Читать книгу The Otters’ Tale - Simon Cooper - Страница 8

Looking back on it, I was something of a fool; the signs had been there for years but it took a fall of January snow finally to reveal what I should have known all along. As night turned into day, the virgin snow around the lake was anything but virgin, the peninsula that divided the lake from the river criss-crossed with seemingly a thousand footprints or more. From river to lake, lake to river and back again, the night-time visitors had clearly been busy, the five clawed paw prints exposing the green grass beneath the broken snow. This animal runway was as churned up as any busy city-centre pavement, but with particularities that told its own unique tale.

The river bank spoke of great effort, the snow ground into mud. Deep impressions in the turf atop the bank were clearly purchase points, the lower bank a mess of icy earth where the creatures had scrabbled to haul themselves from the water. Where the track marks met the lake was a different story. An icy slide, which looked as fun as that of any water park, was worn smooth with regular use, forming the connection between land and water. At the approach a patch of snow, maybe the size of a large door mat, was crushed flat – smooth evidence, to my mind at least, of someone or something lying and rolling in the snow.

In the dull light of pre-dawn one corner of battered snow beneath the tall alder caught my eye. It looked different to the rest and, sure enough, as I approached I could see the mottled snow was flecked with blood, with a bright red patch at its centre. Little bright silvery grey specks, at first unfamiliar, decorated this collage of nature. I stooped down, licked my finger and dabbed at one. A fish scale, shining like translucent mother-of-pearl, glinted back at me. The cogs in my head were gradually clicking into alignment.

A raspy, wheezy cough cut through the silence, and there, at the base of the alder, on the roots that formed a sinewy platform at the lake edge, sat the otter that I would one day know as Kuschta. In truth, she seemed calmer about our accidental meeting than I was. In that fraction of a second in which our eyes locked she assessed me, dismissed me as irrelevant and then turned, in one fluid movement pouring herself into the lake. I, on the other hand, stood rooted to the spot, uncertain what to say or do. I mean really, how daft is that – what could you ever say to an otter? Or do? Well, I did nothing. She, clearly the more evolved one in this particular situation, surfaced a few yards out from the bank before heading for the island that sits in the middle of the lake. On reaching its edge she emitted a single eek, which was echoed a moment later by a short symphony of eeks that soon took form as four dark shapes plopped from the island into the water to join her.

From my rooted spot I could easily track the progress of the swimming party across the lake as they set course for the outflow where it joined the river at the waterfall created by the weir. The five flat, domed heads glistened against the inky blackness of the water. They were hurried rather than panicked, with the young otters swimming in a rough V formation behind their mother. As they scrambled over the weir I lost sight of each in turn, but it was a long time before I knew they were completely gone. For a while as they headed downstream I could hear them cavorting and splashing as they went, eeking to each other every few seconds in that otterly way that says, ‘Don’t worry, I’m fine, I’m still with you.’

But eventually all I had was silence and the red sky of dawn. Somewhere downstream, in the water meadows and woods that border the river, the otters would seek refuge from the day, curling up in the warm, dry comfort of a rotten tree trunk until dark. I’d lost them for now but somehow I knew they would return.