The Otters’ Tale. Simon Cooper
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