The Otters’ Tale. Simon Cooper

the corpse flipped over, it was clearly an otter. I am no pathologist, but years of living in the country usually gives you some ability to tell what a creature has died of, or been killed by, but this otter was too far gone for any postmortem. The fur was peeling away, exposing the greying pink skin beneath. Bones were showing through the flesh of the legs. I suspect in a week or two it would have been unrecognisable even as an otter. So I can only surmise as to how it had died. In all probability it had crawled into the tunnel as a last place of refuge, hit perhaps by a car, which is common enough. Or maybe it was on the wrong end of a fight. Or perhaps it was simply old age. Whatever the reason, it was a sad way to see my first otter.

      I must admit, at the time I didn’t think very much more about it, putting it down to a freak occurrence, but as I spent more time at my desk beside my newly refurbished mill wheel I started to have unexpected company. As I mentioned earlier, the wheel housing is a separate room of the mill, through which the river flows, splitting into two channels. One channel takes up about two-thirds of the width, over which hangs the wheel itself. The other third is the mill race, where the water pummels through. The race is a sort of relief channel through which the river is diverted when the wheel is not running. The whole wheel housing is effectively open to the elements with brick arches over the river at either end of the building. On the upriver, or inflow, side, two huge, ancient oak beams straddle the width of the room from which are hung the iron gates that control the flow through the two channels. It was these beams that the otters adopted as couches.

      I say ‘the otters’, but I really have no true idea whether it was the same otter who arrived often or a series of visitors. The sightings were nearly always fleeting as I came into the room to sit at my desk; a blur caught in the corner of my eye followed by a splash. At first I ignored it, thinking it was, well, I don’t really know what I thought it was. A mink perhaps, or a stoat; they are far more common. Even a rat maybe. But one day when I was adjusting the control gates I saw shining atop one of the oak beams what today I would instantly recognise as a spraint. Back then, less so, or, if I’m being honest, not at all. A trip to my desk and a visit to Google put me right. I determined to be more discreet when entering the office next time.

      However, my definition of discreet and that of an otter is a very long way apart. Two or three steps into the room was only ever the best I could do before the splash and the rapid departure. I did take to rushing outside to at least have the satisfaction of following the bubble trail as the otter headed off underwater. Sometimes he, or it could have been she, would surface to look back, but generally the last I would see was a wet sliver of fur slide itself over the weir and disappear into the pool below.

      A few times I did get closer. One summer afternoon I went into the mill wheel room, blinking as I went from the bright sunshine to semi-darkness, only to be struck rigid at the sight of two otters sitting on the oak beams. Who was more shocked I have no idea. I looked at them, they looked at me. I didn’t move but they did, twisting and diving into the water, fleeing at speed. The other times were when I worked very early or very late at my desk. I’d hear some splashing and coughs of exertion as an otter hauled itself out of the water using the ironwork as a sort of ladder to perch on one of the beams, grooming and generally making itself comfortable before settling down. It was then, and still is now, a wonderful thing to see up close. Occasionally the otter would spy me, our eyes meeting and the reaction variable. Sometimes instant flight, other times mild curiosity before choosing to ignore me. The latter was fine by me. Working with an otter peering over your shoulder is an oddity worth getting used to.

      It might seem odd that an otter would choose the mill wheel as such a regular stopping-off point, being, as it is, in the midst of a human habitation. But I think it is something of a combination of things that makes it so attractive – the antiquity, the lie of the land around the mill, the location and, more recently, an awful lot of fish. There is no doubt that they have been using that oak beam as a couch for a very long time. Spraints are not just odorous but are also pretty toxic in dung terms. Regular sprainting spots on grassland will turn the turf brown then dead. It will really take the ground a long while to recover, the deposits having much the same effect as spilling fuel or oil on your lawn; once you know what to look for, it is an easy way to tell whether otters are around. In a similar fashion, otters who live by the sea will take a particular liking to a prominent rock or outcrop. Clearly the spraints can’t do much damage to solid stone, but the spot will turn green in time, much like the copper roof of a church. Back closer to home, my oak beams have suffered a slightly different fate; each now has rotten indentations where the otters have laid down their marks over the years.

      The land around the mill is a regular Spaghetti Junction of water courses; not only does the water go under the building but it goes around it on both sides – we are effectively moated. To put that into some sort of perspective, imagine you are looking directly at a rugby ball; from the top the three lines of stitching represent where the single river is split into three. Down the left goes the original Wallop Brook, a fast clear stream that burbles over gravel. Down the middle is a much wider, deeper slower river which we (confusingly) call the Mill Pond. It is this that drives the mill wheel, which is where the rugby ball laces would be. Down the right is a side stream, or carrier, a man-made channel that was created to regulate the level of the Mill Pond. All have been dug or adapted by man in past centuries to manage the water flow, with the addition of some connecting channels that run crossways between them. Downstream of the mill, at the base of the rugby ball, if you like, all three come back together where a united brook continues on its way into the water meadows.

      All in all, this is otter heaven; when on land, there is no point at which an otter is ever more than a few bounds from the safety of water, and they do treat the respective streams as regular highways. I can see from the permanent tracks in the grass and the slides that they arrive via one stream, cross by land to another, tracking back to the original one further downstream by a different route. They barely deviate in the routes they follow; in the spring the fresh grass is pressed down, by summer it is pounded brown and in winter there is muddy track. And then, of course, there is the snow. They are, if nothing else, creatures of habit.

      The mill is also on the edge of two of the Wallop villages that stand along the brook, our building being the first or last outpost, depending on your direction of travel. The two settlements, Over Wallop and Nether Wallop, like the territory of otters, are very linear. The ancient meaning of the word ‘wallop’ is hidden valley, and the combined villages stretch about three miles, the homes of just a few hundred people mostly hunched up close to the course of the river. I suspect that the mill wheel, the last stop after all those miles of habitation, is where otters can arrive and depart by water, almost like a proper holt, which must seem like a blessed refuge. Conversely, if they arrive from the direction of The Badlands (more about this place in a moment), after a trek over four or five miles of wild and barely habited river, the stopover with us must appeal for different, but equally important, reasons.

      The one thing I haven’t mentioned is the trout lake, which for all the obvious reasons makes us an undoubted attraction on the itinerary of any otter. The lake, which lies just 35 yards to the west of the mill (to the left of that imaginary rugby ball) is fed by offshoots of the Wallop Brook that flow in at the top and out at the bottom. It is the shape of a kidney, which size-wise would more or less fit into a football field. There are grilles at the inflow and outflow to stop the trout escaping, but it is otherwise unprotected, just part of the landscape. But this is not really your normal lake. It is stuffed full of rainbow trout, because this is where I teach fly fishing – with new people coming every day you need a heavy density of fish, and during the season, April to October, the stock is replenished fortnightly from a local trout hatchery. I don’t like to diminish the status of the rainbows; they are hard-fighting fish that are great to catch and in their native North America they are wily survivors, but here, when the fishermen have gone home and the night falls, the odds are stacked against them when the otters come calling.

      During the spring and summer when I go out to do my early morning rounds, clearing the sluices and adjusting the hatches in preparation for the fishing day ahead, I expect to find a fish corpse, or the evidence of one being caught, more or less every other day. Usually it is a victim of an otter, though occasionally it is a heron, but it is pretty easy to tell the difference. If it is an almost whole fish, the heron will have left tell-tale