Ring of Bright Water. Gavin Maxwell
second attempt, when the freshness of the image has faded; and that must be my excuse and apology for quoting here part of what I wrote of that otter cub, Chahala, soon afterwards; that and the fact that she is an integral and indispensable part of my narrative.
We were sitting after dark in a mudhif, or sheikh’s guest house, on a mud island in the marshes, and I was brooding over the delinquency of the chatelaine, a bossy old harridan of a woman who had angered me.
I felt an unreasonable hatred for that witless woman with her show of bustle and competence, and contempt that not even her avarice had mastered her stupidity. Thinking of these things, I was not trying to understand the conversation around me when the words ‘celb mai’ caught my ear. ‘What was that about otters?’ I asked Thesiger.
‘I think we’ve got you that otter cub you said you wanted. This fellow comes from that village half a mile away; he says he’s had one for about ten days. Very small and sucks milk from a bottle. Do you want it?’
The otter’s owner said he would fetch it and be back in half an hour or so. He got up and went out; through the entrance of the mudhif I could see his canoe glide away silently over the star-reflecting water.
Presently he returned carrying the cub, came across into the firelight and put it down on my knee as I sat cross-legged. It looked up and chittered at me gently. It was the size of a kitten or a squirrel, still a little unsteady on its legs, with a stiff-looking tapering tail the length of a pencil, and it exhaled a wholly delightful malty smell. It rolled over on its back, displaying a round furry stomach and the soles of four webbed feet.
‘Well,’ said Thesiger, ‘do you want her?’ I nodded. ‘How much are you prepared to pay for her?’
‘Certainly more than they would ask.’
‘I’m not going to pay some ridiculous price – it’s bad for prestige. We’ll take her if they’ll sell her for a reasonable price, if not, we’ll get one somewhere else.’
I said, ‘Let’s make certain of getting this one; we’re near the end of the time now, and we may not get another chance. And after all the prestige doesn’t matter so much, as this is your last visit to the marshes.’ I saw this fascinating little creature eluding me for the sake of a few shillings’ worth of prestige, and the negotiations seemed to me interminable.
In the end we bought the cub for five dinar, the price to include the rubber teat and the filthy but precious bottle from which she was accustomed to drink. Bottles are a rarity in the marshes.
Most infant animals are engaging, but this cub had more charm per cubic inch of her tiny body than all the young animals I had ever seen. Even now I cannot write about her without a pang.
I cut a collar for her from the strap of my field-glasses – a difficult thing, for her head was no wider than her neck – and tied six foot of string to this so as to retain some permanent contact with her if at any time she wandered away from me. Then I slipped her inside my shirt, and she snuggled down at once in a security of warmth and darkness that she had not known since she was reft from her mother. I carried her like that through her short life; when she was awake her head would peer wonderingly out from the top of the pullover, like a kangaroo from its mother’s pouch, and when she was asleep she slept as otters like to, on her back with her webbed feet in the air. When she was awake her voice was a bird-like chirp, but in her dreams she would give a wild little cry on three falling notes, poignant and desolate. I called her Chahala, after the river we had left the day before, and because those syllables were the nearest one could write to the sound of her sleeping cry.
I slept fitfully that night; all the pi-dogs of Dibin seemed to bark at my ears, and I dared not in any case let myself fall into too sound a sleep lest I should crush Chahala, who now snuggled in my armpit. Like all otters, she was ‘house-trained’ from the beginning, and I had made things easy for her by laying my sleeping bag against the wall of the mudhif, so that she could step straight out on the patch of bare earth between the reed columns. This she did at intervals during the night, backing into the very farthest corner to produce, with an expression of infinite concentration, a tiny yellow caterpillar of excrement. Having inspected this, with evident satisfaction of a job well done, she would clamber up my shoulder and chitter gently for her bottle. This she preferred to drink lying on her back and holding the bottle between her paws as do bear cubs, and when she had finished sucking she would fall sound asleep with the teat still in her mouth and a beatific expression on her baby face.
She accepted me as her parent from the moment that she first fell asleep in my pullover, and never once did she show fear of anything or anyone, but it was as a parent that I failed her, for I had neither the knowledge nor the instinct of her mother, and when she died it was because of my ignorance. Meanwhile this tragedy, so small but so complete, threw no shadow on her brief life, and as the days went by she learned to know her name and to play a little as a kitten does, and to come scuttling along at my heels if I could find dry land to walk on, for she hated to get her feet wet. When she had had enough of walking she would chirp and paw at my legs until I squatted down so that she could dive head first into the friendly darkness inside my pullover; sometimes she would at once fall asleep in that position, head downward with the tip of her pointed tail sticking out at the top. The Arabs called her my daughter, and used to ask me when I had last given her suck.
I soon found that she was restrictive of movement and activity. Carried habitually inside my pullover, she made an enceinte-looking bulge which collected a whole village round me as soon as I set foot outside the door; furthermore I could no longer carry my camera round my neck as I did normally, for it bumped against her body as I walked.
One evening Thesiger and I discussed the prospect of weaning Chahala. We both felt she should be old enough to eat solid food, and I felt that her rather skinny little body would benefit by something stronger than buffalo milk. However, I underestimated the power of instinct, for I thought that she would not connect flesh or blood with edibility and would need to be introduced to the idea very gradually. The best way to do this, I decided, was to introduce a few drops of blood into her milk to get her used to the taste. This proved to be extraordinarily naive, for while I was holding the bodies of two decapitated sparrows and trying to drip a little blood from them into her feeding bottle she suddenly caught the scent of the red meat and made a savage grab for the carcasses. I think that if I had not stopped her she would have crunched up bone and all with those tiny needle-like teeth, and we took this as evidence that she had already been introduced by her mother to adult food. I took the carcasses from her, much to her evident fury; and when I gave her the flesh from the breasts cut up small she wolfed it down savagely and went questing round for more.
‘Finish with milk,’ said Amara, our chief canoe-boy, with a gesture of finality, ‘finish, finish; she is grown up now.’ And it seemed so, but, alas, she was not.
A week later we shot a buff-backed heron for her, and she wolfed the shredded flesh avidly. It was the last food that she ate.
It was very cold that night. Over my head was a gap in the reed matting of the roof through which the stars showed bright and unobscured, but a thin wind that seemed as chill as the tinkle of icicles rustled the dry reeds at the foot of the wall, and I slept fitfully. Chahala was restless and would not stay still in my sleeping-bag; I did not know that she was dying, and I was impatient with her. In the morning I took her to a spit of dry land beyond the edge of the village to let her walk, and only then I realized that she was very ill. She would not move, but lay looking up at me pathetically, and when I picked her up again she instantly sought the warm darkness inside my pullover.
We made an hour’s journey through flower-choked waterways in low green marsh, and stopped at another big island village. It was plain to me when we landed that Chahala was dying. She was weak but restless, and inside the house she sought the dark corners between the reed columns and the matting walls. She lay belly downward, breathing fast and in obvious distress. Perhaps something in our huge medicine chest could have saved her, but we thought only of castor oil, for everything she had eaten the night before was still inside her. The oil had little effect, and though she sucked almost automatically from her bottle there was little life in her. I sat