Otter Country by Miriam Darlington

We are eye to wild eye; its face is armed with a startling array of walrus bristles. Its ears are larger than I expected, almost like a cat's, and its nostrils are visibly measuring my scent. There is nothing shy about this animal. I have got close enough to see five different sets of whisker around its face and under its chin. In its eyes I can see shock at what on earth I am, and at what I could be doing in its hunting ground. The live current in both of us prickles. When I do not move, it comes a little closer, huffs, then melts bodily into the water surface, leaving the shadow of a ripple and nothing else.

As a child, Miriam Darlington was obsessed with otters: otters in aquarium, otter skeletons in the natural history museum, and so forth. And who wouldn't? Few animals seem to combine the wildness and precociousness, the sheer charisma of an otter. But Darlington's obsession was confined to aquaria and museums because it's very hard to see a river otter in the wild; unlike their sea cousins who float happily in the harbors of northern America, river otters are secretive creatures whose sensitive powers of perception are rivaled only by their power to slip away and not be perceived. Otter Country is the story of a year in Darlington's life in which she vows to seek out the otter in the wild and learn its ways, a journey that takes her from Scotland to Wales to Cornwall and elsewhere in the British Isles.

Otter Country, it must be said, contains mostly scenes of Darlington not finding otters. Like I said, they seem to be quite elusive. They leave behind certain signs of their existence, like the feces, called spraint, they use to mark the paths of their territory, but by the time you see them, the otter has already disappeared again. It's all right, because Darlington is a talented writer of landscapes and a patient noticer of the natural world. Though she never makes this quite explicit, I got the sense that one of the great rewards of Darlington's otter search is that it forces her to pay closer attention to the world around her, to take in what one might not ordinarily notice. The otters are rare visitors, but there always trees and birds and things. When the otters do appear, the encounters are transformative: Darlington describes coming face-to-face with an otter while disguised as something like a hunk of tree branches. And of course these encounters last only seconds--small fare when compared with the months and months that Darlington spends searching.

Otter Country reminded me quite a bit of H is for Hawk, perhaps pointedly so. Darlington makes a push at the kind of intertextual literary quality that book possesses when she brings in a pair of otter books: Gavin Maxwell's accounts of raising African otters at his Scotland home (haven't read it), and Henry Williamson's imagining of an otter's life, Tarka the Otter (read it, liked it). Later, the book takes a more scientific-personal-essayish mold, as Darlington meets with otter experts about the significant ecological dangers that the river otter faces in the England of the 21st century. (Like the stories of many of the world's endangered species, it's one of great improvement and still-great risk.)

I'm not sure if I learned much about otters, and the book is quite intentionally very slow. But I did find it pleasant and purposeful, and like Darlington, I felt the enchantment of providence when the otters finally do show up.

Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson

He was alone, a young male of a ferocious and persecuted tribe whose only friends, except the Spirit that made it, were its enemies--the otter hunters. His cubhood was ended, and now indeed did his name fit his life, for he was a wanderer, and homeless, with nearly every man and dog against him.

Tarka, a river otter, is born in the west of England. He learns from his mother how to feed himself, hunting for fish and frogs, and also how to play. But an otter's life, Tarka will learn, is not an easy one, and he spends his entire life in the shadow of the gruesome Deadlock, the champion hound that local men employ to hunt and kill otters. Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter follows Tarka's life from birth to death, hunting, mating, playing and fighting.

Tarka is not like Watership Down or any number of other books about talking animals; the animals do not talk and are really no more than animals. Though they are often given names--Tarka's otter associates include Greymuzzle, White-Tip, and Tarquol, and other animals get them too, like the heron Old Nog and the crow Kronk--the animals are not anthropomorphized. Rarely does Williamson even assign the kind of emotions to them with which we may identify, which preserves the essential strangeness of an animal's life: it explains, for example, how Tarka can search so endlessly for his "lost love" White-Tip and then leave her again. And yet Tarka can be as engaging and thrilling as any adventure novel. Tarka's relationship with his nurturing mother, his steady companionship with his first mate Greymuzzle, his yearning for White-Tip, his escalating skirmishes with Deadlock--these events are gripping, but their interest lies in the projection of human emotions that the reader must bring with them.

Otters are an interesting subject for this kind of book. For one, they're famous for their playfulness, a trait that makes them more rounded as "characters" than, say, the stoats and weasels that compete with them for food. One of my favorite scenes in Tarka shows the protagonist learning to play with a crow--a similarly intelligent and playful creature--by passing rocks and sticks and other objects back and forth. But otters are also meat-eaters, efficient and vicious killers, and Williamson doesn't shy away from depicting the violence of the natural world. (Don't get too attached to the hedgehog Iggywick just because he has a cute name.) Tarka is an enemy to many just as he has enemies, and yet he has too "many friends, whom he played with and forgot--sticks, stones, water-weeds, slain fish, and once an empty cocoa-tin, a bright and curious thing that talked strangely as it moved over the shallows, but sank into the pool beyond, sent up bubbles, and would play no more."

Tarka the Otter's depiction of the Devonshire countryside in which Tarka lives is remarkably rich. It's clear that the novel is the product of man years of close observation of animal behavior in exactly this habitat; Williamson's introduction is in part a defense against critics who claim that an otter could never, for instance--spoiler alert--drown a dog. But as the foreword notes, Tarka is really a novel about habitat, because the shape of an animal's life is completely governed by its habitat in a way a human being's never could, and Williamson does this idea justice by casting a sharp eye on the botany, geology, and hydrology of Devonshire. A liberal use of local jargon emphasizes this, and makes Tarka a convincing portrait of a single animal in a single corner of the wide world.