For the few short weeks of my visit to Camusfeàrna I had tried to avoid seeing the otters. Their end in a zoo was something to which I could never reconcile myself, the institutionalization of unwanted children; but there had seemed no alternative. I could not even earn the money to support them; though already I had received an uncountable number of letters from the public censuring my decision in the most unequivocal terms. What could they know of the impossibilities? Seven thousand pounds a year to keep Camusfeàrna alive but barren – how many of my correspondents could find that money, now or ever, to keep something beautiful even dimly alive in an oxygen mask? And for how long? I had known that it was over, done, finished; but still the unknown faces, unknown voices, had hammered at me to do the impossible, even the ridiculous. Some asked why I did not ‘set them free’. As well to ask why one could not set free a dog that one had owned and cherished for seven years; these two otters, Edal and Teko, had been bottle-reared by humans from early infancy, had lived in human houses until the danger of the situation had become disastrously apparent, and they were used to having their meals provided at regular hours. They would not leave; and if, instead, one were oneself to leave they would neither be able to fend for themselves nor to withstand the rigours of the Scottish climate without the heated sleeping quarters to which they were accustomed. It had been a different matter with the various Scottish otters we had kept at Camusfeàrna; we did set them free, and miraculously they appeared to have survived, for years anyway, the peril inherent in a wild animal’s trust of man. I saw them occasionally; more often, however, I received letters from English tourists visiting the West Highlands telling me that at some point which was always within fifteen miles or so of Camusfeàrna an otter had come out of the sea, and had approached them unafraid, and sniffed at their shoes. Was this, some of them asked, the normal behaviour of an otter? Each of these letters gave me a tremendous lift of heart, for they told me that the creatures we had taught to trust humans had not yet been murdered because of it.
But with Edal and Teko there could be no such simple solution, and I had made up my mind at last. To love animals as well as humans increases one’s capacity for suffering; sometimes I have envied those who are indifferent to mammals of other species than their own, but perhaps it increases, too, a general perception and understanding, the compassion and tenderness that is all too latent in most of humanity – so latent that by now we threaten the survival even of our own species. These things which constituted my attitude towards the two otters made my decision the outcome of a painful struggle, more painful than I would care to describe. But the struggle was over, the decision made. The otters were going, Camusfeàrna would be closed; somewhere I would find a new life.
Nothing is ever as definite as that. If you love a human or an animal there are great ropes pulling you back to the object of that love, and the hands that haul upon the ropes are your own. But it was a little late for loving.
I started down the hill towards the lights of the house. In the darkness the night seemed wilder even than the dusk had been; the rain, driven in from the sea by a full gale, slashed and battered at my face. The tide had turned, and I could hear the roar and hiss of the incoming breakers pounding on the beach below the house. It was an apt enough setting for a long farewell.
*
I passed between the rowan tree, its form just visible against the hurrying nighted clouds, and Teko’s enclosure. Teko would by now be in his sleeping quarters, the little lean-to slate-roofed outhouse built on the northerly wall of Camusfeàrna cottage. There he had an overhead infra-red lamp, a raised platform, and a bed consisting of a large lorry tyre filled with blankets. As I passed by, I visualized his sleeping form; I did not expect ever to see him again, because I did not think that I could have borne to visit him in a zoo.
A dog suddenly nuzzled at me in the dark. Something huge, at waist level. I put my hands down and recognized my deerhound bitch Hazel, wet and draggled like I was, but warm and welcoming. Since the Pyrenean Mountain Dog, Gus, had been killed, Hazel had been my familiar; her vast form sleeping on top of my bed, to our great mutual discomfort but to her great delight. Many people may think that I should be ashamed to write that at this, that seemed our last meeting, I was near to tears. She put her paws on my shoulders, and her head was a foot above mine, I said goodbye to her and I let her into the house to warm and dry.
I had said goodbye to Hazel, and now I wanted, obsessively, to say goodbye to Teko. For some minutes I stood there in the dark and the rain and the high wind, knowing that what I wanted to do could only make things worse; but perhaps with a subconscious knowledge of what was going to happen, with a subconscious will to change what was happening to Camusfeàrna and to change all decisions I had made, I turned and opened the high wooden gate to his little house. I closed the gate behind me and switched on the electric light in his sleeping quarters. He wasn’t there – and small wonder. The gale had dislodged slates from his roof; the entire floor was under something like an inch of water; the blankets were soaking, and the infra-red lamp had fused. I called him, and he came through from the big enclosure which contained his swimming pool, wet and draggled and miserable.
He greeted me as might a castaway on a desert island greet his rescuing ship. All his language which I had come to know so well over seven years he employed in welcome, in rebuke, in renewed hope for the future. The mustelline access of emotion that may turn to such terrible violence was now all affection and desire for reassurance; he squirmed and writhed and put his fingers in my mouth and ears; he put his mouth to mine and sought the animal exchange of saliva.
I called at the top of my voice for dry towels and dry blankets; when these arrived he took pleasure in being dried as he had when he was an infant, and when I had furnished his tyre with warm blankets he entered it at my gesture and composed himself to sleep on his back, his head resting ludicrously upon my forearm, his mouth open and snoring slightly.
I disengaged myself and left him sleeping, knowing now that I could not send him to a zoo, and that somehow or other he must be taken again to the waterfall, to the rock pools, to the sea and the river, to roam free as he had once become accustomed long ago. I did not know how this might be achieved, but I knew that it must happen; that if it did not I would be a betrayer, and a betrayer of animal loyalties becomes a betrayer in human situations too.
I lacked courage; I asked someone else to telephone to the zoo to which Teko had been destined, saying that whereas Edal now appeared relatively independent of human company and might settle there, Teko would not, and I would keep him. I did not know how; I knew only the necessity. I had become committed. I wanted to spend the next summer giving back to this animal the joy and freedom that we had once shared in Camusfeàrna. My own future had become dim and blurred by multiple problems; his, at least, I could restore for a season.
So when I left Camusfeàrna for North Africa in December 1966 I was not saying a true farewell as I had planned and prepared. I was returning, come what might, hell and high water. I felt that by now I was acquainted with both.
2
A Little Late for Loving
Some of the history of Camusfeàrna after the publication of Ring of Bright Water I tried to write of in The Rocks Remain, but it was necessarily an incomplete story, and I treated much of it in a semi-farcical vein that I should find difficult to do today. Then I saw the happenings as isolated and episodic, however bad the worst of them had been, rather than as part of a trend that was leading steadily toward the end of Camusfeàrna and all that it had stood for. With hindsight now each seems a logical step on a stairway of decline; though even with that hindsight only a few would have been avoidable.
In August 1961 the female otter, Edal, had almost literally chewed off two fingers from her keeper Terry Nutkins; in time even Jimmy Watt, who had known her for so long, lost his trust in her, and she was totally confined, as is any animal in a zoo. This in itself was a heavy enough hammer blow, but it was o
nly the first, so that as time went on I came to expect nothing but blows.
In October of the same year there was the wreck of the Polar Star, a night such as I hope never to pass again.
In November I became engaged to be married, and in December the male otter, Teko, savagely attacked my fiancée’s son Simon, then aged thirteen. In January 1962, while I was in London preparing for my wedding on 1 February, Teko attacked Jimmy Watt, and after that both otters became animals living under zoo conditions.
By the last months of that year the stresses of an incompatible marriage had become too great for me to write, and the sequel to Ring of Bright Water, which should by then have been completed, had hardly been begun. A friend offered to lend me an empty villa in a remote village of Majorca, and I went there meaning to shut myself off from all problems at home, and to concentrate upon working as I had never done in my life. On the day of my arrival my car was stolen from Palma dock, and within half an hour had been irreparably crashed. The whole of my time in Majorca was taken up by legal and police formalities, and by the time I returned to England the book was little further forward than before my departure.
When I came back I found that Terry Nutkins had left; Jimmy Watt was alone, and there were not enough hours in the day to deal with all the responsibilities that the management of Camusfeàrna now entailed. This was the beginning of a series of temporary assistants, nearly all of whom, each in his own way, brought the end of Camusfeàrna perceptibly nearer.
Some six weeks later my wife and I separated, though we were not divorced until July 1964. It is with the end of The Rocks Remain, in the spring of 1963, that I take up the story of Camusfeàrna – or perhaps some may choose to think of it as the story of the rowan tree.
On 24 June 1963 I left Camusfeàrna for the south. I was going to spend a fortnight at my brother’s home in Greece. Normally I would have looked forward keenly to this visit, but now I did not want to leave my own home – or what little was left of it – for I was trying desperately to hold it together.
At the top of the hill I transferred my luggage from the jeep to the big Land Rover in which I was going to drive to Inverness to take the train south. This Land Rover was one which I had used in North Africa, and had a number of special features. Amongst others was one that a few minutes later probably saved my life – a BBC hard roof, designed to carry the weight of men and equipment. I remember that it was a sunny morning with no wind, and that the sea in the Sound of Sleat below me was brilliant blue. There were big white cumulus clouds high over the purple hills of Skye.
The first seventeen miles of road from Camusfeàrna is single-tracked, with passing places every two or three hundred yards, and for the first five miles to the village it is very narrow indeed. Barely wide enough, for example, for car and a bicycle to pass abreast.
I had driven half a mile or so, and I was going uphill at perhaps twenty miles an hour, when from behind a heathery knoll on my right a stag jumped across the road right under my wheels. I swerved instinctively and just missed the stag. He was bounding down the bank below me on my left and I was in the act of righting the steering wheel when a second stag followed him. I could not avoid this one, but I suppose I must have tried. I felt the dull thud of contact; then I felt the car lurch over, and I knew that I was overturning. My head hit the roof as the car completed her first somersault, then something heavy hit me in the ribs as she rolled over again.
If I lost consciousness at all it must have been for moments only. I was still in the driver’s seat but I was lying on my right hand side, and grass and heather were pushing through the window into my neck and cheek. The engine was still running, but I could not reach the switch with my left hand because of a big suitcase that had been on the passenger’s seat and was now pinning my left arm to my side. There were two full jerry cans of petrol on the front end of the Land Rover, besides a full tank; I was in no condition to assess rationally the likelihood of fire, but I knew that if it started while I was in this helpless position I should at the least be very badly burned. I struggled to get the suitcase off me, but I could only do this by half turning upward in my seat so as to be able to push with my left hand. This was made the more difficult because my left foot was somehow caught between the pedals, so that it would not turn with me and give me purchase. I struggled, squeezing my foot enough to hurt a little, but it would not move. Though I could not shift the suitcase I managed at last to worm my left arm through below it and reach the ignition switch. Then there was absolute silence, and I lay there getting my breath back.
I could move the suitcase only by butting it simultaneously with my head and left shoulder; at each butt it bounced, until one, stronger than the rest, toppled it over to lodge behind the gear lever, in the passenger’s foot-well. Then I had both arms free, and I started to try to climb out. Because, like other Land Rovers, there were three seats in front, the door through which I had to make my escape seemed a very long way above me. I tried to haul myself up by the gear lever, and it was only then that I realized that my left foot was truly trapped and that it would not follow me. I writhed and squirmed and twisted it, but it was still held fast. At last I gave it one terrific jerk, which hurt only in the sense that a bad graze hurts, and I was free. I climbed awkwardly out of the horizontal passenger’s door, jumped down to the ground and lit a cigarette.
There was hardly a mark on the visible portions of the car. There was no sign of the stags, though the second had left a big tuft of hair on the bumpers. There was no blood. It seemed to me as if neither the stag nor I had received serious injury. I was very wrong.
I did not understand then, and I have never understood since, the causes of that accident which had such far-reaching consequences, which changed, in fact, my life for years to come. To begin with, the stags had run downhill, straight at the forestry fence a bare thirty yards or so below the road, and a stag in summer would do this only if suddenly surprised from above by a human being. Even then they would have heard the noise of the Land Rover approaching. I climbed the knoll with a sort of anger, thinking that there really was someone up there, someone who had seen the car rolling over and over down the bank and had been too indifferent to help me while I lay there trapped and thinking that I was about to be roasted.
There was nothing; only the slot marks of the stags in soft black peat a few yards from the road, and, higher up, a few sheep grazing scattered and undisturbed. That ruled out the possibility of a dog, for the sheep would have bunched together. I began to walk back the way I had come.
When I reached Druimfiaclach, the cottage on the road above Camusfeàrna, I turned in to see my old friends the MacKinnons; I felt I could do with one of Morag’s cups of tea before I started down the hill to telephone about having the Land Rover restored to the road. Calum Murdo was as puzzled as I was about the behaviour of the stags. ‘It’s not like the beasts at all,’ he said. In fact I think he did not believe me until he saw the tufts of stag’s hair in the joints of the bumpers.
While I was sitting in the MacKinnons’ kitchen the doctor came in. She was comparatively new to the district, though it had been many years since the village had had a male doctor. She had seen the Land Rover as she passed; she had been puzzled, as anyone would have been, as to how the accident could have happened, and she had stopped at Druimfiaclach to ask if anyone had been hurt. I told her briefly of the sequence of events. ‘And you’re not hurt?’ she asked.
‘No, not at all.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Quite sure. Only a bruise or two, and a graze on one foot. I feel fine.’ I believed this completely, so that when the symptoms of damage began to appear I did not at first connect them in any way with the accident.
‘Well,’ said Calum Murdo, ‘I don’t know whether to say you are lucky or not, Major’ (my war-time rank had stuck to me in the district, despite every effort on my part to rid myself of it). ‘You get away with driving that Mercedes at a hundred and fifty miles an hour and you and t
he population of the British Isles seem to survive it, and now you leave the road in a Land Rover doing less than twenty. They say the devil looks after his own; he’s got a lot of different ways of doing it, and maybe he employs stags as well as special roofs built on to Land Rovers. Anyway one thing’s certain, we none of us get it before our time – “I have a rendezvous with death at some disputed barricade”… You’ll pardon me if I’m carried away by the exuberance of my own verbosity…’
Five days later I arrived at Athens airport. As I left the aircraft and began to walk down the gang-stairs the heat seemed almost to push one down into the ground. The passengers began to walk across the tarmac towards the airport buildings some two hundred yards distant, and after a quarter of the way I could feel the sweat trickling down every inch of my body. I was halfway when I became aware of a curious cramping pain starting in my left foot, a dull pain like the feeling of a bruise, but growing steadily in intensity. To my enormous surprise it became so bad that I had to stop. I put down my hand luggage and wriggled my foot about, thinking that perhaps I had sat for too long in one position in the aircraft. After perhaps a minute the pain receded, but it was back with me by the time I had reached the Customs. As soon as I was standing still – and there was nothing else to do for quite a long time – it wore off. My brother was there to meet me at the airport with his car; after that I had no more walking to do, and I forgot the episode completely.