The Otters’ Tale. Simon Cooper

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СКАЧАТЬ the rugby ball, if you like, all three come back together where a united brook continues on its way into the water meadows.

      All in all, this is otter heaven; when on land, there is no point at which an otter is ever more than a few bounds from the safety of water, and they do treat the respective streams as regular highways. I can see from the permanent tracks in the grass and the slides that they arrive via one stream, cross by land to another, tracking back to the original one further downstream by a different route. They barely deviate in the routes they follow; in the spring the fresh grass is pressed down, by summer it is pounded brown and in winter there is muddy track. And then, of course, there is the snow. They are, if nothing else, creatures of habit.

      The mill is also on the edge of two of the Wallop villages that stand along the brook, our building being the first or last outpost, depending on your direction of travel. The two settlements, Over Wallop and Nether Wallop, like the territory of otters, are very linear. The ancient meaning of the word ‘wallop’ is hidden valley, and the combined villages stretch about three miles, the homes of just a few hundred people mostly hunched up close to the course of the river. I suspect that the mill wheel, the last stop after all those miles of habitation, is where otters can arrive and depart by water, almost like a proper holt, which must seem like a blessed refuge. Conversely, if they arrive from the direction of The Badlands (more about this place in a moment), after a trek over four or five miles of wild and barely habited river, the stopover with us must appeal for different, but equally important, reasons.

      The one thing I haven’t mentioned is the trout lake, which for all the obvious reasons makes us an undoubted attraction on the itinerary of any otter. The lake, which lies just 35 yards to the west of the mill (to the left of that imaginary rugby ball) is fed by offshoots of the Wallop Brook that flow in at the top and out at the bottom. It is the shape of a kidney, which size-wise would more or less fit into a football field. There are grilles at the inflow and outflow to stop the trout escaping, but it is otherwise unprotected, just part of the landscape. But this is not really your normal lake. It is stuffed full of rainbow trout, because this is where I teach fly fishing – with new people coming every day you need a heavy density of fish, and during the season, April to October, the stock is replenished fortnightly from a local trout hatchery. I don’t like to diminish the status of the rainbows; they are hard-fighting fish that are great to catch and in their native North America they are wily survivors, but here, when the fishermen have gone home and the night falls, the odds are stacked against them when the otters come calling.

      During the spring and summer when I go out to do my early morning rounds, clearing the sluices and adjusting the hatches in preparation for the fishing day ahead, I expect to find a fish corpse, or the evidence of one being caught, more or less every other day. Usually it is a victim of an otter, though occasionally it is a heron, but it is pretty easy to tell the difference. If it is an almost whole fish, the heron will have left tell-tale stab wounds. Conversely, if the bird has had time to eat pretty much all the fish, it will look more like a cartoon fish skeleton, the left-behind bones picked clean. Otters, on the other hand, generally start from the head down, eating everything, bones and all, as they go. In the depth of winter, when food is scarce, it is unusual to find part-eaten trout – protein is too scarce. It is only really in the summer, or when the mother is teaching the pups to fish, that otters abandon a trout without finishing it off. Sometimes I have to look really hard to see whether they have been, the only evidence those few flecks of blood or bright scales similar to what I saw on that snowy morning. I suspect the otters had been robbing me blind of trout for years without me ever knowing it.

      As winter clutched at the throat of the countryside, daily squeezing every last drop of life from the less hardy inhabitants, Kuschta took to exploring her new territory. Unfettered by the constraints of other otters, she was free to move at will, marking the land along the Wallop Brook from the junction pool to the headwaters, where it is barely a river at all as the bright crystal water springs from the ground. If you flew up the valley like a bird you’d see that, despite all the apparent habitation – houses, farms, roads and all the other things that civilisation brings in its wake – the Wallop Valley is surprisingly wild. Woodland crowds up to the bank for at least a quarter of its length, hiding the river from prying eyes. Water meadows, rough-grazed by cattle and flecked with wild flowers, merge the land with the water. In some places it is just a river lost in a wetland swamp. We call this lost place downstream of the Mill The Badlands, where reed beds, crisscrossing rivulets, soft soggy ground and a scruffy, fallen willow plantation look like a terrific mess. It is rarely visited by people. Sure, there are some tidy gardens that come up to the edge of the brook in places, bits that have been adapted for things like my mill or banks that have been realigned to prevent flooding, but on the whole it is a natural stream that hasn’t changed much in the past two or three centuries.

      When we think about the history of our landscape, it is strange that otters don’t feature more in British folklore, history and culture, for they have been part of our lives since the first moment man made settlements on the banks of a river. From that time onwards, as we invaded the territory that they had called their own for millions of years, otters were amongst us but never really part of us – mysterious creatures that we saw rarely and understood even less. The inns along the highways of Britain are testament to this absence; the names The White Hart, The Black Horse, The Bear, The Swan, The Bull and even The Black Rat offer an insight to the creatures that have impinged on our culture down the centuries. But The Otter Inn? Well, there are some, but very few considering it is our largest semi-aquatic mammal.

      The more you think about it, the stranger it is. After all, otters are not exactly small; nose to tail they are close to four feet long. A fully grown male weighs around twenty-two pounds – that is heavier than a terrier or about the same as a beagle. In feline terms, think twice the weight of a healthy cat and twice the body length. And a river through a town is a much-watched place – you’d think they would hardly go unnoticed, plus you’d expect that the numerous opportunities for food would draw them into human orbit. Rats and foxes have adapted to human habitation, thriving on our detritus and finding homes that man has, by accident rather than design, created for them. But not otters. They seem to shun the opportunities afforded by man, even changing their habits to become yet more secretive.

      We think of otters as nocturnal, but they can equally be diurnal – active by day instead of night. On the south and west coast of Ireland otters regularly swim past anglers during the day; visitors are astonished, whilst for the locals it is so common as to pass unremarked. It is the same in the Scottish Isles, suggesting that where people are sparse otters are content to alter their behaviour accordingly. When they choose the night, they do it to avoid their greatest adversary – man.

      Maybe there was a time long, long ago when man and otter lived in perfect harmony. After all, nobody ever seems to suggest that otters make good eating. They were not hunted for food, unlike the slow-witted beaver who, also native and incredibly populous to Britain at one time, was hunted to extinction as soon as early man took to living in the river valleys. In fact, the only people who seemed regularly to eat European otters was a group of Carthusian monks in Dijon, France, who stretched the truth to get around some awkward theological dietary requirements. Banned by holy order from consuming meat, they cunningly deemed the otter to be a fish. Now whether this was because it ate fish or lived like a fish, nobody is exactly sure, but accounts of the time rated the flesh ‘rank and fishy’, so the monks must have been somewhat desperate.

      So aside from a few monks, maybe there was a time when the otter went about its daily life without a care in the world. A time when the fish were plentiful and the people few, when otters were free to range over huge tracts of unsettled land where the rivers were wild and the woodland dense. A time when otters feared nobody and wanted for nothing. It is a lovely thought; a sort of aquatic Garden of Eden. But if such a time ever existed it most certainly came to an end in the Middle Ages, when the population of Europe increased. Communities coalesced around rivers, the fertile valleys were gradually cleared and drained for agriculture. What was done a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago across southern England was not so very different to СКАЧАТЬ