The Otters’ Tale. Simon Cooper

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СКАЧАТЬ Effectively my office is divided in two – one half for me and the other half for the mill wheel. Despite the constant pummelling roar of the water next door (yes, every minute, of every hour, of every day, year in year out), I chose to build a desk over what used to be the drive mechanism for the grinding stones. If I look up I can see the marks in the ceiling beams where the power take off gear connected to the spindle to the grinding gear. Behind me is an old-fashioned winding handle that turns two cogs, which in turn lift an iron gate that controls the flow of water into the stream that powers the mill wheel. I only need turn the cogs two or three notches and the wheel will turn. It is a slow, powerful, creaking turn, the thirty-two buckets (the official term of a mill wheel paddle) taking nearly a minute to go full circle. I have to remember to keep my feet clear of the turning spindle when it is in motion.

      But it wasn’t always like this. When I first arrived, the wheel was stopped and had been that way for years. In some distant past it had slipped out of level alignment; for a while it obviously continued to turn despite being out of kilter, cutting circular gouges in the wall that are still plain to see. But at some point it must have jumped out of the shoe in which the nub of the spindle sat, to lean at a crazy angle jammed up against the wall. The iron control gate had rusted away to nothing, the cogs that raised and lowered it long gone. You’d think that it was a hopeless case. Plenty suggested that I might just as well sell the iron for scrap. However, I am not that easily deterred. Believe it or not, there are still skilled wheelwrights working today. Men with boiler suits, toolboxes full of mighty spanners and hands perpetually ingrained with grease. They took one look at it, pronounced it sound and returned some weeks later with newly made parts that made the wheel operation whole again.

      You might wonder why this is relevant to my first otter sighting. Well, there is a vaulted tunnel where the mill straddles the river, carrying away the water after it has powered through the wheel. After years of disuse that tunnel was virtually blocked. We had donned waders to check it out, jammed as it was with logs, mud, brushwood and all sorts, but really it was too dark and confined to tell much. I was all for some extreme raking to clear it, but the millwright guys assured me that the water would do all the work. So with great ceremony the iron gate was lifted for the first time in decades. The water flowed, the mill wheel turned and the tunnel gradually filled with water until the force was so great that a plug of ancient detritus burst through into the mill pool below. Suddenly the pool went from shallow and clear to deep and dirty. Tree roots, bald tennis balls, reeds, twigs and all sorts swirled in the surface, but something in the back eddy caught my eye. It looked like an over-inflated, half-sunk, part-hairy, grey and pink balloon. I dragged it closer with a stick.

      I guessed it was something dead. At first I assumed it was a badger, but the long tail, denuded of hair in death, told another story. As the corpse flipped over, it was clearly an otter. I am no pathologist, but years of living in the country usually gives you some ability to tell what a creature has died of, or been killed by, but this otter was too far gone for any postmortem. The fur was peeling away, exposing the greying pink skin beneath. Bones were showing through the flesh of the legs. I suspect in a week or two it would have been unrecognisable even as an otter. So I can only surmise as to how it had died. In all probability it had crawled into the tunnel as a last place of refuge, hit perhaps by a car, which is common enough. Or maybe it was on the wrong end of a fight. Or perhaps it was simply old age. Whatever the reason, it was a sad way to see my first otter.

      I must admit, at the time I didn’t think very much more about it, putting it down to a freak occurrence, but as I spent more time at my desk beside my newly refurbished mill wheel I started to have unexpected company. As I mentioned earlier, the wheel housing is a separate room of the mill, through which the river flows, splitting into two channels. One channel takes up about two-thirds of the width, over which hangs the wheel itself. The other third is the mill race, where the water pummels through. The race is a sort of relief channel through which the river is diverted when the wheel is not running. The whole wheel housing is effectively open to the elements with brick arches over the river at either end of the building. On the upriver, or inflow, side, two huge, ancient oak beams straddle the width of the room from which are hung the iron gates that control the flow through the two channels. It was these beams that the otters adopted as couches.

      I say ‘the otters’, but I really have no true idea whether it was the same otter who arrived often or a series of visitors. The sightings were nearly always fleeting as I came into the room to sit at my desk; a blur caught in the corner of my eye followed by a splash. At first I ignored it, thinking it was, well, I don’t really know what I thought it was. A mink perhaps, or a stoat; they are far more common. Even a rat maybe. But one day when I was adjusting the control gates I saw shining atop one of the oak beams what today I would instantly recognise as a spraint. Back then, less so, or, if I’m being honest, not at all. A trip to my desk and a visit to Google put me right. I determined to be more discreet when entering the office next time.

      However, my definition of discreet and that of an otter is a very long way apart. Two or three steps into the room was only ever the best I could do before the splash and the rapid departure. I did take to rushing outside to at least have the satisfaction of following the bubble trail as the otter headed off underwater. Sometimes he, or it could have been she, would surface to look back, but generally the last I would see was a wet sliver of fur slide itself over the weir and disappear into the pool below.

      A few times I did get closer. One summer afternoon I went into the mill wheel room, blinking as I went from the bright sunshine to semi-darkness, only to be struck rigid at the sight of two otters sitting on the oak beams. Who was more shocked I have no idea. I looked at them, they looked at me. I didn’t move but they did, twisting and diving into the water, fleeing at speed. The other times were when I worked very early or very late at my desk. I’d hear some splashing and coughs of exertion as an otter hauled itself out of the water using the ironwork as a sort of ladder to perch on one of the beams, grooming and generally making itself comfortable before settling down. It was then, and still is now, a wonderful thing to see up close. Occasionally the otter would spy me, our eyes meeting and the reaction variable. Sometimes instant flight, other times mild curiosity before choosing to ignore me. The latter was fine by me. Working with an otter peering over your shoulder is an oddity worth getting used to.

      It might seem odd that an otter would choose the mill wheel as such a regular stopping-off point, being, as it is, in the midst of a human habitation. But I think it is something of a combination of things that makes it so attractive – the antiquity, the lie of the land around the mill, the location and, more recently, an awful lot of fish. There is no doubt that they have been using that oak beam as a couch for a very long time. Spraints are not just odorous but are also pretty toxic in dung terms. Regular sprainting spots on grassland will turn the turf brown then dead. It will really take the ground a long while to recover, the deposits having much the same effect as spilling fuel or oil on your lawn; once you know what to look for, it is an easy way to tell whether otters are around. In a similar fashion, otters who live by the sea will take a particular liking to a prominent rock or outcrop. Clearly the spraints can’t do much damage to solid stone, but the spot will turn green in time, much like the copper roof of a church. Back closer to home, my oak beams have suffered a slightly different fate; each now has rotten indentations where the otters have laid down their marks over the years.

      The land around the mill is a regular Spaghetti Junction of water courses; not only does the water go under the building but it goes around it on both sides – we are effectively moated. To put that into some sort of perspective, imagine you are looking directly at a rugby ball; from the top the three lines of stitching represent where the single river is split into three. Down the left goes the original Wallop Brook, a fast clear stream that burbles over gravel. Down the middle is a much wider, deeper slower river which we (confusingly) call the Mill Pond. It is this that drives the mill wheel, which is where the rugby ball laces would be. Down the right is a side stream, or carrier, a man-made channel that was created to regulate the level of the Mill Pond. All have been dug or adapted by man in past centuries to manage the water flow, with the addition of some connecting channels that run crossways between them. СКАЧАТЬ