‘Du’s back then? Fine that. I hae something to tell dee . . . ’

The old crofter pauses, weighing the awkwardness of what he has to say.

‘Something’s been takkin’ dy hens. I doot it’s da draatsi.’

The clocks went back the day before I returned home to Shetland. As I step outside into an unusually still, moonless October evening, I can hear the lisping calls of countless redwings as they stream overhead, invisible in the absolute darkness. The air is heavy with moisture, and below me the sea sloughs rhythmically on the shingle beach at the foot of my small croft. I open the metal gate that leads into the grassy yard where my hens live, and play my torch across the door of the old stone byre in which they roost at night. The pop-hole in the door is still open – night had fallen well before I got home.

There are neither streetlights nor immediate neighbouring houses here. My croft stands alone on the brow of a promontory at the north-eastern tip of one of Shetland’s smaller inhabited islands. My neighbours are the grey seals that watch me curiously from the sea, and my visitors at this time of year are the migrant birds that have blown in from Scandinavia. The news that an otter has been taking my hens while I’ve been away seems unlikely – in the ten years I have lived here in the islands I have never had any bother with them. Their local reputation seems entirely out of proportion with the reality of the charismatic animals I have spent many hours tracking and watching on the island. Apparently it’s not just domestic poultry that needs to worry about them:

‘When da draatsi bites du, he’ll no slip dee until he hears dy bones crack.’

This is all at odds with my time spent sharing their lives in their coastal territories. I have lain in the glistening, slimy bronze straps of kelp at low tide watching adolescent siblings twisting and turning in a Medusan knot as they play-fight mere yards from me. I have watched otters hunting slippery butterfish, misshapen lumpsuckers and writhing octopuses, tracking their trail of exhaled bubbles on the water’s surface as they dive again and again until a catch is made and they swim in to land to consume it. I have watched them noisily courting one another, have listened to the anxious whistling of cubs unseen in their holt, and have seen their mother drive them away when they’ve grown up and should be seeking territories of their own.

But I’ve never lost a hen to them.

Rough edges of stamped-down turves stop me in my tracks as I walk to the byre. There are muddy bootprints in the glistening wet grass and, sticking to them, myriad small, pathetic downy white feathers.

‘I’ve buried aa dat wis left. I didna ken what tae do. I doot du widna want dem cast ower da banks.’

Poor Lawrie, left in charge of feeding the free-ranging hens, has been left to clear away the remains of a daily incursion that has lasted a fortnight. ‘I ken dy peerie boy has names fur aa dem . . . ’

Lawrie is right – my young son named all of the hens and I am dreading breaking the news to him. As I stand unhappily looking down at their rough grave, treacherously wishing Lawrie had chosen somewhere less obvious in which to bury them, I am suddenly struck by the most uncomfortable feeling that someone – something – is nearby.

I swing the torch to my left and there, just beyond the wire fence that bounds the field, are a pair of dull red glowing eyes. The eyeshine is almost at the top of the fence. This is deeply unnerving and my immediate thought, irrationally, is that a large dog is watching me silently from the darkness. My stomach clenches slightly in what, I am later ashamed to admit, is primal fear.

‘Go on! Away with you! Go home!’ I shout at it. The eyes don’t move. ‘Go on!’

I start walking towards them. The eyeshine suddenly drops, comes and goes quickly as the animal casts from side to side, and then vanishes altogether. In the weak light at the end of the torch’s beam I see a large, long dark shape humping and slouching unhurriedly away down the track to the road. It’s an otter, and a big one at that. Where he stood upright I find a perfect round hole worn through the long thick grass at the base of the fence. This is where he’s been coming and going. The gaps in the wire are too small to pull a hen through, but are just big enough to allow the passage of a determined male otter. I will later learn that this is where Lawrie found a dead hen every morning, partially consumed as far from the byre as the otter could remove it.

In the mud around the byre door are footprints. Those of the hens, and the distinctive pugmarks of an otter. My impression of size is borne out now – this is as big an otter as I’ve ever seen. The paw prints come and go, some fresh and some older and more obscure. Having found a ready food source he’s been returning to exploit it. The naturalist in me dispassionately notes this; the crofter and the father in me is upset, dismayed that our blameless and tame hens have been decimated.

I shut the pop-hole in the byre door. If I feel angry, it is at myself. Mostly I feel guilty – perhaps I should have left the hens shut indoors while I was away? Has ten years of their freeranging without consequence allowed me to grow complacent? I walk back to the house contemplating a weekend of building a small, heavily wired outside run for the hens.

Coming home on Friday evening I see a familiar and tragic sight by the roadside. Where the narrow road bisects my croft, an otter has been hit by a car. An all too common sight in Shetland, where otters exist in such high numbers but have never learned to associate danger with moving vehicles. I stoop to examine it. There is no helping this unfortunate animal – it is freshly dead, the body still warm, a small pool of vivid blood on the asphalt beneath its muzzle. This is my otter – a large, heavy old male, his size imposing even in death. His nose is badly scarred, his eyes rheumy and his claws worn and blunt. Prising open his jaws I find he is missing most of his teeth, and those that remain are in poor condition.

After a life of roaming and fathering cubs around Whalsay he will have been finding catching fish an increasingly difficult task as age caught up with him and his physical condition deteriorated. At this time of year, with daylight hours rapidly dwindling and the weather deteriorating, his ability to hunt successfully will have been further impaired. Having chanced upon my hens he would have been unable to resist such easy pickings. Under the cover of darkness he had been returning from the shore to the byre to see if the pop-hole was open again. He was well into the autumn of his life, but now it has prematurely come to an end.

I pick him up, and carry him to the house. Tomorrow I won’t be building anything. I will be burying an otter next to the remains of his last supper.

Jon Dunn, 2016