“The wild otter lives in a cold, dangerous waterscape that continuously pours away and remakes itself.” In Otter Country: An Unexpected Adventure, by Miriam Darlington—first published in England in 2012 and just released in this country in February—the author spends a year immersing herself in that waterscape in search of this elusive animal.
After catching a glimpse of a wild otter, and transfixed by the experience, Darlington determines to spend a year “wading through marshes, hiding between mossy rocks, paddling down rivers and swimming sea lochs.” She sets off through the West Highlands of Scotland, West Wales, the Lake District, and Cornish estuaries. She visits remote regions known for their wild otter populations, tours sites associated with famous books such as Tarka and Ring of Bright Water, takes courses on the ecology of mammals with otter specialists, and visits conservation efforts such as the Otter Project in Cardiff, in association with which the Environment Agency pays for any otter found dead in England or Wales—mostly hit by cars—to be frozen and shipped to Cardiff for research.
Her journey is immersive, tactile, saturated with experience and sensation. She fights intense swarms of biting insects in the Highlands, wades through bogs, slips into the water herself over “glutinous depths of eel-soft mud.” Donning a wetsuit, she slides in “down the shallows in a slick of silt, head first into the water, into the brackish stench. Weed and mud waft into my face as the cold ripple of the incoming tide comes up to meet me.”
Her descriptions of otters are poetic, evocative, precise. “A brown eye is floating on the surface towards me. … I can see upturned nostrils, a half-submerged snout and two ears. … It bends into the depths, dips and comes up all teeth and whiskers, chewing what look like small eels. Even as it eats, there are no ripples.” Otters will “roll over and over like a cat in the sun until every hair is smooth.” Observing a mother and her cub foraging for food together in frozen clumps of grasses, she watches as “their thin curves slip together into the twilight, like fierce, muscled ribbons, darkening into the ribbon of the stream.”
Darlington’s research takes her from etymology to the history of otter hunting in Great Britain to poetry. She notes that “otter” comes from the Old English otor, and from the same root word as water, and quotes from a poem on their watery nature by Kenneth Steven: “carved out of laughter and let loose / more currents and bend in their bodies / than a whole river.”
Her vivid writing extends to the waterscapes and landscapes through which otters make their way. Of a saturated bog on Westhay Moor, she writes that the “colourful tangle of dark-red sundew, liverworts and mosses looks like some kind of primordial ooze, or the interconnected organs of a living creature.” On an estuary, “mussel shells are worn to a thinness of lilac and pearl,” and in a forest, she notes birdsong “distorted by the woods, rolling like a river of pebbles, tumbling toward me.”
Sometimes, when the news of the day is too much, the spirit yearns for the refreshment of another world—to wade into that bog or slip otter-like into those waters—or, failing that, into a current of prose, twisting and turning in its eddies, and diving, with the author, into that watery realm. Otter Country provided me with that escape.
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.