September 1960
Mr. Maxwell remarks casually somewhere in this very good book that he can neither fly nor swim, and the fact that his West Highland household contains one expert swimmer and five first-rate flyers - an otter and five greylag geese - all of whom learned their respective arts from him, is but one indication of his generous sense of responsibility as a host.
The story begins ten years ago when the author was offered a roadless cottage on the West Highland seaboard - an isolated place to live, but set in country so beautiful and remote that even to read about it creates a longing: white sands and green islands, rowan trees and small rocky bays and a burn with a roaring waterfall. Here, he and his springer spaniel, Jonnie, settled, furnishing the cottage by degrees from useful things washed up on neighbouring shores. Jonnie died, and afterwards the author, who was travelling in southern Iraq, was offered a young male otter. From the moment that it emerged from its sack, its fur stiff and spiky with mud, the author belonged to it, and the chapters about Mijbil (who turned out to be a hitherto unknown species of otter and was formally identified with the author’s name) are the most engaging in a book which is extremely enjoyable throughout.
Otters are perhaps the most captivating of all creatures that can be kept in domestic circumstances, and although they will ruthlessly adapt the circumstances to their idea of domesticity, their tremendous gaiety, intelligence, affection and general zest for life with you seems amply to repay their innate dislike of order, their genius for dismantling stuffy domestic fitments such as telephones, beds, books, china, paper, clothes, etc. After a frightful journey back to England by air - the fact that Mr. Maxwell is very funny about it does not detract from its frightfulness - Mijbil settled in a flat with his friend near Olympia before going North for an idyllic summer where he was utterly free to swim and fish and play, returning each night to sleep in the cottage,
A year later - it never occurring to him that anyone he met might be a treacherous lunatic - he was brutally killed by a road mender with a pick-head.
The sequel to this tragedy was a piece of marvellous good fortune, but there was an alarming interim. Mr. Maxwell tried keeping a ring-tailed lemur, who was gentle and charming most of the time, but after her third and nearly successful attempt to murder him - she severed his tibial artery - he sent her to a zoo. (I knew that lemur: it lunched lightly off lilac buds with me and was left by its owner for the night. I cannot help feeling now a little like somebody who invited Charlotte Corday to see me in my bath.)
In Scotland again Mr. Maxwell, by astonishing chance, encountered what must have been the only two people with a tame (Nigerian) otter whom they had to dispose of before returning to Nigeria and, ten days later, Edal took possession of the cottage and the burn. Here are admirable descriptions of man to otter relationships, and apart from many photographs there are drawings by Peter Scott, the author, Robin McEwen and Michael Ayrton.