Copyright

William Collins

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First published in the United Kingdom by William Collins in 2017

This William Collins eBook edition published in 2018

Text © Simon Cooper 2017

Cover illustration © Curious Otter, 2003 (w/c on paper), Adlington, Mark/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008189747

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008189723

Version: 2018-09-26

Praise for The Otters’ Tale:

‘He summarizes his observations by telling the detailed story of a mother and her young and the male otter with which they occasionally interact. He does so with the charm of a Kenneth Grahame but with the scientific rigour of modern behavioural science. It is the best popular account of the lives of otters written so far.’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Offers something new, and ultimately optimistic.’

New Scientist

‘A wonderful book.’

Daily Mail

Praise for Simon Cooper:

‘I loved the gentle flow of this book and the insight into both a pastime and a wonderful corner of the land.’

BBC Countryfile

‘Cooper’s enthusiasm is so infectious’

Daily Mail

‘[Simon Cooper] is a renowned fly-fisher himself and, in this book, he writes as well as he casts […] delightful […] Mr Cooper is in love with chalkstreams and anyone who reads this splendid book will soon hold the same view.’

Country Life

‘We are taken on a delightful journey overflowing with passages that capture our imagination […] It is both uplifting and therapeutic.’

Classic Angling

Dedication

To Mary and Minnie – muses both.

Epigraph

‘It’ll be all right, my fine fellow,’ said the Otter (to Ratty). ‘I’m coming along with you, and I know every path blindfold; and if there’s a head that needs to be punched, you can confidently rely upon me to punch it.’

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1 Alone and afraid

Chapter 2 A place to call home

Chapter 3 Something in the air

Chapter 4 Alone but determined

Chapter 5 And then there were five

Chapter 6 And then there were four …

Chapter 7 A country playground

Chapter 8 Life in the food chain

Chapter 9 To Autumn

Chapter 10 It’s a dangerous life

Chapter 11 Solstice

Chapter 12 Lutran’s tale

Chapter 13 Coming of age

Chapter 14 The long journey

Epilogue

Footnote

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Looking back on it, I was something of a fool; the signs had been there for years but it took a fall of January snow finally to reveal what I should have known all along. As night turned into day, the virgin snow around the lake was anything but virgin, the peninsula that divided the lake from the river criss-crossed with seemingly a thousand footprints or more. From river to lake, lake to river and back again, the night-time visitors had clearly been busy, the five clawed paw prints exposing the green grass beneath the broken snow. This animal runway was as churned up as any busy city-centre pavement, but with particularities that told its own unique tale.

The river bank spoke of great effort, the snow ground into mud. Deep impressions in the turf atop the bank were clearly purchase points, the lower bank a mess of icy earth where the creatures had scrabbled to haul themselves from the water. Where the track marks met the lake was a different story. An icy slide, which looked as fun as that of any water park, was worn smooth with regular use, forming the connection between land and water. At the approach a patch of snow, maybe the size of a large door mat, was crushed flat – smooth evidence, to my mind at least, of someone or something lying and rolling in the snow.

In the dull light of pre-dawn one corner of battered snow beneath the tall alder caught my eye. It looked different to the rest and, sure enough, as I approached I could see the mottled snow was flecked with blood, with a bright red patch at its centre. Little bright silvery grey specks, at first unfamiliar, decorated this collage of nature. I stooped down, licked my finger and dabbed at one. A fish scale, shining like translucent mother-of-pearl, glinted back at me. The cogs in my head were gradually clicking into alignment.

A raspy, wheezy cough cut through the silence, and there, at the base of the alder, on the roots that formed a sinewy platform at the lake edge, sat the otter that I would one day know as Kuschta. In truth, she seemed calmer about our accidental meeting than I was. In that fraction of a second in which our eyes locked she assessed me, dismissed me as irrelevant and then turned, in one fluid movement pouring herself into the lake. I, on the other hand, stood rooted to the spot, uncertain what to say or do. I mean really, how daft is that – what could you ever say to an otter? Or do? Well, I did nothing. She, clearly the more evolved one in this particular situation, surfaced a few yards out from the bank before heading for the island that sits in the middle of the lake. On reaching its edge she emitted a single eek, which was echoed a moment later by a short symphony of eeks that soon took form as four dark shapes plopped from the island into the water to join her.

From my rooted spot I could easily track the progress of the swimming party across the lake as they set course for the outflow where it joined the river at the waterfall created by the weir. The five flat, domed heads glistened against the inky blackness of the water. They were hurried rather than panicked, with the young otters swimming in a rough V formation behind their mother. As they scrambled over the weir I lost sight of each in turn, but it was a long time before I knew they were completely gone. For a while as they headed downstream I could hear them cavorting and splashing as they went, eeking to each other every few seconds in that otterly way that says, ‘Don’t worry, I’m fine, I’m still with you.’

But eventually all I had was silence and the red sky of dawn. Somewhere downstream, in the water meadows and woods that border the river, the otters would seek refuge from the day, curling up in the warm, dry comfort of a rotten tree trunk until dark. I’d lost them for now but somehow I knew they would return.

CHAPTER 1
ALONE AND AFRAID
Two years earlier

As dusk started to fall, Kuschta gradually uncoiled her body, stretching away the stiffness of a day spent asleep. Sniffing the air, she could tell the holt was empty without even opening her eyes. There was nothing unusual in that, but she was comforted by the slight warmth radiating from the indentation left by her mother in the soft bed of the rotten willow trunk which they shared. She was clearly not long gone. Kuschta weighed up her options. She guessed her mother would not be far, probably down at the weir pool diving for eels – easy pickings, as they gathered in great numbers before their summer migration to the sea.

In truth, Kuschta had options, but only of the no-win kind. On that fateful evening the outcome was to be the same, whatever her decision. Whether she stayed in the holt or went in search of her mother she was destined to greet the following dawn alone. But knowing none of that, Kuschta assumed her mother would return as she had done every day of her fourteen-month life. Maybe with a tasty eel that they would share? So oblivious to the future, Kuschta chose to stay put, recoiled herself, buried her nose in the crook of her hind leg, closed her eyes and was instantly asleep.

You could walk close by the spot where Kuschta slept and not give it a second glance. In fact, I’d hazard that even if you stopped and stared you might not be much the wiser. Otters are not like badgers, which dig elaborate setts, creating multiple cave-like entrances with the spoil of their digging spread around for all to see. In their choice of home otters are pragmatists, moving between ‘holts’, which are usually tunnels amidst the roots of trees beside the river, and ‘couches’, well-concealed resting places above ground. Neither is particularly easy to spot because they are so much a part of the landscape, used by generation after generation of otters. Twenty, thirty, forty years of continuous use is not uncommon – even a century has been recorded. This we know from otter hunts that combed every inch of bank until they were banned in the 1970s. A diligent huntsman would know every hover, as some called them, returning time and again to seek out their prey and record the locations for future hunts.

Otters are not builders like, say, beavers; they take what they find and adapt it. The best holts are created by Mother Nature. An ash or a sycamore grows tall beside the river until gravity takes a hold as the water erodes the bank beneath, so the tree starts to lean out over the river. These trees are well adapted to such a pose, the wide shallow roots providing enough support for some considerable elevations of lean. But it is in that process of tipping that the den is made; the movement lifts the bank to create a cavity under the roots, which in turn becomes the canopy of the holt. And in the otters go. Some judicious digging will create a labyrinth of dry tunnels and, if all goes according to plan, there may even be an underwater connection to the river.

Couches, on the other hand, are rather more at the making of otters, but they are, as the name suggests, the more informal of the two habitats. A pile of reeds, dry moss or leaves in a thicket of brambles a few yards from the river would be typical. It’s more of a good weather than a bad weather sort of place, though not always. In wet flood plains where dry holts are scarce, elaborate couches are created as alternative homes, but more generally the couch is the resting place where otters feel safe to sleep, catch the sun and play whilst whiling away the daylight hours, hidden from view.

I guess Kuschta would care little for my subtle differentiation between couches and holts. All she knew was that the hollowed-out crack in the willow branch had long been a favoured resting place for the family; warm, inviting and familiar. The willows that thrived by the river had this strange way of growing that helped the otters; shooting up fast, they soon outgrow themselves so much that the limbs burst or crack open lengthways before snapping away from the trunk and falling to the ground. Laid out, the cracked branches look a little like an open pea pod, and at first there would probably only be just enough room for an otter to squeeze inside the fissure in the wood. But in time the timber would start to rot from the inside out, the constant comings and goings of the otters gradually hollowing out the trunk. The bark and cortex, still connected to the mother tree, stay alive even to the extent that the bright green shoots continue to grow up to create a sort of curtain in front of the hollow. It is as natural a hiding place as you’d ever find.

It was well into the night when Kuschta woke up with a start; something or someone was passing by. She had no reason to be scared, but she was, freezing rigid until the sound faded into the distance before she raised her head to check the hollow. Empty. She pawed at the soft, rotten wood where her mother usually sat. Cold. Cold as if she had never been there. Something wasn’t right. Wishing it wasn’t so, Kuschta stared out at the river for a little while, the landscape bathed in the silver light of a half moon, until she reached a decision – she’d go to find her mother.

Parting the willow-whip curtain, Kuschta pushed herself out of the hollow and slid into the water. In her mind there was no doubt she would find her mother at the weir pool. It was one of their favourite haunts. As she swam she became more confident in her decision. Familiar landmarks marked the route. The moon lit the way. The weir was not far. Turning the last bend with it just ahead, Kuschta slowed her pace. She half expected to see the silhouette of her mother on the wooden beam that braced the right-hand side of the structure. The two of them often sat there to share the spoils, but tonight it was empty. No matter. Kuschta stopped paddling, letting the current take her along whilst straining her ears for familiar sounds above the regular pounding of the water as it crashed over the weir. Nothing.

Scrambling up, she took in the whole pool from the vantage point of the beam with one swift movement of her head. The fast plumes of water that washed to the centre of the pool then gathered together to push out and on through the mouth to continue on as one river. The gentle slope of the grassy bank that led down to the water on the far side. The line of alders on the nearside, all gaunt and black against the night sky. All utterly familiar but totally absent of the one thing she sought. Confused and deflated, Kuschta settled down on the beam to wait for her mother to return. Time was her only hope.

It is probably better that at this point Kuschta doesn’t know what we know, namely that she has been deserted by her mother forever. Deserted is a harsh word, but from such swift and brutal decisions, good will come. It’s just that sometimes it doesn’t seem that way at the time.

Otters are relatively unusual in the mammal kingdom of Britain, breaking with the norms of reproduction. In the standard way of things, offspring are born in spring, raised in the summer and go their own way by the autumn at the latest. But for otters it is somewhat different, the reproductive cycle being closer to biennial than annual, with the pups, the females in particular, staying with the mother until they are well over a year old. With so much time together, the bond between mother and pups is intense; the father is rarely a factor, moving on soon after mating. Otter pups are truly dependent on the mother; they can’t swim or hunt without being taught. But even when armed with those basics they can’t go it alone. Three months, six months, nine months, a year – they will starve without maternal oversight all the way into young adulthood.

The family group is everything in the upbringing of an otter. The litter, anywhere from one to four pups, will spend every waking and sleeping hour together with the mother until they go their separate ways. The first schism comes earlier for male pups. Approaching one year of age, he will be as big as his mother, and with increasingly unruly behaviour and becoming more dominant than she would like, the mother takes a stand against her son and drives him away. Shorn of her guidance and protection, this adolescent faces an uncertain future. Travelling alone, he has to fight for his life both in terms of finding a territory to call his own and food to live on. Mature males will care little for his intrusion and other mothers will be fiercely protective of their patch. He will find it hard to rest; the itinerant life will drain his strength as he is constantly moved on. His hunting skills are still evolving; surviving day to day in unfamiliar places is a constant battle. There are plenty for whom the battle is too much, dying of exhaustion and starvation. His sisters will eventually reach a similar fork in their lives.

Survival, and the search for food to ensure survival, can also determine otters’ habitat. Sometimes the choice of a coastal home is made of necessity, driven along to the mouth of a river in a search either for territory or for food. Otters are very ‘linear’ in their habits and outlook; they rarely stray far from water, preferring to travel great distances along watercourses rather than heading inland. The only common exception to this is the birthing holt, which, for reasons we will discover, is located well away from the water. So when an otter can’t find a territory to call his or her own, or possibly when there is not enough food, he keeps on travelling until, as with any river, he reaches the sea. Saltwater, freshwater – it is all the same to an otter. Coastlines offer the same opportunities for raising a family. Let’s face it, if your kind has been able to span so many continents and landmasses, you are going to be pretty adaptable.

It is, however, worth making a distinction here between sea otters and otters that live by the sea. Kuschta – and every single otter that has ever existed in the British Isles – is of the family Lutra lutra, more commonly referred to as the Eurasian or European otter, which is one of thirteen different known otter species around the globe. As the name suggests, the European otter is indigenous to Europe, but also to Asia and North Africa, with a truly phenomenal spread across the northern hemisphere. West to east, with a few exceptions, such as the Mediterranean islands, this species walks every landmass from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. From northern Russia to the Indian Ocean, snowy Finland, dusty Morocco, the foothills of the Himalayas, humid Thailand or the frozen shores of the Bering Sea – if you know where to look, you’ll find Lutra lutra in all these lands.

On the other hand, sea otters – Enhydra lutris – are an entirely different species altogether, found along the shallow coastal waters of Russia, California and Alaska in the northern Pacific Ocean. They rarely venture onto land, living entirely in the water, and are famous for floating belly up in the kelp forest that hugs the shoreline. Conversely, British otters that live by the sea are just your normal inland otters that have picked a different type of home. In the Scottish islands, where they thrive, this way of life is the practical alternative, where there is more productive coastline than freshwater river or loch.

As the sky started to show fire red behind the grey clouds in the pre-dawn, Kuschta knew it was time to move. She had seen and heard nothing during her night-time vigil. Neither friend nor foe had broken the silence or the surface of the eel pool. Stretching her stiff body on the beam, she knew she should have used the darkness to hunt, but with the sun coming up fast it was now too late. Darkness is the friend of otters; they navigate their world in the secret time between dusk and dawn. Daylight is the time for rest, night the time for travel, food and adventure; this much Kuschta had learnt from her mother. Impelled by the rising sun, Kuschta needed to make it back to safety or at least somewhere familiar. Sliding into the water, she swam quickly upstream, sending out unruly waves that rocked at the reeds on either bank, first startling a moorhen who let out an anguished squawk of protest, and then a water vole who simply paused his weaving amongst the stems until the commotion was past. Silhouetted against her skyline, the cattle grazed in the meadows, their scrunching remarkably noisy, even to her ears. A fox trotted across a bridge, no doubt heading, just as she was, to a daytime lair. The dawn chorus was reaching fever pitch as the birds laid territorial claim to a busy day ahead. The rural community of creature kind was resetting the natural order of things as the night shift headed for bed and the day shift repopulated a valley in all the pomp of its summer plumage.

Heading for the crack willow couch, Kuschta sensed her life had changed. She had no expectation of finding a familiar body settled on the spongy, rotten wood. She was alone, and that, for now at least, was the way it would be. Pushing herself head first through the willow screen, she settled into the couch. Hunger was now her greatest concern. For a while she stared out from her hide as the river slowly woke up. A trout sipped at insects caught in the surface film. Damselflies began their hovering dance. The kingfisher took up his perch ready to feed. Bees created a symphony of buzzing as they sucked the nectar from the buttercups that blanketed the water meadows. As the familiar sounds and the warmth of the morning overtook Kuschta, she slowly drifted towards sleep, but not before resolving to find food as soon as darkness came.

It is fitting that Kuschta spent her first nights alone in the hollow of a tree, as she took her name from the myth of Native American tribes who both revered and feared otters. In legend otters dwelt in the roots of trees, transforming themselves into human form at will. In some tribes the kuschta, which literally translates as ‘root people’, were friendly and kind, leading the lost or injured to safety. But for other tribes these shape-shifters did so for evil intent, to become the stealers of souls by guile, luring the naïve or unsuspecting away from home where they were transformed into otters, thus deprived of reincarnation and the consequent promise of everlasting life that was at the core of Native American belief. Interestingly, dogs were considered the best protection against these ‘land otter people’, being the only animals the kuschta feared as their barking would force them to reveal themselves or flee. Today dogs still have a similar effect on otters.

By the time dusk arrived Kuschta was ravenous, as hungry as she had ever been in her life. In all probability she had never gone this long without food, so just as soon as the darkness felt safe she pushed out into the river. The eel pool was the obvious destination, so she swam with purpose, confident in her ability to hunt down a meal solo; after all, she’s been doing so for much of her life, but in the wild nothing is ever certain. Fish are faster than otters, which Kuschta had learnt very early on – over the first two yards a trout will always leave an otter trailing in its wake. Hours of fruitless pursuit had left her exhausted on the bank, reliant on the success of her mother or sharing with her siblings. But over time, through observation and imitation, she figured out that over ten yards, when stamina tells, the odds would start to tip in her favour. Add in a bit of stealth and suddenly she had a winning formula.

Cruising the pools, she’d use her super-sensitive whiskers to pick up the vibration of a fish. Arching her body, she’d dive head first, deep under the surface, preparing to hunt the fish from below. Sometimes if the moon was bright she’d see the outline of the fish above her, but more often it was her whiskers that were her guide. Propelling herself upwards with her webbed feet and powerful tail strokes, she’d accelerate towards her prey. For a moment she’d have the advantage of surprise, but fish are no slouches when it comes to sensing vibration; their lateral line, which runs the length of their body, is as good as any whisker sense and usually enough to grab that two-yard start. From then on it is ten seconds of life or death for the fish, success or failure for the otter. The two swim, leap, crash, weave and dive, creating mayhem in the pool as Kuschta tries to grab the fish in her mouth.

You might be tempted to think that the otter holds all the cards in this showdown, but in truth failure is the accepted outcome. What otters have is total determination; that instinct to try and try again. There are few hiding places for a good-size fish. In general they have to keep moving to survive. Movement equals vibration. Vibration equals discovery. When an otter has found a fish once, it will find it time and time again. Unsuccessful chases will be followed by more unsuccessful chases until, through tiredness or error on its part, a fish ends up clamped between those whiskery jaws or the otter accepts that the fish has won the day this time.

Approaching the eel pool, Kuschta aligned herself with one of the gaps in the weir that spouted water into the pool, knowing this to be the perfect cover for her attack. As she flopped over the lip she allowed the current to carry her out into the midst of the pool, the turbulence masking any evidence of her arrival. She really didn’t have to expend much effort along the way, just use her tail and paws to course correct until the back eddy bought her to a gentle halt. In the still night dark she hung in the water, its pace now very slow as the champagne bubbles dissipated around her. Weightless and drifting, Kuschta was alert to the slightest movement – her whiskers, her eyes. A few yards off she sensed a fish coming her way, but before she could dive, it turned away. The fish were there, that much she knew. All she had to do was find one.

Calm to the task, Kuschta curved her body, using a slow tail beat to rotate in a wide circle, using eyes, ear and whiskers to scan the full circumference of the pool, the eddies, bubbles and swirls breaking the flat surface. Somewhere out there she sensed, rather than saw or heard, another fish slowly swimming away, unaware of her presence. Perfect. She arched her back, slid beneath the water, and when she was a few feet submerged she started to home in on the fish in a rising diagonal. As she gathered speed the distance between them narrowed. Advantage Kuschta. But not for long. The fish felt her coming as the bulk of her body pushed a sonic bow-wave ahead which reached him just before she did. That fraction of a second warning was enough to alert him to the danger. In a moment he went from languid to panic, his body squirting forward, flexing for speed as if electrified. Accelerating away, the gap widened, but that suited Kuschta just fine. The more the fish panicked the easier he was to track, as the chatter of vibrations came back to her through her whiskers. She hung on in his wake, letting her stamina blunt his speed. Across the pool they went, the distance narrowing with each yard as they headed for the far bank. For the fish the bank equalled safety, a chance to throw off his pursuer amongst the roots and undercuts. Kuschta knew this and put on extra speed to close the gap, getting herself close enough to lunge at the fish. In that final effort she bunched her body, then exploded forward, but just as her nose brushed the flank of the fish it twisted away, her jaws closing on nothing but water.

Kuschta surfaced for air, emitting a sharp cough as otters are apt to do after underwater effort – whether it is a reflex action, a clearing of the air passages or a prelude to a sharp intake of breath, I do not know, but it was to become one of the sounds that I will forever associate with otters. Head in the air and eyes shining bright, she readied for the next attack, wheezing as she gradually recovered her breath. She knew she only had to wait. All stirred up by the chase, the fish would be radiating vibrations, uncertain where to hide or swim. It would not take long for it, or maybe another fish equally disturbed by Kuschta’s presence, to come back into her orbit. And sure enough, one came straight towards her at speed, whipping past and giving her only enough time to dive down at it. But her effort was more sound and fury than effect, as the fish was already out of danger by the time she had completed the lunge. Unconcerned, she paddled after the fish; sometimes she kept it close, other times it faded into the distance, until she picked up the tell-tale signs again. Around and across the pool they went. The pursued 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, but essentially her path was that of the river bank. Sometimes she’d reach a confluence, the junction of the river offering a left or right choice with her taking the one seemingly least travelled.

Her progress was always halting, stopping to smell each spraint she came across, the new evidence to be considered before a decision could be made. Male or female was the first marker scent she’d evaluate. At first glance a male might spell bad news, but not necessarily so. A male otter will cover a huge territory, many times that of a female, so he expects to find a number of females within ‘his’ territory. On that basis she’d pose no surprise, interest or threat, being as yet still too young for mating. Females, on the other hand, were a different thing altogether. Though Kuschta offered no physical threat to a mother otter, who would be more than capable and willing of protecting herself and her pups, Kuschta would definitely be seen as taking a share of the neighbourhood food. It is interesting that otters moderate their reaction to competition for food very much according to the season. When times are good they are happy to share, and temporary visitors will be tolerated. When times are hard boundaries are, if not explicitly protected, to be more respected by an interloper.

The freshness or not of the spraint presented all sorts of conundrums; some good, some bad. If it was a fresh male mark, it signalled that he had been here and had moved on, and was unlikely to return for a few days. Stale? Well, he might be back sometime soon. Female spraints were different; lots of the same within close proximity told Kuschta that she was probably in the midst of a family territory – better to go. No female scents, or at least only ancient ones, were more complicated. Either she had stumbled across vacant territory, or maybe, if it was a productive area, the female was going through the secretive phase that bitches are apt to experience immediately before and after the birth of a litter, as they stop sprainting for a while. They change their normal behaviour to disguise their presence for the safety of the pups, which have to be left alone for a few hours each day whilst the mother hunts. Surprisingly, during this period the greatest threat to the litter comes not from other species but from otters themselves. Postmortems of roadkill dog otters regularly produce the remains of pups in the stomach. Now whether this is more often the father or another jealous male, nobody is entirely sure, but it surely happens and in all probability, as indicated by DNA matches, it is a bit of both. The fact is, this infanticide happens more often than we might like to believe. The reasons? Again, we don’t really know, but one can best assume that the mothers would not have evolved such a protection strategy without good cause. For otters the genesis of single parenting may have many reasons.

But spraints are more than just markers of territory; they are, in twenty-first-century jargon, food management tools, used by otters in all sorts of ways. Firstly, the spraint can say ‘I’ve just fished this pool, so give it some time to recover or we’ll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs’. Or secondly ‘Don’t waste your time and effort. I’ve caught all there is to catch’. Conversely, a pile of spraints, the most recent a little old, tells the otter that historically this is a productive spot now ripe for hunting. And no spraints either mark virgin or barren territory – proceed as you choose. Likewise, the contents of the spraint, be it the remains of fish, eel, crayfish and so on, tell of what there was, and maybe there still is, to eat. Kuschta was still a few months off appreciating the final piece in this spraintology jigsaw, which tells of females ready to mate and males on the prowl. Her time for this would come soon enough; for now she was struggling to find that elusive home territory.

If you sat an otter down to discuss the whys and wherefores of territory, the first words out of its mouth would most likely be ‘It’s complicated’; for Kuschta and her kind the enforced itinerant months were a progression from ignorance to understanding. When she was young the home patch that her mother had carved out was uniquely theirs; as far as she was concerned, the otter world did not extend beyond her immediate family. If other otters, including her father, strayed close, her mother would ward them off long before they could approach the pups. But now, on the road, she had to negotiate her way through a competing world.

To the human eye it is nigh on impossible to tell where the territory of one otter starts and another ends. There are no clear dividing lines; otters are certainly no respecters of man-made boundaries and there is little in nature that will hinder their progress. Otters are legendary for the ability to cover enormous distances in a single night; twenty miles is well within the scope of most, but herein lies the problem – that twenty miles is along a river, inevitably passing through a multiplicity of other territories that rightfully belong to other otters. But our mustelids have created a social policy that some humans could do well to learn from. At the core is the family territory, which is sacrosanct. It is always accepted that other otters will ‘pass through’, but woe betide any that pause or, worse still, try to stay. There is no excuse for ignorance; those spraints are flags enough to say who lives where and why. Single female otters, on the other hand, are more relaxed; after all, they don’t have pups to feed or defend so their territories are looser, overlapping at the edges. That said, they will have carved out a portion of the territory that they regard as ‘theirs’, expecting other otters to keep away. Males spread themselves much wider, their territory taking in maybe three, four or five females’ homelands, which they continually traverse, taking as much as a week to cover the entire area. Of course, this assumes there is only one dog otter in any given super-territory. But nature would not allow that – replacements and competition are always required. There will be more than one male sharing the territory, a potentially ruinous situation with competition for land, females and food. But otters have evolved a daisy-chain hierarchy where each lesser male follows in the footsteps of his immediately superior male, organising his life so he precisely avoids meeting the others. Of course, there are clashes, violent fights and changes in the order. No otter chooses to be of lower caste, but, given a death or some other departure, there will be a shuffling of the pack.

It is a fascinating animal culture; despite being solitary creatures, otters as a breed have survived for 20 million years because, probably without realising it, they look out for each other. Avoidance saves wasteful territorial disputes. Designated family homelands allow pups to thrive. Complicated spraint markings spread out the population, avoiding overcrowding, preserving food stocks and limiting disease. Wandering males mix up the gene pool. For the perfect evolution you could not write a much better script – it is just a shame, as we will see later, that humans came into the midst of this with near-fatal consequences.

CHAPTER 2
A PLACE TO CALL HOME
Winter

As far as the weather is concerned, otters don’t worry unduly about the seasons; they are perfectly adapted to anything the British climate might throw at them, unlike, say, their tiny, semi-aquatic, fellow river dwellers the water voles, which are easily wiped out by a spell of damp weather, floods or the sudden arrival of a predator. Being at the top of the food chain helps, but, more importantly than that, the otter frame is honed for survival. You might have thought that, for an animal constantly in and out of the water, blubber was the key to insulation, like, say, a seal, but otters carry just 3 per cent of their body weight in fat. In seals it is more like 25 per cent, which is close to that of the human body. So what is it that keeps otters warm and dry?

A clue lies in the luxuriant fur which the otter, when not swimming or sleeping, is frequently grooming. To start with, otters generally look close to black when wet, but actually, when dry, their fur is more of a brown colour and incredibly soft to the touch. Kuschta’s Californian sea otter cousins have the densest fur of any animal on the planet, at 140,000 hairs per square centimetre. On its own, that figure doesn’t mean much, but when you reckon that the arctic fox, one of the most durable survivors of polar winters where the temperature may drop to as low as -20°C (-4°F), has fur with a mere 20,000 density, then the British otter, even though it trails the sea breed at 80,000, has a pelt for life. If you are wondering about us, a density of 300 on the human scalp tells you everything about the importance of hats.

Kuschta’s fur, like that of a polar bear and other mammals which are constantly immersing, is dual-layered. The top layer consists of outer guard hairs, which are thick and long and form a partial barrier to keep the fur beneath dry. As she climbs out of the water, Kuschta’s pelt will look anything other than smooth and sleek, but rather spiky, the coat almost like that of a hedgehog. This is because the hairs combine in little arrows to draw and drain the water off the body. But it is the underneath, the under-fur, the really dense stuff, where the otter is so truly well adapted for life in a river. Regardless of any density quotient, the ultimate test of the under-fur is that in whatever direction you stroke or pull at the half-inch hairs, you will not see the skin below.

However, the fur alone is not enough to insulate the otter. It takes one other crucial component, namely air, which, once trapped between the hairs, keeps out the cold – a sort of mammalian double-glazing – hair, air and then more hair. Grooming is, of course, about drying out and keeping clean, but it is equally for puffing up the under-fur to let air back in. And it’s a lot of air. To track an otter swimming underwater, watch out for a tell-tale line of air bubbles rising to the surface – wherever the otter goes, the bubbles will follow. For otter hunters it was a tracking gift from heaven and something the otter cannot avoid, for the bubbles are not created by breathing but by the pressure of the water gradually squeezing the air from the pelt. And because of this there is a definite time limit as to how long an otter can spend in water. After about half an hour the air has gone and both layers of fur are completely sodden, the cold water pressing against the skin, sucking heat from the unprotected body. Again, otter hunters knew this. If they could keep the otter immersed for long enough, regardless of how many times it surfaced for air (they can hold their breath for up to four minutes but rarely do so for more than 30 seconds), hypothermia would set in, hastening the end. Conversely, in the heat of a summer day, lounging on her couch, Kuschta would be content to leave her damp pelt well alone, the slowly dissipating air allowing her to keep cool, her coat fluffing and lightening to a more roan brown the longer she lay.

To find her place within this singularly convoluted riverine society, Kuschta established a pattern whilst alone during the summer and autumn months, exploring and testing each new place she came across. Sniffing tell-tale marks, she was now old enough to make a swift decision whether to move on or stay. Moving on was always her first choice because it involved least risk of confrontation, whilst staying was more nuanced, but on one particular night her luck changed.

Kuschta sat for a while at the base of the ash tree at the end of the promontory where the river split; she was perplexed. Everything she’d ever learnt told her this junction pool was a classic boundary marker, a feature in the river landscape that all otters would recognise and mark accordingly. But she had been up and down, crisscrossing the entire isthmus to check for signs of other otters, and … nothing. So if her nose told her nothing, maybe her ears would reveal some other presence, for otters have acutely sensitive hearing. To look at their tiny ears you wouldn’t think so, but I’ve frequently learnt this to my cost – until they dismissed it as benign, the slightest click of a door lock from my mill in the dead of the night was enough to scare the otters away before I ever saw them. No wonder that for me and so many others they can be such elusive creatures.

Otter hearing breaks down into two categories: in air good, in water bad. Despite water being such a good conductor of soundwaves, otters are not adapted for underwater hearing like, say, a dolphin or some seals, and in fact the auricle – the furry, half-moon visible part of the ear outside of the head – has a reflex response, closing over the ear hole when the otter submerges. Beneath the surface, touch, smell and sight are more potent senses. In air it is an altogether different story because otters have a range of hearing that is far more sensitive than that of humans, taking in a spectrum of high-pitched sounds something akin to that of a dog. For a creature that lives by the night and which has vision limited to movement and blurry shadows, acute hearing makes perfect sense.

After a long while of waiting, Kuschta had heard nothing beyond the usual night sounds, so with no real way of telling which was best, she took the right-hand fork; it was smaller than the other side but the stream appealed to her, the overgrown banks seemingly untrodden by human or otter. From her low viewpoint she couldn’t see far, but the dense reeds, interspersed with stunted alders crowding in up to the river edge, gave her a comforting sense of protection. At its narrowest point the reeds had fallen across the stream, supporting each other at the middle, creating a cathedral-arch-like tunnel that stretched into the darkness.

The mass of vegetation barred any further progress along the bank, which suited her just fine. Otters are not ideally built for walking or running; watch them move anything faster than ambling pace and you’ll see their back end rise and fall in a sort of jerky, lolloping, uncomfortable way. You worry that with all the strength in their hindquarters the front end won’t stand the strain, or at the very least the otter will tumble into an involuntary front roll as the rear end overtakes the front. Otters are a bit of a mammal oddity; a creature that lives on land but is really best adapted to life in the water. They clearly know this – in all the years I’ve lived amongst otters they have never tried to outrun me for any distance. Actually, though I’m certainly not an Olympic athlete, they couldn’t anyway, as the top otter speed is little more than fast human walking pace. When in flight, the otter tactic is clear – head for water as fast as you can. It always amuses me because they go from sheer panic on land to total confidence in the water within the blink of an eye. Once immersed, rather than swimming away into the distance at speed, they’ll take a couple of strokes to where they feel safe, surfacing to gaze back at me as if to say ‘Fooled you!’ before disappearing off.

Unless in flight, an otter is not the type of animal that hurls itself into the water. The act of movement from land to water is one of the most fluid motions you will ever see in nature. It is a sublime rendering of evolution: that moment when a creature is so totally in harmony with the many elements it occupies that you can only marvel at the grace. To say an otter pours itself into the river is no exaggeration; it is almost as if the water parts to welcome the creature home. Slipping into the water creates no alarm. Draws no attention. For an animal that relies on the element of surprise to hunt, stealth is no bad thing.

It was with this sinuous action that Kuschta moved from land to water, content in her own mind that, for once, she was perhaps entering vacant territory. Otters may be elusive but they are big, leaving distinct trails in the landscape. They may be able to enter water like a spoon sliding into honey, but getting out is something else altogether. Steep banks, together with that long, heavy frame, leave their mark – a few ins and outs at the same spot creates a slide, a muddy runway in the grassy bank. Kuschta saw no such slide. Otters are great creatures of habit in the routes they follow. Kuschta made the simple evaluation – no slides, no otters.

Cruising upstream with flicks of her webbed paws, Kuschta is barely visible, leaving only a slight silvery wake through the tunnel of reeds. As otters swim, at least nine-tenths of the body is below the surface; only the top of the head protrudes, with the nostrils open, eyes wide and ears pricked, ever alert. Sometimes, when extra effort is required, the rump and tail will appear above the surface, giving the impression of a three-humped creature, but for the most part the strong legs and tail stay beneath the surface, giving propulsion enough. Though perfectly at home in the river, the otter is an alien and ominous presence to most other river dwellers. They may be silent and invisible to people, but Kuschta’s entry into the stream created enough disturbance to frighten the small trout that were using the cover of night to feed away from the preying presence of larger fish. Alarmed by her arrival, they fled for cover amongst the roots of the reeds. All this Kuschta sensed through her whiskers, the tiny vibrations at first close, then far. But she paid them no heed. She was after bigger prey. For now she needed to move on, so as her own vibrations faded the trout headed back out in her wake to continue their search for food, life returning to normal.

After 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 partition to the ceiling. 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. Downstream of the mill, at the base of the rugby ball, if you like, all three come back together where a united brook continues on its way into the water meadows.

All in all, this is otter heaven; when on land, there is no point at which an otter is ever more than a few bounds from the safety of water, and they do treat the respective streams as regular highways. I can see from the permanent tracks in the grass and the slides that they arrive via one stream, cross by land to another, tracking back to the original one further downstream by a different route. They barely deviate in the routes they follow; in the spring the fresh grass is pressed down, by summer it is pounded brown and in winter there is muddy track. And then, of course, there is the snow. They are, if nothing else, creatures of habit.

The mill is also on the edge of two of the Wallop villages that stand along the brook, our building being the first or last outpost, depending on your direction of travel. The two settlements, Over Wallop and Nether Wallop, like the territory of otters, are very linear. The ancient meaning of the word ‘wallop’ is hidden valley, and the combined villages stretch about three miles, the homes of just a few hundred people mostly hunched up close to the course of the river. I suspect that the mill wheel, the last stop after all those miles of habitation, is where otters can arrive and depart by water, almost like a proper holt, which must seem like a blessed refuge. Conversely, if they arrive from the direction of The Badlands (more about this place in a moment), after a trek over four or five miles of wild and barely habited river, the stopover with us must appeal for different, but equally important, reasons.

The one thing I haven’t mentioned is the trout lake, which for all the obvious reasons makes us an undoubted attraction on the itinerary of any otter. The lake, which lies just 35 yards to the west of the mill (to the left of that imaginary rugby ball) is fed by offshoots of the Wallop Brook that flow in at the top and out at the bottom. It is the shape of a kidney, which size-wise would more or less fit into a football field. There are grilles at the inflow and outflow to stop the trout escaping, but it is otherwise unprotected, just part of the landscape. But this is not really your normal lake. It is stuffed full of rainbow trout, because this is where I teach fly fishing – with new people coming every day you need a heavy density of fish, and during the season, April to October, the stock is replenished fortnightly from a local trout hatchery. I don’t like to diminish the status of the rainbows; they are hard-fighting fish that are great to catch and in their native North America they are wily survivors, but here, when the fishermen have gone home and the night falls, the odds are stacked against them when the otters come calling.

During the spring and summer when I go out to do my early morning rounds, clearing the sluices and adjusting the hatches in preparation for the fishing day ahead, I expect to find a fish corpse, or the evidence of one being caught, more or less every other day. Usually it is a victim of an otter, though occasionally it is a heron, but it is pretty easy to tell the difference. If it is an almost whole fish, the heron will have left tell-tale stab wounds. Conversely, if the bird has had time to eat pretty much all the fish, it will look more like a cartoon fish skeleton, the left-behind bones picked clean. Otters, on the other hand, generally start from the head down, eating everything, bones and all, as they go. In the depth of winter, when food is scarce, it is unusual to find part-eaten trout – protein is too scarce. It is only really in the summer, or when the mother is teaching the pups to fish, that otters abandon a trout without finishing it off. Sometimes I have to look really hard to see whether they have been, the only evidence those few flecks of blood or bright scales similar to what I saw on that snowy morning. I suspect the otters had been robbing me blind of trout for years without me ever knowing it.

As winter clutched at the throat of the countryside, daily squeezing every last drop of life from the less hardy inhabitants, Kuschta took to exploring her new territory. Unfettered by the constraints of other otters, she was free to move at will, marking the land along the Wallop Brook from the junction pool to the headwaters, where it is barely a river at all as the bright crystal water springs from the ground. If you flew up the valley like a bird you’d see that, despite all the apparent habitation – houses, farms, roads and all the other things that civilisation brings in its wake – the Wallop Valley is surprisingly wild. Woodland crowds up to the bank for at least a quarter of its length, hiding the river from prying eyes. Water meadows, rough-grazed by cattle and flecked with wild flowers, merge the land with the water. In some places it is just a river lost in a wetland swamp. We call this lost place downstream of the Mill The Badlands, where reed beds, crisscrossing rivulets, soft soggy ground and a scruffy, fallen willow plantation look like a terrific mess. It is rarely visited by people. Sure, there are some tidy gardens that come up to the edge of the brook in places, bits that have been adapted for things like my mill or banks that have been realigned to prevent flooding, but on the whole it is a natural stream that hasn’t changed much in the past two or three centuries.

When we think about the history of our landscape, it is strange that otters don’t feature more in British folklore, history and culture, for they have been part of our lives since the first moment man made settlements on the banks of a river. From that time onwards, as we invaded the territory that they had called their own for millions of years, otters were amongst us but never really part of us – mysterious creatures that we saw rarely and understood even less. The inns along the highways of Britain are testament to this absence; the names The White Hart, The Black Horse, The Bear, The Swan, The Bull and even The Black Rat offer an insight to the creatures that have impinged on our culture down the centuries. But The Otter Inn? Well, there are some, but very few considering it is our largest semi-aquatic mammal.

The more you think about it, the stranger it is. After all, otters are not exactly small; nose to tail they are close to four feet long. A fully grown male weighs around twenty-two pounds – that is heavier than a terrier or about the same as a beagle. In feline terms, think twice the weight of a healthy cat and twice the body length. And a river through a town is a much-watched place – you’d think they would hardly go unnoticed, plus you’d expect that the numerous opportunities for food would draw them into human orbit. Rats and foxes have adapted to human habitation, thriving on our detritus and finding homes that man has, by accident rather than design, created for them. But not otters. They seem to shun the opportunities afforded by man, even changing their habits to become yet more secretive.

We think of otters as nocturnal, but they can equally be diurnal – active by day instead of night. On the south and west coast of Ireland otters regularly swim past anglers during the day; visitors are astonished, whilst for the locals it is so common as to pass unremarked. It is the same in the Scottish Isles, suggesting that where people are sparse otters are content to alter their behaviour accordingly. When they choose the night, they do it to avoid their greatest adversary – man.

Maybe there was a time long, long ago when man and otter lived in perfect harmony. After all, nobody ever seems to suggest that otters make good eating. They were not hunted for food, unlike the slow-witted beaver who, also native and incredibly populous to Britain at one time, was hunted to extinction as soon as early man took to living in the river valleys. In fact, the only people who seemed regularly to eat European otters was a group of Carthusian monks in Dijon, France, who stretched the truth to get around some awkward theological dietary requirements. Banned by holy order from consuming meat, they cunningly deemed the otter to be a fish. Now whether this was because it ate fish or lived like a fish, nobody is exactly sure, but accounts of the time rated the flesh ‘rank and fishy’, so the monks must have been somewhat desperate.

So aside from a few monks, maybe there was a time when the otter went about its daily life without a care in the world. A time when the fish were plentiful and the people few, when otters were free to range over huge tracts of unsettled land where the rivers were wild and the woodland dense. A time when otters feared nobody and wanted for nothing. It is a lovely thought; a sort of aquatic Garden of Eden. But if such a time ever existed it most certainly came to an end in the Middle Ages, when the population of Europe increased. Communities coalesced around rivers, the fertile valleys were gradually cleared and drained for agriculture. What was done a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago across southern England was not so very different to what is being done to the rainforests of South America today. The destruction of a habitat that slowly marginalises the indigenous species. Some will survive this change, others will become extinct. A few will become mortal enemies of man; unwelcome at best, feared at worst. The history of medieval times tells us that the otter fell into the ‘unwelcome’ category, labelled as the ‘fish-killer’, stealing food from the rivers that ‘rightfully’ belonged to the more ‘deserving’ mankind. It is a tag that remains today, but the persecution dates back many centuries.

The more you look back, the more astonishing it is that otters have avoided extinction in the British Isles. We might think of the eradication of a species as a rather modern manifestation of human behaviour, but otters have been on the hit list for over a thousand years. Way back in the twelfth century society went to war with the otters and lutracide was born. Henry II appointed the wonderfully titled King’s Otterer, who was charged with the extermination of the species. It was no passing fad; this was serious business. With the title came a manor house, land and an annual stipend all bundled up in legislation to create the Otterer’s Fee. The first Otterer, a man called Roger Follo, from his ‘Fee’ in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, went about his task with a new form of otter control, namely an otter-hound pack.

However innovative and hard-working the Honourable Follo might have been, any success must have been transitory, for by the fifteenth century Henry VI was back at it again with the creation of the Valet of our Otter-Hounds. But otters continued on their merry way until 1566, when, frustrated by their continued existence, Parliament passed the Acte for the Preservation of Grayne, which classified otters, along with badgers, foxes, hedgehogs¹ and others, as vermin, allowing parish councils to offer bounties for their capture. Sixpence, the reward for a dead otter in the early 1600s, strikes me as a lot of money and gives some indication of how otters had become a significant public enemy.

It is interesting to ask why otters were elevated to this status. I think we can say with some degree of certainty that their fate as public mammal enemy number one was cast for the next three centuries in 1653 when Izaak Walton wrote about them in The Compleat Angler – a huge bestseller when it was first published and subsequently one of the most reprinted books of all time. He declared,

‘I am, Sir, a Brother of the Angle, and therefore an enemy of the Otter; for I hate them perfectly, because they love fish so well.’

This is pretty stern stuff for an animal that carried no disease, kept clear of people and posed no physical danger. But the fact is that otters were eating the fish owned by those who held the reins of power: the monarchy, noblemen, the church and the educated. These were singularly bad groups to antagonise. Noblemen owned the rights to fish rivers, which was an important source of income and food. Fishing grounds were jealously guarded – not just physically but in law, for they were specifically mentioned in the Magna Carta. The draconian law that went as far as capital punishment was enough to keep the commoners at bay, but otters required something else. Monasteries and the palaces of bishops had for centuries reared fish in ponds, but they were difficult to protect and made tempting pickings for a hungry otter in the depths of winter. Then people such as Walton discovered the joys of angling as a pastime, which pretty well sealed the public perception of the otter. Whether they truly posed a threat to fish stocks is debatable, but the fact remained that otters had got on the wrong side of the wrong people.

So the notion of the otter as a quarry became entrenched in the psyche of the nation; along with foxes and deer, the hunting of these animals with hounds was an accepted pastime. It was both part of the social fabric of the British Isles and a requirement for the management of the countryside, albeit the latter of dubious value. You’d have thought that as feudalism gave way to industrialisation society would lose interest in the otter, but not a bit of it. In the Victorian era, otter hunting became quite the fashionable pursuit, reaching its zenith in the years between the two World Wars. However, for all its barbarism, twentieth-century hunting barely put a dent in the otter population. Ironically, it was the hunts, with fewer otters to hunt, who first alerted a wider public to the decline in their numbers across post-war Britain, as over two decades – the 1950s and 60s – otters all but vanished from the countryside. Hovering on the brink of extinction, the search was on for the otters’ insidious foe before it was too late.

What has changed over the past half century in our country is the otter population. Wind back the clock eighty years ago or more and it is a fair bet that Kuschta would have faced fierce competition along the Wallop Brook, with probably just two or three miles to call her own compared to the nine miles over which she ranges today. The truth is that otters are just clawing their way back from the edge of extinction.

It really was a mighty achievement of twentieth-century man to bring otters to this sorry point in time, where their very existence was threatened. After all, we have succeeded where centuries of persecution have failed, but we did it entirely by accident, and then in recognising the ongoing damage we failed over successive decades to put it right. It will be of no comfort to know that we were not alone in this. Across Europe – in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Finland, Sweden – and in fact in just about every mainland country, we have seen a catastrophic decline in the population of otters in the post-war era. A culture of persecution continued to play a part; in Switzerland there were 40–60 otters left when given protection in 1952. By 1960 they were all gone. To give you some idea of the level of hatred, three captive otters in Zurich Zoo were killed by visitors. But ultimately it was a poison, spread in the name of progress, that took otters to the brink.

Seven decades on from the end of the Second World War, it is hard fully to understand the mind-set of a Britain traumatised by a conflict that had kept the nation on the brink of imminent starvation. What we would now call food security, the ability to feed the population with crops grown on home soil, was the mantra of all governments of all hues in the years immediately after the war right through to the 1970s. As the Minister for Agriculture, you would have been one of the top five men in the cabinet; today you would be an also ran. The National Farmers Union held sway at every level of decision making in the drive to boost food production. The BBC joined in, The Archers a handy propaganda tool for agricultural lobbying. What was good for farming was good for the nation. Where nature stood in the way of progress, science was enlisted, the upsides lauded and the downsides ignored. Intensive agriculture, the please-all, cure-all of the time, required chemical intervention, and so it arrived in 1955.

It was the simplest of desires that caused the first problems; the wish to protect newly sown corn from pests for better germination rates. Coated with an organochlorine pesticide, the effects were almost instant – wheat and barley thrived, bringing marginal arable land into production and boosting yields. The trouble is, fields don’t exist in a vacuum. Wood pigeons and songbirds eagerly scratch out the newly planted seed from the ground, consuming it in quantity. They were the first to die, killed by direct ingestion. Next up were the species that died from eating the dead. Foxes and barn owls were hit hard, but it was the dramatic decline of the peregrine population that sounded alarm bells in 1956. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) started to investigate the avian deaths, fingers were pointed but there was unstoppable momentum behind the use of organochlorines.

They were used in a multiplicity of ways that spread them into nature’s food chain: sheep dips, bulb dressing, orchard sprays, timber preservative, moth-proofing fabrics and carpet-making, to pick a few. It might seem a long step from those processes to killing a top predator like an otter, but when you consider, for instance, that great rug weavers like Wilton built their factories by rivers for water and for waste disposal in an era when environmental legislation was all but non-existent, then the connection comes into focus. So, as the invisible fingers of pollution touched just about every river (sheep dips were particularly pernicious in this respect), the problem turned into the unknown crisis, with nobody really noticing through a combination of bad luck, the secret nature of the otter life, the delayed effect of the poison and inaction. The bad luck came in the form of a report published in 1957 but based on data from 1952. Why there was a five-year delay I have no idea (though conspiracy theorists might), but it concluded that the otter population was doing fine. With the birds to worry about, nobody gave much more thought to otters and, being such secret animals, few had any real idea what was happening to the population as the insidious chemicals did their worst. This is how it happened.

Being top of the food chain is all very well, but the implication is that you prey upon everything below you. That’s fine just so long as your favourite foods – eels and fish, in the case of otters – are good to eat. By the early 1960s this was far from being the case. Eels, which live for 10–20 years in ponds, were absorbing the organochlorines into their bodies at a rate of knots from a diet of similarly affected grubs, earthworms and insects. The same thing was happening with fish from their diet of invertebrates: nymphs, snails and all those other bugs you find in a river. But the chemical pass-the-parcel wasn’t killing outright the otters or the things they ate. There were no corpses littering the river bank – if there were, things might have turned out differently. No, otters were hit hard because, with little body fat to act as a buffer like, say, in the eels, the sub-lethal poisoning went straight to the reproduction organs, slowly rendering the population infertile. Otters were not dying, they were dying out.

It is a hard case to make from an emotional standpoint, but it was otter hunts that were the greatest guardians of Lutra lutra during this time. They had a vested interest, that was true, but nobody was closer to the lives of the otter. It is counter-intuitive, I know, but when it came to habitat protection and preventing uncontrolled extermination, the hunts were the otters’ best friend. One hunt in Dumfriesshire even went to the lengths of importing otters from Norway for reintroduction into the wild after a localised population crash. By the early 1960s the declining population was more than just a local occurrence; packs up and down the country were reporting fewer and fewer otters. Some packs closed down. Others hunted mink instead. The remainder changed their method of hunting, reducing the kills from 50 per cent of all otters chased to 15 per cent, limiting, as far as it was possible, those kills to old or sick otters. By the time otter hunting was finally banned as part of an Act of Parliament that gave the animals protected status in 1978, the fifteen otter packs that remained were killing just 150 otters a year between them.

The threat of extinction was never just from hunting, but as the news of the otter decline filtered through to the wider population during the 60s and early 70s this was what took the brunt of the blame, as the anti-hunting lobby gained a voice. Other voices called for investigations, and reports were duly produced. Water quality, habitat destruction, disturbance through human activity and even the lowly mink were the four reasons generally cited for the decline of otters, but rarely was the systemic poisoning given the prominence we now know it deserved.

However much it was wrong, it was hardly surprising that mink took part of the rap; a non-native species first imported in the 1920s, it had adapted to life in Britain pretty well, the population gradually expanding over time, with regular boosts from escapees from mink farms. The European mink, Mustela lutreola, are, as the second half of their Latin name suggests, related to otters, part of the mustelid family. They are more gregarious than their larger cousin (they are about one-third of the size), and you are far more likely to see a mink than an otter as they are less wary of people, preferring to be out and about during the day. The mink were blamed because nature abhors a vacuum. As the otters disappeared, the mink expanded into the vacant space, people assuming that the mink, with a reputation for being vicious, had driven out the otters. Nothing could be further from the truth. Today, with otters in the ascendant, mink are finding themselves marginalised, and their population is declining.

Habitat destruction, mostly in the relentless process of urbanisation, will always be an issue for otters. Actually the worst of the damage was probably done in the 1940s and 50s when, again in the name of food production, vast swathes of otter-friendly wetlands were drained and thousands of miles of rivers straightened and dredged. Disturbance? Well, that was cited in the form of more leisure uses for rivers – boating, fishing, canoeing and so on – but otters are pretty tolerant of minor human incursions into their territory and no amount of daytime splashing would have had a significant effect. Water quality (aside from the organochlorines) was actually by this time going in the opposite direction, improving rather than worsening. The River Thames is often cited, reaching its polluted nadir in 1957 when classified as a ‘dead’ river, incapable of sustaining a fish population. Since then, along with most other rivers, the situation has improved, with salmon now regularly running up the capital’s river. Confusing? Well, only if you were directed, as most people were, to look in the wrong places. But for those close to the science, otter postmortem data was tightening the noose around the neck of organochlorines – the problem was that nobody in power was prepared to pull the lever that consigned them to death instead of the otters.

Finally, a report in 1968 that charted the catastrophic collapse in otter numbers captured the headlines, leading to a general acceptance, albeit grudgingly in certain circles, that organochlorines were the problem. However, vested interest and inaction delayed the widespread banning of their use until 1975. This you might think was a cause for dancing in the street, but they were simply replaced by the equally bad organophosphates the following year with, almost unbelievably, the original chemical continuing in use for commercial bulb farming in Cornwall and the compulsory practice of sheep dipping right through to 1992. In that same year, the authorities finally called time on organophosphates, replacing them with synthetic pyrethroids. Relief? Well, not really. The synthetic substitute, rather than infecting the food chain, went a step further by wiping out entire groups of invertebrates – so the very insects that fed the fish that fed the otters were disappearing. This new menace was finally banned in 2006.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your head is spinning from all these dates and scientific terms, but I chart it because it is truly amazing that, despite fifty years of sustained attrition, albeit unintentional, otters are still with us today. As with everything to do with these secretive creatures, it is hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the population reached its lowest point, but most observers seem to agree that it was some time in the 1990s – by then it was estimated that otters were only present in a handful of English counties. In Wales, Scotland and Ireland, with less intensive agriculture, the numbers had held up better. But the long road to recovery, which continues to this day, had begun. It was never going to be a fast journey; the ‘organos’, with their various suffixes, have to dissipate gradually from the food chain. Otters are not the most prolific breeders at the best of times, their progress tied to the health of the rivers and the availability of food. Fortunately they hung on in enough places to keep a breeding population alive; the areas mostly away from agriculture and industry. And that otter society requirement for the juveniles to travel great distances to find new, unoccupied territories had started to disperse a new population nationwide.

As luck (they finally got some) would have it, they had some breaks along the way: more legal protection, better environmental oversight of the watercourses and an explosion in the crayfish population – one of their favourite and most nutritious foods. All of this culminated in a survey published during 2011 that had found otters in all the forty-eight English counties, Kent being the last piece in the jigsaw. But don’t be under any illusions that the danger is over; they remain rare and under threat.

Kuschta knew nothing of her rarity, nor the perilous past her recent ancestors had trod to bring her to this point. All she knew was that The Badlands should be her home. A place good for otters, bad for people, as you’d struggle to walk across this landscape without considerable difficulty and deviations. A very long time ago this was water meadows, low-lying land in the flood plain that was deliberately ‘drowned’, covered by water diverted from the river during the winter and spring, to boost the growth of grazing pasture for sheep and hay making. It didn’t happen by accident; seventeenth-century Dutch engineers had been engaged by the large landowners, church and gentry to dig side streams or, as they are correctly known, carriers that were regulated by wooden hatches all along the valley that enabled and controlled the flooding. If you think of a human skeleton with the river as the spine and the ribs as the man-made channels, then you will get some idea of the layout. Long abandoned to nature, the defunct Dutch engineering now defines this landscape.

So where you would struggle, Kuschta revels. To start with, you’d have a hard time even entering her domain from most points of the compass, protected as it is by thick swathes of dense, prickly hawthorn, the vicious barbed sloe bushes and bramble briars. Of course, for her this presents no problem, slaloming between the stems, free to come and go at will and unnoticed. There is one gate to The Badlands, which is not much used and is your best entrance. From the gate it is hard to tell much about the landscape beyond, as almost all you can see is reeds. They stretch ahead of you, to the left and the right, almost to the height of a man, obliterating your view of the horizon. In the winter the reeds are desiccated, bleached to a dirty cream with the grass-like seed pods furling out of the top. Occasionally a small songbird, a wren or robin, will alight to the top of the stem, swaying perilously from side to side as it pecks for scarce food.

Too wet for people or cattle, the occasional visitors to The Badlands at this time of year are dogs; in time Kuschta learnt to recognise the sound of their imminent arrival as the beaters sweep the surrounding fields on shoot days. The guns sound in the distance. The horn wails to signal the start and end of each drive. The click-click-click and clack-clack-clack of the beaters tapping their sticks against the trees is interspersed by shouts as they clear the woods of birds. The wild fluttering of wings, as a pheasant takes flight, is followed by cries of ‘forward’ to alert the shooters of incoming sport. Sometimes Kuschta will feel the ground quiver as a shot bird thumps into the ground somewhere close by. Occasionally she’ll see the last twitches of life play out in front of her. Soon the gun dogs appear, splashing through the water and crashing through the reeds, directed by whistles and calls from afar. There is no subtlety to their arrival, playing havoc with the snipe and curlew who rise fast to the air in protest, the unwise making flight over the line of guns. In truth, dogs of the retrieving kind are not much worry to Kuschta. At first she had fled in terror, bolting from her couch to the safety of the river. But now, a few months on, she knows to hold her ground. Mostly the dogs are too intent on finding the birds to even notice her. If one does, she’ll snarl and hiss at the barking canine until the distant handler, frustrated by a dog going feral, calls it back with irritated shouts and shrill whistles. Soon the dogs retreat, the noises fade and The Badlands is at peace again.

The side streams, once the open channels that carried water across the meadows, are now both Kuschta’s paths and her larders. If The Badlands were shorn of vegetation you could very easily spot what are today effectively a series of parallel ditches about 50 yards apart, radiating at right angles away from the river, the ground between each rising and falling to create a gentle mound. From a distance it is a landscape that might look like a soft swell rolling in to a shore. If you choose to traverse The Badlands you’d be well advised to follow along the length of the mounds – they are relatively dry and firm underfoot. If you make your path by crossing the old streams in turn, prepare for a long and tiring effort. Though not exactly quicksand or bottomless pits, these are cloying obstacles, too wide to jump and with no firm crust to support even the lightest person. But otters? Well, that was altogether a different story.

Aside from the sheep set on The Badlands for a month of grazing in the late summer, rarely did anything of any size interrupt Kuschta’s rule of this stretch. Too wet for rabbits, badgers or foxes and away from human intervention, the largest, wildest thing that came through were startled deer on the run. With springing leaps they would clear the tops of the reeds, but the success of each leap would entirely depend on the landing – hit a mound and they sprang on at speed. Hit an old stream and it was all legs, mud and rasping gasps before hauling up and on the way again. It was an almost daily occurrence and Kuschta would listen out for it; as we’ll discover deer were her unwitting eel finders – an essential staple in the diet of an otter.

But if the eels, however accidentally uncovered, were the regular gift of nature, the manna from heaven was provided by me in the form of the trout lake at The Mill. No emaciated trout here, every one of them nourished daily with pellets, a true living larder. A popular winter venue, I’m always surprised Kuschta doesn’t visit it more often during the worst of times. It is only a mile or two from The Badlands so, as far as I can tell, far from being on the extreme edge of her territory. She could pretty well visit every night if she chose to, but despite the abundance of easy prey, she doesn’t. I often wonder why. It is said otters have a higher level of common sense than most other animals when it comes to their food sources, hunting in such a way that allows the population to regenerate rather than wiping it out. It sort of comes back to one of the multiple purposes of sprainting, an otter quality mark telling of what was caught where and when, providing a sort of self-regulation. But if I shared with Kuschta the truth – that I restock the lake to replace all the trout she takes – maybe she would alter her behaviour.

As it is, I’d estimate the visits are a bit more than every other day at this time of year. In my early years at the mill these losses used to annoy me; the fish corpses along the bank both a financial and emotional loss. I like fish as much as I do otters, but then I read a simple quote by I can’t remember who: ‘otters are rare, fish are common’. For some reason it struck a chord, and since then, though Kuschta’s pillage doesn’t exactly fill my heart with joy, I’ve accepted it as a price worth paying for the sight of a beautiful creature. That said, it doesn’t stop me sending a few choice curses her way when I see a fish with half a tail or a lacerated side.

In the winter she arrives at the lake early, and that always takes me by surprise. It shouldn’t really. My ‘early’ is judged against the human definition of nocturnal, let’s say 9pm to 6am, whereas hers runs from sunset – 4pm at the winter solstice – to sunrise at 8am. You’d think that those sixteen hours would be a massive opportunity for her to travel far, but otters are not active through every hour of darkness. They tend to pack the most into the first two or three hours, resting for the remainder until the last hour before dawn when they get busy again. It is not what you’d expect, but it is sometimes easier to find otters in winter than summer; it certainly does not involve all-night vigils. I’ll see Kuschta dive for cover as I nip out to catch the last post, or I’ll hear that tell-tale splash as I flick on the office lights to combat the gloom. If I’m out before sunrise for my morning checks of the river hatches we’ll often come face to face. The best is when she has a fish to eat. While she is intent on that, I will generally see her (the dreadful noise of her tearing apart the fish is always the giveaway) before she sees me. I can’t help myself, but I always creep up as close as I can. I guess I should circle around and leave her be, but the draw is too much. And the denouement is always worth it because when she finally sees me I can see in her expression a conflict of choices. Should she run and leave the fish, should she run with the fish, or should she stay put? It is mostly the first, straight into the lake. It is never the second, but very occasionally, mostly when she is blinded by wind and rain, it is the third. Whether it is bravery or the simple fact that she does not see me, I cannot judge, but I’ll do my bit, backing slowly away to leave her to it.

February did not disappoint. I always expect it to be the bleakest month of the year and this one proved to be equal to its fellows. There are no hints of spring, no harking back to the glories of autumn. Every day is the relentless winter. The landscape oozes cold and damp. But for all the deprivations, Kuschta was surviving well. As she passed her second birthday she was strong, fit and mistress of her domain. The valley was her place, providing all the shelter and food she needed as she ranged along its length. Naturally some days or weeks were better than others, but ultimately she only had herself to sustain in this solitary life. Strange though this might be, her whole life was predicated around the concept of being alone. She knew, of course, that she wasn’t, because as food became scarcer the more other otters passed through the valley, but she’d do everything she could to avoid contact. She’d sniff at the spraints of uninvited visitors before trumping them with her mark. She’d constantly patrol what she regarded as the core of her territory to ward off incomers. She had no curiosity to meet others and they had no curiosity to meet her. It is a great system, barring one thing – procreation.

Early March was not appreciably different to the month it left behind but for one thing – a scent. Kuschta picked it out from the air; the particular odour of a very particular stranger. In itself that wasn’t unusual, but this spoke to something deep inside her. Her first instinct was to double down on her territorial marking, but this time she paused, the particular dry muskiness percolating into a part of her brain that made her excited rather than fearful. Intrigued rather than dismissive. Curious, in fact. For a while she followed the trail, as it took her to higher ground, well away from anywhere she had been before. Eventually the unfamiliar landscape began to trouble her, so she turned back to home. As she slipped into the comforting embrace of her Badlands, bedding down in the dry shelter under one of the old brick culverts that harked back to the days when the water meadows operated, she was unsettled. For the first time since she had been abandoned by her mother, she felt the need to meet another otter. It was a need that was both visceral and strange, not least because it was that one particular otter. She wanted to ignore the urgings, but deep inside her something was changing that would never change back. She knew she must find this otter. But in truth, Mion was going to find her soon enough.

CHAPTER 4
ALONE BUT DETERMINED
Spring

Mion’s job, if his life may be described in such terms, is that of a grand overseer, protector and inseminator. Whereas Kuschta could cover her territory in a day if pressed, Mion ranged far and wide, taking as much as a week to cover his. It might be tempting to describe the four or five females that lived under his purview as his harem, but that gives a lie to his active involvement, suggesting that Kuschta and her gender are supplicants. They aren’t.

As the grand overseer, Mion had been aware of Kuschta from almost the very first day she arrived in the Wallop Valley, but chose to give her a wide berth, allowing her the freedom to mark out a home of her own. Two years her senior, he knew the valley better, confident of travelling further from the water than she was. With short cuts across fields at the junctions and bends of the river, he was able to dip in and out of her life unnoticed. Kuschta was too young for mating, so Mion was content to view her from afar until the time was right.

Like Kuschta, Mion tried to avoid conflict and interaction with other otters, but as the alpha male it was not always that simple. In truth, at somewhere between four and five years old, Mion was past his prime. Not in his dotage exactly, he had maybe one good year left, so, for now at least, young males mostly passed on and through the valley without challenging his authority. But it would not always be like that. There would come a time when Mion would have to fight for his dominance. For all their complex avoidance strategies, there is no way that otters are able to circumvent the Darwinian certainty of the survival of the fittest. There is some debate as to how much male otters fight. It is clear that they do fight, but nobody is exactly sure whether when two come head to head it comes down to a contest, or whether that is the choice of last resort. What is clear, however, is that it is simply not possible for two mature males to exist in harmony. One must give way to the other. The results will range from a mild confrontation to mortal injury.

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