Furry fury

Thanks to Henry Williamson and Gavin Maxwell I have spent hours in the company of otters, though I have only seen two. The first was harried, fleeing towards us along a shoreline, apparently pursued by spirits. From The Otters’ Tale I now know that was a period, the late 1980s, when the otter was heading for British extinction. It was a young adult, menaced by hunger and the weather. The second otter, a decade ago, was one of a resurgent population, erupting out of the river Teifi, in Wales. A whiskered face popped out of the torrent and stared.

‘Otter!’ we shouted, delighted. The animal’s expression suggested ‘Humans!’ — but that is the danger of otters. The creature was a flourish of existence, bobbing in the rapids with the apparent joy of a child on a windy day. Otters might have been framed by nature to bring out the anthropo-
morphist in any who come close to them. Look at Maxwell, walking his Mijbil through London on a leash.

To live near otters must be marvellous, though; in Simon Cooper’s telling, the animals are loud, playful and rapacious. Cooper lives in a Hampshire watermill where his trout attract otters. He names a female ‘Kuschta’ after a native American word meaning ‘root people’, shape-shifting beings who might be roots, otters or humans. This is appropriate, as the Kuschta Cooper describes is sometimes an observed subject and sometimes, less successfully, an imagined character. (Williamson and ‘BB’ rendered animals so well through strict avoidance of human traits. Perhaps the task was easier in their less anthropo-
centric times.) Following Williamson’s model, Cooper follows Kuschta’s search for territory, her raids on Cooper’s lake, her mating and parenting.