The Otters’ Tale. Simon Cooper

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СКАЧАТЬ a while the reeded, scrubby bank gave way to open meadows, the river now wider and shallower. Shorn of any bank cover, the moon shone down directly on the surface, lighting a bright path of water ahead. Other than Kuschta, nothing moved or stirred. She was in that nether time of night when the chill had settled and the bats and owls were back in their roosts. The grass had turned cold damp, enough to send the furred creatures to ground – rabbits and voles care little for getting wet when there is scant prospect of warmth; they would be waiting for dawn before reappearing. The isolation suited her just fine, so she swam on strongly against the steady current, putting distance between her and the stream junction. As the river meandered first this way, then that, she began to tire, getting a little cold herself. Easing up onto a tree root that dipped down into the water on the inside of a sharp bend, she took stock.

      Otters are rarely idle. Kuschta surveyed the river whilst all the while grooming herself, both the effort and the effect gradually bringing the warmth back into her body. Perched on the root, dried and rested, she could afford to take her time – she had chosen the warmest spot on the river. Otters exploit the smallest wrinkles in nature; her perch was one such wrinkle. With certain rivers, at particular times of the year, the water is considerably warmer than the air, and where the two meet a blanket of warm air, a layer no more than a foot or so thick, hugs the surface. If you ever see a ‘smoking’ river, that’s the evidence, and by inserting herself beneath the mist, close to the water, Kuschta was exploiting nature’s very own greenhouse effect.

      Everything about the bend in the river screamed fish; the tapering flow on the inside bank on which she sat had just enough slack water where a fish might rest. The faster middle would be empty, the effort/reward ratio too much for any fish to bother to hold station in. The far bank, with its undercuts, back eddies, tree roots and depth, was fish heaven – they could lie in there night and day, ready to dart out to any food that drifted their way. It was time for Kuschta to make a move. Slipping into the water, she let the current carry her downstream for a few yards, then simultaneously turned and dived, pushing herself hard and fast along the inside bend, as close to the gravel river bed as she could – the closer she stayed to the bottom, the fewer options the fish had to escape; they could go left, right or up, but not down. In the dark she could see very little. But no matter; her whiskers were doing all the seeing.

      She couldn’t be sure, but maybe a fish had darted off into the distance. She let it go. Her hopes were really pinned on the far bank. By her estimation the fish would be facing upstream, looking out for food, so if she came at them head-on she’d have a crucial moment of advantage as they had to turn to flee. So surfacing well upstream, she coughed in that way that otters do, noisily sucked in air and dived. Her swimming, combined with the current, moved her fast. For a short moment the fish didn’t notice her coming, her movements masked by the midstream current. But then in total alarm they knew there was something dangerous amongst them. Kuschta’s whiskers were alive with information. She lunged as a trout slipped for cover under a tree root. Her teeth grazed another that bounced off her head. She accelerated after a third but it had too much of a head start. Undeterred, she surfaced, paddled for a moment to recover and then headed down deep, preparing to get amongst the roots this time.

      It is something of an irony that any fish would be best advised to do nothing when hunted by an otter; by remaining still, the chances of detection in the dark, swirling water would be next to zero. But flight is the natural instinct of fish, so otters exploit this primordial reaction to danger. The fact was, Kuschta had no exact idea where the fish lay, she just knew that they were probably hiding in the cavity beneath the tree roots, and if she could spook them their instinct for flight would lead her to them.

      Rising from below and slipping between the trailing roots that hung down in the water, Kuschta’s bulk filled the confined space. Any speed advantage the fish might have had over her was gone as she drove them down a watery cul-de-sac. Was it two, three or four fish? She couldn’t really tell, such was the confusion as they tried to push past her to the safety of open water. However many it was, it didn’t really matter – she needed just one, the currents of vibration honing her in on a fish trapped between her and the bank. The soft belly of the fish gave a little as she made contact with it with her mouth before she drove her long, curved canine teeth into the flesh. The now-wounded trout flexed head and tail in unison to escape the pain and capture. Reversing out, Kuschta kept her jaws clamped tight, the backwardly curved teeth maintaining a certain grip on the struggling fish. Breaking the surface, Kuschta’s nostrils flared open to breathe in air, whilst the trout splashed and crashed about her head, in a flailing death throe now exposed to the same air. Swimming back across the river, Kuschta headed for the root perch, scrabbling up and out, sending a spray of water all around as she delivered the coup de grace, violently shaking the fish to snap its spine.

      Kuschta didn’t bother to groom or preen; she ate as if her life depended on it. By the time the first fingers of the cold winter dawn showed across the meadows she was done, the leftovers just a ragged tail. It was time to hide. Her eye was drawn to a mess of dried reeds and twigs that had been gathered up then left behind by a recent flood, piled up against the base of the tree. Pawing at the pile, she exposed a gap in the web of roots at the base of the tree. Squeezing through, she found a small cavern beyond, the sides and roof made up of old, gnarled brown alder roots, most of their growing done. The floor was softer, still alive, a bed of little pink nodules ready to sprout in the spring. Dragging some of the leaf litter inside, she circled around as best she could in the tiny space, fashioning a comfortable mattress which she nestled into. Sleep was not long coming, but before Kuschta finally drifted off she sensed she might finally have found a place to call home.

       CHAPTER 3

       SOMETHING IN THE AIR

       Winter

      I’ve lived on and around rivers pretty well all my life, but it wasn’t until my fourth decade that I finally saw an otter. And even after all that waiting, that first sighting wasn’t under particularly auspicious circumstances.

      I had just bought an abandoned water mill that straddles a small chalkstream in southern England, called Wallop Brook. It did, and still does, comprise two buildings – the miller’s cottage and the mill building. The former was just about habitable and the latter was really nothing more than a foursquare brick structure rising over three storeys, completely empty bar one important element: the mill wheel itself. I gleaned from the villagers (not all overly friendly when I first moved in …) that the corn-grinding mechanism had been stripped out years before, the last production sometime soon after the Second World War. A few things remained to remind a casual visitor of a past that stretched back over a thousand years – you will find the Nether Wallop Mill listed in the Domesday Book. The side wall of the building was hung with slates, faded white signwriting emblazoning in two-foot-tall letters the legend F. VINCENT’S NOTED GAME FOODS. The mill had produced both bird food for a wider market and, on a lesser scale, flour for Nether Wallop and the surrounding villages. Out in what is now the garden, where in the past sheep grazed up to the back door, there can be found a complicated array of a mill pond, pools, hatches, carriers and relief streams. It might look antediluvian to us today, but in Mr Vincent’s time, and long before that, too, these old-fashioned devices controlled the flows that were vital for driving the water wheel and sustaining the milling industry. In more modern times, and for my purposes, they are far from defunct, their control being the difference between me having a wet or dry house in times of flood.

      As I write this today my feet are poked under a giant cast-iron spindle, the central core to an even more giant cast-iron mill wheel, the height of two men, that is separated from me by a low wall, topped by a glass СКАЧАТЬ