#gavin maxwell

...for I became, during a year of his constant and violently affectionate companionship, fonder of him than of almost any human being, and to write of him in the past tense makes me feel as desolate as one who has lost an only child.

Otters are extremely bad at doing nothing. That is to say that they cannot, as a dog does, lie still and awake; they are either asleep or entirely absorbed in play. If  there is no acceptable toy, they will, apparently with the utmost good humor, set about laying the land waste. There is something positively provoking to an otter about order and tidiness in any form, and the greater the state of confusion that they can create about them the more contented they feel. A room is not properly habitable to them until they have turned everything upside down; cushions must be thrown to the floor from sofas and armchairs, books pulled out of bookcases, wastepaper baskets overturned and the rubbish spread as widely as possible, drawers opened and contents shovelled out and scatters. An otter must find out everything and have a hand in everything; but most of all he must know what lies inside any man-made container or beyond any man-made construction.

I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it.

[The otter] behaved towards us much as Mediterranean people do towards their gods, with a mixture of trust and abuse, passion and irritation. In turn each of us depended, as gods do, upon his worship; I perhaps most of all, because he was the only living creature that was ever likely to bear my name.