PORT LEVY’S OTTERS

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34047, 10 January 1976, Page 8

PORT LEVY’S OTTERS

Over the Hills But Not to Stay. By Jane Hascombe. Whitcoulls. 192 pp. N.Z. price $6.50. Was there really a .family of otters — or something odd — at Port Levy? This intriguing possibility is given a chapter and two smudgy snapshots in Mrs Hascombe’s otherwise uneventful chronicle of two year’s stay in the bay. She describes sightings, in midwinter, 1971, of an animal “which was clearly neither cat nor ’possum” which visited the compost heap, and later, what appeared to be a baby “otter”, in her cottage.

Mrs Hascombe says that soon after the sightings, she read an article by G. A. Pollock in “The Press,” in which he

referred to recent evidence that there was “a South Island otter.”

Mrs Hascombe may not have heard of the waitorete, the otter-like creature sighted amny times in South Westland Her Port Levy animal, as she describes it, is similar to this furry mystery. This apart, Mrs Hascombe’s chatty and amusing tale tells how she and her husband “sold up” in Christchurch and went to live in a secluded cottage at Port Levy, to come to grips with the country life amid good people and nature’s surprises.

Why Mrs Hascombe is so coy as not to name their new home as Port Levy is another mystery, but there it is, in glorious colour, on the dust-cover of the book.