  Meanwhile, before she could be brought ashore in February, we had to arrange the building of a cradle for her, for she could not be beached in the ordinary way without damage to her propeller-shafts. A wheeled cradle to carry a boat of nine tons deadweight is a substantial vehicle, costly to construct and exceedingly difficult to transport to a site as remote as Camusfeàrna. Ours was built on the Clyde, some 250 road miles to the south of us, and carried by heavy lorry to the village pier five miles away; from there we hired one of the semi-local car-ferry boats to bring the massive structure in sections to the south bay at low tide.

  The cradle had then to be assembled in shallow water before the tide rose; the whole operation had to be timed with military precision, for the Polar Star, lying seventeen miles to the southward, was to be floated on to her cradle as the tide came up. The whole eleven tons we then intended to winch up the beach and on to the grass beside the house, using for this purpose our own Sahara Land Rover. The car was already at the house, for, after the narrative of Ring of Bright Water had been brought to a close, the proprietors of the estate on whose land Camusfeàrna lies had decided to bulldoze a track to a neighbouring bay, and we had paid for three extra days bulldozing to branch this track to Camusfeàrna. The result could hardly be called a road; in places, indeed, the bulldozer seemed to have succeeded merely in removing the floating crust from stretches of peat bog, but by Land Rover the track was usable after a spell of dry weather, when its gradient of one in three was not mud-covered nor its flatter stretches reduced by rain to seemingly bottomless morass. The downward journey was usually practicable in theory, though the fording of the Camusfeàrna burn, which cut the upper section of the track, was difficult in spate; but to ascend in anything but the driest conditions we had become used to putting out anchors ahead of the Land Rover and hauling her up on her own winch. Certain sections of the track were by now littered with broken anchor flukes in evidence of past failure.

  Our plans did not run with clockwork efficiency. The two-ton cradle came apart as it was dropped into the sea, and its massive metal parts proved very difficult to reassemble in the water. When Jimmy Watt in the Land Rover began to winch it to the position chosen for floating-on, the Polar Star was still on the horizon, but long before we were ready she was cruising impatiently round the bay. It was a further two hours before she settled solidly on to the heavy timbers of her cradle, and our work was only begun.

  The Land Rover was able to move the whole eleven tons a hundred yards up the beach to the edge of the grass, but the step up from the shingle on to the field itself was beyond her capacity, and we succeeded only in burning out the clutch. For the completion of the work, and for the removal of the now useless Land Rover, we had two days later to hire a breakdown lorry from a garage twenty miles away. The lorry was able to winch the Polar Star on to the grass, but the removal of the reluctant Land Rover presented greater difficulties. At the end of three hours the cortège had progressed less than a hundred yards up the one in three gradient of the track, and it was some seven hours after the beginning of the operation when, after midnight, the exhausted pall-bearers reached the metalled road at Druimfiaclach. It is such frequent incidents as these that render life at Camusfeàrna more costly than that of many a great mansion house nearer to the amenities of civilization.

  All this was after the great freeze-up. First had come tempests and hurricanes that knocked the fences flat, whisked the slates from the roof like leaves in autumn, blew dinghies about as if they were pieces of paper, while the surf fell upon the windows of the house and crusted them thick with salt. The gentle slope of the high sand-dunes to the sea became overnight a vertical cliff some ten feet high as the invading waves roared in and battered the dunes into a resistant wall; the racing torrent of the burn in spate undermined the roots of the alders and the trees fell; the length and breadth of the field, where the bent-grass itself lay flattened by the wind, was scattered with seaweed and flotsam from the beach. It had been impossible to watch the sea, for one could not stand upright without support, much less keep one’s eyes open as the hurricane hurled mingled spume a
nd sand landward at a hundred miles an hour.

  When the days of tempest were over it began to snow, and – something I had only seen once before at Camusfeàrna – it lay right down to the sea’s edge. Slowly it turned intensely cold; the burn froze over and then finally the waterfall itself. It froze solid, still in the form of a waterfall, so that only the lack of movement betrayed its sculptural substance. Giant icicles formed a fringe from the banks of the pool beneath it, icicles more than seven feet long and as thick as a man’s arm, and the deep pool itself was solid for more than two feet. The snow fell as though it would never end. Flat on the field and down to the tide it lay nearly two feet deep, and on the margin of the sea itself floated a tinkling crust of ice. On the hill above us the road was blocked; there the snow lay evenly more than a yard deep, and there were drifts into which an elephant could have disappeared.

  Everywhere the snow went on falling, but the days were for the most part bright and sunny and the sea blue, and the plantation of young firs on the hillside above us became a regiment of Christmas trees. We improvised a toboggan, to the huge delight of Teko, who would straddle it to be towed round at ever-increasing speed. He seemed to understand the idea very soon, and when we pulled the toboggan to the top of a slope he would climb on to it and wait with obvious impatience for someone to shove it off down the slope. As it began to slow he would kick with his hind legs to maintain the impetus, and when his chariot came to rest he would work angrily at the ropes with his teeth, as if by so doing he could once more coax it into movement. We sent to London for a real toboggan, but by the time it arrived the snow had long gone and had given place to mud and quagmire.

  The geese had left us, the wild grey geese that I had domesticated at Camusfeàrna two and a half years before. The day before the snow began they had taken wing, spiralled high above Druimfiaclach and made off southward at a great height. Of the eleven that left, only three came back in the spring; the rest, no doubt, suffered the common fate of wild creatures that have been taught to trust their worst enemy.