As soon as Mags heard about the otters, she knew there’d be trouble. If there was one thing Mags understood about her former best friend, it was that Ainsley was one hundred per cent obsessed with all things otter.
The whole class was travelling up from Edinburgh to Orkney for a school trip to look at wind and tidal turbines and algae farms. The trip was meant to inspire the students to think about going into the sciences, but the area supposedly had wild otters too.
Mags had heard roughly a billion factoids about otters from Ainsley over the years. There were thirteen different species. They ate a quarter of their body weight every day. They stored the rocks they used to break open clams in the loose skin of their armpits, and their fur had up to a million hair follicles per square inch. They fell asleep holding hands, and a group of snoozing otters was called a raft. Otters had all but disappeared from the wild a few decades ago, but there had been good rewilding efforts over the past ten years (according to Ainsley, who was determined to go into conservation when she was older). It was part of a whole plan to strengthen the ecosystem – it’d help the other species of plants and animals too, not just the otters themselves. All this information was burned into Mags’s brain.
When they’d been friends, Mags and Ainsley had gone to Edinburgh Zoo to look at the otters what felt like every other weekend.
They were all to stay together as a group, but rules had never much bothered Ainsley. If she wanted something, she’d do it. If her parents tried to ground her, she’d either argue her way out of the punishment or sneak out and go to the park anyway. If she thought something was unfair, she’d do what she thought was right, never mind the consequences, and never mind who got in trouble with her. Ainsley would see an otter in the wild this week. Somehow, she’d find a way.
Mags breathed out hard through her nose. If Ainsley wanted to get into trouble, it wasn’t Mags’s problem any more. She wouldn’t be dragged into it.
A few months ago, Mags had been looking forward to the trip – until she and Ainsley had fallen out. Now she was dreading it.
“The campsite info says that there are otters in the loch near by,” Ainsley told their teacher for what felt like the hundredth time. They were all standing on the platform at Waverley train station. “Will we see them?” Her eyes had gone big and round, and her shiny brown plait bounced as she jiggled with excitement.
Elsa laughed and nudged her friends, rolling her eyes. Elsa had only joined their school six months ago but had already established herself as Queen. She had one of those piercing, unblinking gazes and you did not want those blue eyes focussed on you. She was too good at picking apart flaws. Sometimes she didn’t even need to say anything at all. A pause and Mags would know her shoes were ugly, or maybe her buttons were crooked.
Mags felt bad for Ainsley but stared down at her shoelaces.
Mx Swanwick (“Mx as in Mix!”, they always said) wrinkled their forehead. “Sorry, Ainsley, but as I’ve told you” – their voice was tight with exhausted patience – “I’ve heard there hasn’t been a wild otter sighting up there in years. Now please, get on the train.” They were frantically counting the twelve year olds on the platform and making sure everyone was accounted for.
“Can we look for them? The otters? Just in case?” Ainsley asked again, her suitcase forming a barrier to the open train door.
Elsa scoffed and told her to get out of the way, echoed by the other students.
“We’ll look for the otters if we have time. Now. Get in your seat.” Mx Swanwick put on the Stern Teacher Voice that made you forget they were five foot nothing.
Ainsley ducked into the carriage without even a backwards look at Mags. Someone droned on the loudspeaker, announcing a platform change.
Mags dragged her feet but eventually found an empty window seat and rested her forehead against the glass. No one came to sit next to her. She’d known they wouldn’t. She felt like she’d swallowed a stone.
Elsa and her friends sat at the other end of the carriage. She could hear them giggling from here. But Ainsley, she noticed, wasn’t among them.
When Elsa had first arrived, she’d befriended Ainsley. Mags’s former best friend was one of those universally liked people. It was impossible to hate her. She was weird, with the whole animal obsession, but people thought it was cute. She was super smart but not a pushover – she wouldn’t do your homework for you, but she would help you figure things out.
Previously, people had tolerated Mags circling around Ainsley like a satellite. Mags understood being friendly to the new girl, fine, but before Mags knew it, she had been pushed out of orbit. But Mags wasn’t going to give in easily. When she found out she hadn’t been invited to Ainsley’s birthday four months ago, she’d crashed the party. Every time she thought about their big blow-up fight, she winced, her toes curling with guilt and embarrassment. Not her best work.
A couple of weeks ago, Elsa had quietly dumped Ainsley. Mags wasn’t sure why. She should be glad that Ainsley had had a taste of her own medicine. She wasn’t as invisible as Mags, sure, but now Ainsley was a bit on the outside too. But the stone in Mags’s stomach had stayed just the same.
The high-speed train left the station. Soon, the city fell behind them and she watched the fields stream past. Mags leaned to her right and slyly glanced at Ainsley, sitting alone at her own table, head bent over her phone. Mags was sure Ainsley would be looking up more specifics about otters in Orkney. If she’d been sitting next to Mags, she’d have been chattering about how most Scottish otters were bred in captivity these days. She’d know exactly what rehabilitation programmes had happened and how much wild populations were meant to improve over the next ten years.
Mags had turned into a loner over the last few months. She knew it, the students knew it, the teachers knew it. And, most painful of all, of course Ainsley knew it. She was the one who had helped it along. Turns out best friends for ever had hidden small print.
Mags had got very good at sneaking looks at her former best friend without the other girl noticing. Like a glimpse of that dark braid from the other side of the ferry deck. Or the double dimple on her right cheek when she smiled. Mags’s stomach went all flippy, but she blamed it on the choppy waters. She was counting down the days until they could go home like it was a prison sentence instead of a school trip.
They arrived and had dinner in Kirkwall before carrying on. They were staying in some eco cabins near Stromness. Elsa and her friends Helen and Rhona swanned off to have a cabin to themselves. For everyone else, it was a bit of a scrabble. And, of freaking course, Mags and Ainsley ended up in the same cabin. They both chose bottom bunks as far away from each other as possible, not making eye contact. A few months ago, this would have been the dream. They’d have chosen the same bunk beds so they could whisper after lights out, or pass notes and snacks up or down.
After dumping her stuff, Mags took a brief look around. The grounds had some solar-powered electric scooters they could rent. Some of the students zoomed around after they unpacked but before lights out. She crawled into her bunk and didn’t speak to the other three students in her cabin. They didn’t speak to her. Still. She might have snuck a few looks at Ainsley’s sleeping back.
Day 1: Travel to Orkney. Check. Just a few more days of awkwardness to survive. She could do this.
Day 2: Tidal turbines. Mags caught a flash of Ainsley’s face when they were all going around the tidal power plant on the shore near the Pentland Firth. The guide went on and on about the skinny yellow boats with the turbines attached to the hull beneath the water. They floated in the gap between the very north of Scotland beyond John o’ Groats and the Outer Hebrides. There were scale models everywhere next to informational placards. The boats looked normal up top, but down below they were as busy as duck legs: the fans were whirling away to capture energy.
The real ones out in the sea were doing their best to not catch any marine life in the blades. The company was also experimenting with another machine to generate energy. Instead of propellers, it had some weird ribbons that flipped up and down like a mermaid’s tail. It would kill fewer fish. Mags realized she’d never really thought that much about how renewable energy sources had come about. It was easy to forget that her parents had grown up with electricity powered by coal, or burning old dinosaur fossils for fuel and killing the planet. Still, Mags could barely pay attention since not-looking at someone required a lot of concentration. This was not helped when Ainsley stuck up her hand.
“Yes?” The guide blinked at her. He was a middle-aged man with a shock of red hair and a smattering of freckles.
“Do you ever see any otters on the shore?”
Blink. Blink. “Can’t say that I have. Rare these days.”
Ainsley’s shoulders slumped. A couple of the other students laughed, with Elsa the loudest, nudging one of her friends.
Mags turned the levers of some of the scale models, watching the blades move faster and faster in the swirls of water and the little lightbulb brightening from the power of the movement.
“It’s all possible because of the moon,” the tour guide said, coming up to her. Oh no. He’d obviously realized she was alone and felt sorry for her.
“What do you mean?” she asked, reluctantly.
“Tides are all caused by the moon and variations in gravity. Tidal power is the only renewable technology that draws on the Earth and Moon, like the Sun for solar power and the Earth’s internal heat for geothermal power.”
Mags hadn’t thought about it like that. “That’s cool.”
The guide smiled and moved on to the next student.
After the tour, they got into tiny boats under the watchful eye of Mx Swanwick and the parent volunteers, taking a loop around all the turbines in the water. The air was cold, even though it was late spring, and smelled like salt and seaweed. A few working turbine ships were out on the horizon, but their stretch of water was pretty empty. Seabirds called to each other overhead, diving for fish. Mags zipped up her coat. The students looked at the rig where new models of turbines were raised and lowered to test them. It almost looked like some strange portal to another world. If you sailed right through the metal gate, where would you go?
It was something she would have asked Ainsley, and they would have spent the rest of the afternoon making up a new land beyond the Firth and giggling. Instead, Ainsley wasn’t even in the same boat. Mags saw the flash of her orange and blue hat up ahead and hunkered down deeper against the hull of her own boat. The chatter of the other students swirled around her like the currents. Did they even see her, or had she turned invisible? Sometimes she’d check her reflection in the screen of her phone, just in case she had.
Day 3: Algae farm. Mags caught Ainsley’s fingers doing the clenching and unclenching into fists she did when she was nervous. Their classmates were all full of beans, as her gran would say, partly because their guide wasn’t half-dead and bored like the one at the power plant, and because a superhero film had been filmed in an exact replica of the farm a few years ago. It was easy to imagine the caped crusaders flying around the towering green columns or smashing them to bits, green water washing over the concrete floor in waves. Helen and Rhona kept darting behind things and pretending to shoot other people with finger guns until Mx Swanwick told them to cut it out.
“Algae and seaweed are modern miracles,” the guide said. She was an older woman with hair in long grey ringlets down her back. She was clearly a little annoyed by the rowdy students, but kept her voice perky. “You won’t remember how polluted things used to be. The oil spills and such. Algae is carbon neutral and you don’t need any soil for it to grow, making it an incredibly useful foodstuff for humans and animals. For those in space going to Mars just now, for example, it’s one of their main sources of nutrition because it’s high in protein and easy to grow on a spaceship.”
People were always interested in anything around space, so that started another excited round of murmurings. But at least they were listening to her now.
Next, the guide talked about algae and the environment: how it was a useful carbon sink, how they made giant kelp forests in the ocean, and how they grew it for biofuel. Blah, blah. Mags wasn’t as interested in that part. She’d already learned all of this back in class.
Elsa bumped against Mags at one point in the tour, almost slamming her into one of the green towers.
“Oh. Didn’t see you there,” she said airily, waving her hand like the princess she was probably named after. Invisible again. Not even important enough to properly taunt, not now Elsa had got what she wanted.
Further down the line, Ainsley’s eyes lit up as Elsa came in her direction, but the light flicked right back off when Elsa passed her without a second look and joined Helen and Rhona.
Later, they did a simple experiment with algae, dropping them into a solution that made them into jelly-like green balls. Pretty much everyone else paired off, but Mags did it alone, carefully putting an equal number of the balls into two vials with the solution and screwing on the caps. She covered one with black paper and put the other under a grow light. While they waited, they tried different types of seaweed snacks. Some, like the seaweed crisps Mags usually had in her lunch box anyway, were delicious. Others were super gross and just tasted like pond scum. When thirty minutes had passed, they finished the experiment, seeing the difference in photosynthesis between the algae balls that had been exposed to the light versus those that hadn’t.
Mags found herself wondering if otters ate algae, and then gave herself a stern talking-to.
She ducked her head and put up her hood. It made her feel a bit like one of the superheroes from that blockbuster that had been filmed here. Maybe she was the Invisible Girl.
“I still haven’t seen any otters,” Ainsley complained again that evening over dinner, to no one in particular.
“That’s because they aren’t here.” Elsa smiled without showing her teeth. “Me and my family have come here loads of times in the summer and I’ve never seen any. Sorry, Ains, but I don’t think you’ll find them.” She sounded amazingly insincere in her apology. Ainsley went bright pink. Not that Mags was looking. She was definitely not-looking.
Mags hated the twist of the stone in her gut. It was guilt. If they’d still been friends, Mags would have helped Ainsley look for the otters. Or at least been brave enough to tell Elsa to shut up. Instead, her throat felt too tight. Something in her had gone missing when they had that big fight, just like the otters.
Day 4: Wind farms. Mags almost felt bad for Mx Swanwick and the parent volunteers that day. The students had seen wind turbines spinning along all their lives, and the tour felt like a rehash of the tidal turbines the day before, but using wind for power instead of currents. They talked about the initial resistance to windmills and how people thought they ruined the view from the beach. Mags had always thought they looked cool, like slicker versions of the pinwheels her parents used to buy her when she was smaller. Hardly anyone paid attention. Elsa held court in the corner, convincing her loyal followers to give her their extra clementines from their lunches. Elsa loved them and always smelled faintly of citrus.
When they got back to the campsite on day 4, Mags was almost relieved. They’d take the ferry tomorrow early afternoon and be back in Edinburgh in time for a late dinner. Science trip: check. Survived.
“Will we have time to look for the otters tomorrow, Mx Swanwick?” Ainsley asked at dinner.
“Uh, maybe,” their teacher said, evasive. “The ferry is pretty early. If everyone’s up and out quick enough.”
Elsa rolled her eyes. “For the last time, the otters aren’t here,” she muttered just a little too loudly. “You’ve as much chance of seeing a yeti or something. It’s impossible. Give it up, Ains.” The students smirked.
Mags glowered. But Ainsley’s mouth set into a very determined line.
Trouble. Trouble, trouble.
There was a bigger rec centre on the site and that evening they watched that superhero film on a projector. It was fun to watch replicas of the glass columns from the algae farm get destroyed during the big fight scene at the end.
Mags hung back from the group, not-looking at Ainsley, who sat at the back, arms crossed, her scheming face on.
Otters were most active at dusk and dawn, but they were still nocturnal sometimes. Not that Mags had researched that or anything. Or that she’d checked and the loch where otters were most likely to be found was three miles away.
It’d be easier to just tap Mx Swanwick on the shoulder and tell them that Ainsley was probably up to something. A lot easier.
Mags chewed her lips until they were sore. She crawled into her bunk for lights out. And she waited, wide awake, for two hours, until, sure enough, she heard Ainsley getting up and tiptoeing to the door. Mags’s heart was pounding. She should stay put. She really should.
“Where are you going?” Alice, one of the other students, murmured at Mags as she made her own way to the door. Evidently, she wasn’t as good at being quiet as Ainsley.
“Toilet.”
Alice sighed back into sleep.
Mags snuck out a side door and went to the solar scooter stand. Sure enough, the one on the end was missing. She tapped her phone on the controls and borrowed the one next to it.
“Bad idea, bad idea,” she muttered to herself.
This far north, in late spring, it wasn’t super dark at least. Bringing up the directions, she started heading off towards the loch under the light of the full moon.
A half mile from the loch, her scooter died. Mags guessed the other students had been playing around with them after dinner again and drained the charge. She probably should have checked that. She had to huff along up a hill.
Panting, she stopped at the edge of the loch. It was nice, she supposed, as far as big bodies of water went. But she barely took in the way the seaweed swayed beneath the surface of the brackish water (a new word that she now knew meant the loch had both fresh water and seawater). The sky was more purple-blue than the true black of night. The colours up here were different. Or maybe it was just being out of the city. She could see how this place would be a perfect home for otters. She squinted along the shore, looking for the hunched form of a certain animal with a long tail and sleek head. Nothing.
But she did spy one solar scooter, also out of juice. Mags laid hers down next to it.
She heard Ainsley first. Muttered insults and the sound of splashing. Her former best friend was down by the shore, wrangling with an ancient-looking motorboat at the end of a small dock that looked like it’d been down there for a million years.
“What are you doing?” Mags hissed, the first words she’d spoken to Ainsley since The Fight four months ago.
Ainsley whirled around. “I’m here to find the otters.”
Mags sighed. “There aren’t any. Just go to the zoo when you get back and look to your heart’s content.”
“They’re here, Mags. I know it. I sense them.” Ainsley clambered into the boat, tugging at the lead tying it to the dock, which looked like it’d crumble into matchsticks if you jumped on it too hard. Mags hesitated at the edge of it.
“Just get back to the cabins before Mx Swanwick finds out you’ve snuck away.”
Ainsley gave a loud snort, still messing with the rope. “I’m fine right where I am.” She held up her phone. “I’ll have proof and no one will be able to call me a liar.”
Mags winced. “Ains,” she started, inching out onto the dock. Was that a creak? “Just get out of the boat, please.”
“Do you believe they’re out here?” Ainsley demanded, pushing the hair out of her face. “Or do you think I’m foolish, like she does? Do you think I’m weird?”
Mags winced but tiptoed a little closer. As if that would actually stop the dock from falling apart under her weight. She was only a couple of steps away.
“Now come on, you’re being stu—”
She lost her balance as her next step hit a rotten plank. She pinwheeled her arms, fighting for balance. Ainsley reached out and grabbed her and they both fell into the boat.
The boat that was no longer tied to the post.
The force of the fall caused the boat to nearly capsize. A bit of foul water sloshed into the bottom of it. Mags scrambled desperately away from Ainsley and clung to one of the benches. They stared at each other, panting, the boat rocking from side to side.
The boat that was no longer by the shore.
The fall had pushed them out into the loch, and the subtle current was dragging them into the middle. They were stuck.
“Where does it lead?” Mags asked. “Are we going to be swept out to sea?”
“Uhh, I dunno. I dunno. I’m sorry!” Ainsley was fiddling with the ancient motor that was definitely broken and probably had been since before they were born. Not that they’d really know how to use an old-school motor like that. Mags could smell some faint whiffs of petrol, sharp and horrible.
It was dark. There was no one near by. They couldn’t even see the road from this angle.
“I dropped my phone in the water,” Ainsley said, horrified, patting her pockets. “My parents are gonna kill me. Do you have yours?”
“Uh.” She took it out of her pocket. Like the scooter, it was out of battery. She hadn’t charged it since they left Edinburgh. Whoops.
“Oh no,” Ainsley moaned, her hands over her face.
“Help!” Mags tried yelling. “Help us!” She stood, making the boat wobble again, and Ainsley dragged her back down.
“Stop moving!” They were closer to the side of the lake that was just bog, as far as Mags could tell. She tightened her coat and leaned away from Ainsley. Why had she even come? She stared up. She could see so many more stars.
It started getting even darker, though the sky still seemed pretty purple. But clouds had covered the moon, so it wasn’t as bright as before. There was a bucket in the boat. Mags bailed out some of the water at the bottom.
“Should we try to swim?” Mags finally cracked the silence.
“I dunno; it seems a bad idea in the dark. What if there are currents or riptides or something?”
Mags was secretly relieved. She had never been a super-strong swimmer. Though the mention of riptides made her nervous – if their boat was caught up in one, there wouldn’t be anything they could do.
But it bobbed gently, not moving much.
It made the most sense to stick it out until morning. The other students would wake up, and someone would notice they were missing and sound the alarm. They’d be grounded into oblivion, but they’d be fine.
Mags peered at the little bit of water still in the bottom of the boat. Was it getting deeper? Was there a leak? Were they going to drown?
It was so quiet out here. She only heard the shushing of the water, the wind through the grass. Back home, she’d be hearing the buses, the trams. The dings of bikes along the raised cycle paths. People talking outside the pub below their flat. Her dad snoring in the next room.
Mags raised her legs and rested her chin on her knees, wrapping her arms around herself and watching the ripples of the moon on the water.
“Mags,” Ainsley said, eventually. “I messed up.”
“By sneaking off with a scooter and then stealing a boat and getting us stuck in the middle of a lake? Yeah, I’d say.”
“Well, aye. But not only that.”
Mags went still and didn’t trust herself to say anything.
“I was mean to you. Elsa got in the way of us. I don’t even know how she did it.”
“I mean, you let her. You decided not to invite me to the party. That was still you, not Elsa.” She’d already said more than she’d meant to.
“Yeah.” Ainsley shifted on the bench. “Elsa just kept saying you wouldn’t have a good time at it anyway, since you don’t get on with most people.”
“You’d have been there. You’re not most people.” Mags clamped her lips down on the words. The sneaky suckers had escaped.
The silence stretched between them. Mags fiddled with an ancient bit of netting at the bottom of the boat, until she realized how dirty it was. The boat bobbed on the water. At least it didn’t seem like they were about to be swept out to sea, or sink to the bottom of the lake.
“You said some awful things, though, in the fight,” Ainsley said.
Mags had. She’d called her best friend weird, said other people only wanted her around for help with homework and they all thought she was weird too. She’d screamed that Ainsley was a wuss, if Elsa could so easily make her turn her back on her friend. Usually it was Ainsley who would get angry and explode about things, but that time, it’d been like they’d changed places. It was Ainsley who had hunched her shoulders and gone all quiet, not saying a word while Mags yelled. “I’m sorry for calling you weird,” she said. “And for making a whole scene at your party.”
“But you’re not sorry for the rest of it.”
Mags opened her mouth, but Ainsley cut her off. “It’s fine. I was being a wuss.”
Mags’s mouth stayed open.
“Elsa made me feel special. She was new and shiny. She’d been everywhere, it felt like. Her mum’s job means they have to move around a lot. So I guess she has to, like, establish her dominance quickly. Like a cat.”
Mags laughed. Elsa the clementine-loving cat.
“I thought her choosing me meant something. I told her off later, you know. That’s why she’s not friends with me any more. I told her that I was tired of hearing her make fun of other people, especially you.”
“You stood up for me?” Mags asked. She wondered what Elsa had said about her. No. She knew way better than to ask.
“Too late, but yeah. I did.”
“So why didn’t you tell me?” Mags demanded. “You just became a loner too.”
Ainsley shrugged. “I— I dunno. I thought you were still angry with me. That I’d messed things up for good.” Her voice had gone all thick. “This is silly, but I felt like I’d destroyed an environment, polluted it so bad no animals would ever want to live there again.”
Mags looked at Ainsley then; really looked rather than pretending not to. And it was a relief, to take in every part of that face she’d known since they were six. Half her life.
“I’ll always come back. Like the otters.”
Ainsley gave a watery laugh. “Like the otters.”
Mags reached out for her and Ainsley came forward, and they hugged tight, the boat rocking alarmingly from the movement. Mags squeezed her best friend so hard Ainsley gave a muffled “oof” of protest, but then held her just as close.
“I’ve missed you,” Mags said, as if they had been across the world from each other rather than in the same classroom most days.
“Missed you more.”
They finally drew back, laughing a little self-consciously as they wiped their faces.
“We’re still stuck on a boat and it’s your fault,” Mags reminded her.
“Sorry.”
They settled next to each other on the bench, huddling for warmth even though it wasn’t really that cold. Mags didn’t feel quite so scared any more.
Mags yawned, stretching her sore neck. It took her a moment to remember that yes, she was stuck in the middle of a loch with Ainsley and somehow they had fallen asleep. Ainsley, who was her friend again. Mags felt a glow like she’d swallowed one of those sparklers from St Andrew’s Day.
When the light was good enough to see the loch in more detail, Mags snorted. She could literally see the bottom of the lake. It was shallow enough that at any time they could have jumped out and splashed their way back to shore, even though that probably would still have been a bad idea in the dark. Easy enough to twist an ankle on a rock or something. But maybe if they left now, they could get back to the camp before anyone else woke up.
She heard a rustling, and her breath stopped. She saw something wriggling in the water, and thought it was a fish at first, before her brain realized exactly what her eyes were seeing.
Mags nudged Ainsley, who groaned and burrowed further into her hoodie.
“Ainsley, wake up. I promise you’ll wanna see this.”
Ainsley rubbed at her eyes, scrunching up her face. Mags pointed.
There, moving along a little inlet, was an otter. Ainsley gave a suppressed scream of glee, and they grasped each other’s hands as they watched the creature make its way from the water. Stubby little legs. Long neck, small head. The thick tail trailed along the ground, wet and pointed at the end. She decided the otter was a boy, though she had no way of knowing. His fur was wet too, all browns and greys. He turned his little face to Mags and Ainsley, his whiskers twitching, the nostrils in his little muzzle flaring. The small ears on the side of his head looked like velvet shells. He was like the otters in the zoo, sure, but there was something about knowing this one had grown up in the wild. That this otter could go where he wanted, hopefully unbothered by humans.
The otter stared at them for a long time with beady black eyes, like buttons. And then he continued lumbering along the little inlet, sniffing at the grass. In one smooth movement, he slipped into the water, going below the surface with barely a ripple.
“Did you— Did you—” Ainsley wheezed. Her eyes were shining, and the double dimple on her right cheek was out in full glory. Mags poked it with her fingertip.
“Yeah, I saw.”
A few minutes later, the otter came back onto shore, something wriggling in his jaws. When Mags realized it was an eel, she couldn’t suppress the gasp. The otter froze and looked at them again with something very much like annoyance. He grabbed the eel more firmly in his jaws and slunk back into the higher grass at the edge of the loch, maybe setting off to share with his friends.
Mags and Ainsley let the moment just … exist. They sat, they breathed, and they drank in what they had seen.
And then they steeled themselves and jumped from the edge of the boat.
“Don’t think about the eels, don’t think about the eels!” Mags cried, and they ran, splashing, laughing and shrieking, back to shore. They might make it back before people woke up, but they would probably be caught. Elsa would demand a photo. No one would believe that they’d seen an otter in the wild.
But in that early morning light, as she and her best friend walked back down the road, pushing their scooters alongside them, Mags didn’t care.