The Otters’ Tale. Simon Cooper

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СКАЧАТЬ and the pursuer. For the trout it was about staying alive. For Kuschta it was about food. For both, in different ways, it was about survival.

      Soon Kuschta sensed the fish was tiring, the sprints of flight slowing with each passing chase. Suddenly she felt the fish to her right, the two of them swimming parallel. This was her chance. One swift dive, turn and boom and she’d grabbed the fish by the soft underbelly. As the fish tensed and twitched she drove her teeth deep into its flesh, asserting her grip. She knew it wasn’t the perfect hit, more to the tail than the head, allowing the trout to thrash and twist its body, but changing the grip of her jaws was no option. She’d learnt from bitter experience that was how meals escaped. So with the trout whipping about her head she swam for shore, digging her sharp claws into the bank to heave herself and the fish onto the grass. Subduing the fish by shaking it hard, Kuschta held it down with her front paws, let go of the belly and bit hard behind the head, extinguishing all life bar a few death twitches.

      Otters don’t gloat in victory, they simply get down to the job in hand, consuming the capture. Kuschta was too hungry to care anyway, tearing into the flesh, eating as much and as fast as she could. After twenty minutes, with the head and the best end of the fish safely in her belly, she paused to clean herself, licking away the smatterings of blood, scales and flesh. Silent and content, she settled down to rest for a while before she would finish the fish then head back to the rotten willow. But a noise in the distance changed all that. Up on the beam she knew so well, a figure appeared. An otter – bigger than any she had ever seen before. It first sniffed suspiciously at the ground where she had lain then tested the air. She froze as it held its head in her direction. For a moment she thought it was going to leap into the pool and head directly over to her, but it was distracted by another otter, more the size of Kuschta’s mother, which came up by his side.

      As the two nuzzled and groomed at each other’s fur, Kuschta knew her time in the only place she had ever called home was over. The larger of the two was not an otter she recognised; the other may have been her mother but she could not be sure. Though part of her yearned to do it, she suspected, quite rightly, that no good would come of her revealing her presence. It was time to go. Edging away from the river, she headed for the woods and, keeping the sound of the water just within earshot, continued downstream for an hour or more. Moving on land is tiring for otters; yes, they can run quicker than you might think, with a gait not dissimilar to that of a greyhound, but given a choice, it is water at times of flight. Back in the river, Kuschta swam as fast as she could. Soon there were no more familiar landmarks, every fresh stroke taking her to a place she didn’t know. In the space of two days and two nights she had lost her mother and her home. She was alone and afraid.

      At dawn she could swim no further; her body was chilled to the core by too much time in the water. Dragging herself onto the bank, she shook herself like a dog, sniffed the ground and then padded through the long grass, occasionally stopping to sit up and look around. Soon she spied a dense clump of brambles not far from the edge of the river. Finding an opening, she pushed her way into the middle, the tendrils, laden with bullet-hard red blackberries still a month away from ripening, swinging closed behind her, keeping her safe from prying eyes and unexpected visitors. It was far from perfect, but for now, with the ground dry and the leaf mould soft, she gave into the sleep that her exhausted body craved.

      Otters are not by choice nomadic, but in the months immediately after fleeing the eel pool Kuschta had few choices but to become so. Like all her breed, when fit and fed she was capable of covering great distances, but that was borne out of necessity, not choice. In her search for a place to call home, Kuschta found each successive territory occupied, and was forced to move on when her arrival became patently unwelcome.

      That is the thing about otters. We tend to think of them as gregarious, social animals – the Disneyesque vision of a pellucid pool, ringed with trees, which is fed by a tumbling waterfall where the pups frolic and play whilst the parents keep an all-seeing eye as they sun themselves stretched out on the warm rocks. However, the truth is somewhat different; otters are really not very social animals. Once Kuschta had adapted to a life alone, it was the life she preferred. Of course she would join with another when the time for mating arrived, splitting immediately afterwards to become the dutiful single parent for as long as required, but once the pups were gone she’d return to the solitary life, the default choice for her species. Being non-social is all very well but it does require a space to claim as your own, and that was increasingly Kuschta’s problem. Everywhere she went was occupied by people or otters.

      A millennium of persecution has taught the otter a lot about people, not much of it good. Otters have learnt to be invisible, shunning the day and hugging the night. Where the river took Kuschta through towns she just kept swimming by night, staying in the shadows, so that people were oblivious to her presence. Sometimes she was forced to hole up for the day, but it was never a problem; culverts, outflow pipes and all manner of structures were plenty good enough for a layover until darkness returned. At first this was all very unfamiliar, but in her travels Kuschta soon learnt that she was, at least in respect of animals other than her own kind, top dog. The apex predator, as the biologists like to call species such as Lutra lutra. There might have been a time when wolves or bears roamed the British Isles that otters had something to fear, but today they firmly reside at the top of a food chain, upon which no other creatures prey. It is a pretty exalted place to be, but in every society – even within that of apex predators – a structure evolves with the weak at the bottom and the strong at the top. Kuschta, still a few months off physical and sexual maturity, was trying to find her place in that new order.

      Otters are territorial creatures, but claiming homelands in a way that is really quite unusual, for despite all the attributes of a creature fit for fighting – lean, lithe, strong claws and sharp teeth – they choose another path. For aggression read avoidance. Apart from the rare occasion when two rutting males clash, they are the most anti-confrontational of animals, a trait which they achieve by the delicately phrased term of sprainting.

      Spraints, to put none too fine a point on it, are defecations – markers set out along the river bank telling of who ‘owns’ which territory. If you are an otter you can tell a lot about your fellows from a simple sniff – age, sex, status, fertility – they are all there in the musky scent. Marking out your patch is a neverending task. Typically otters will cover anywhere from a quarter to a third of their territory on any given night, making thirty to forty deposits, far more than required by any digestive tract. Maybe this goes some way to explaining the origin of the word spraint, which comes from the French épreindre, which means ‘to squeeze out’. The effort is neverending because the scent only lasts for just so long – a few days at most – requiring regular reinvigoration. Otters are creatures of habit when it comes to these marks, using the same place time and time again. Keen otter trackers will go to great lengths to find piles of dry guano, the remains of up to two hundred spraints, topped with a shiny new marker. Otter huntsmen were keen aficionados; they knew that otters returned to the same spots generation after generation. It is no surprise that these dropping piles were ideal for encouraging the hounds to pick up the scent. A huntsman would not be averse to a bit of scenting himself, squeezing the manure between his fingers to judge its age, along with a judicious sniff. Some hunters claimed similar nasal powers of identification to that of the otters themselves, announcing to the assembled hunt followers that they were on the trail of such and such an otter. You do wonder whether this was more about mystique than fact.

      Kuschta became increasingly impatient as the new day wore on; night was a long time coming and she was hungry. In her temporary hide she pawed the ground for something to eat, but it was more of a distraction than a practical alternative – bugs and earthworms held little appeal. The previous night had been a hunting disaster; one small perch and an unlucky frog that she had stumbled across. As the sky started to darken she took her cue from the bats; if it was dark enough for them it was dark enough for her, so as soon as they began to flit across the blackening skyline, Kuschta was on the move. For days now she had been travelling ever upstream, keeping close to the river. Occasionally she had been driven inland by people, dogs or other otters, СКАЧАТЬ