Spirit of the wild water

I was sheltering in the dunes on a Hebridean beach, reading this book, when I happened to glance up and see an otter galumphing out of the machair and down onto the sand, 20 yards off. Long, hump-backed and shiny, it was the first wild otter I had ever seen. Such is the talismanic power of this book that I suppose Miriam Darlington must have summoned him for me. Here she is, evoking her own first encounter:

I get a flash of the bristling vibrissae, the otter’s extravagant whiskers, and in a split second he catches my scent. He runs and makes a direct gallop for the shoreline. He moves quickly, but with the lumbering gait that, I learn later, otters always have on land. His body arches into a small hummock as he runs, but when he disappears back into the water, he does so without a sound.

Quite unlike me. I merely stood up in amazement, pointed, and shouted ‘Otter!’ Everyone stared, and the dog heard too.

You do not see them, as a rule. By day they lie curled up in their holt, which might be a tangle of roots, a lair of twisted grasses or a badger hole, slinking out to fish mostly in the dark. In rivers they are impossibly lithe and swift, dissolving into a streak of bubbles, or a ripple on the water’s surface. An ordinary otter’s body is covered in 400 million hairs, trapping air for warmth and helping it move like a soft calligraphic brush. A dog otter weighs 25 lbs and is twice the size and ten times as heavy as a mink, but otters camouflage their movements so well that they can seem to be a part of the water they inhabit, a fact that endears them to poets as well as ecologists.