Furry fury

Thanks to Henry Williamson and Gavin Maxwell I have spent hours in the company of otters, though I have only seen two. The first was harried, fleeing towards us along a shoreline, apparently pursued by spirits. From The Otters’ Tale I now know that was a period, the late 1980s, when the otter was heading for British extinction. It was a young adult, menaced by hunger and the weather. The second otter, a decade ago, was one of a resurgent population, erupting out of the river Teifi, in Wales. A whiskered face popped out of the torrent and stared.

‘Otter!’ we shouted, delighted. The animal’s expression suggested ‘Humans!’ — but that is the danger of otters. The creature was a flourish of existence, bobbing in the rapids with the apparent joy of a child on a windy day. Otters might have been framed by nature to bring out the anthropo-
morphist in any who come close to them.