THE OTTER WITH SPOTS.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 159, 11 August 1914, Page 5

THE OTTER WITH SPOTS.

The otter came out of the hole where he had been sleeping all day and slipped noiselessly into the water for his night's hunting. The last glow of ' the summer, evening was just fading, and. as he swam swiftly upstream his flat head was merely a dark, moving blob on the glimmering surface of the water. In a few seconds he came to the throat of the pool where the river foamed through a narrow pass in the rocks. Swimming against such a current was harder work th'an he liked, so he landed at a little bay and galloped briskly across the rocks, like a huge overgrown weasel, to the calm water of the upper pool. If you had been very close you might then have seen, despite the fast-fading light, what made this young otter the proudest in all the county of Devon. The greater part of his fur that could be seen was of the rich, almost reddishbrown of his kind, but on his flanks there was a spot or two of unmistakable white. It was a distinction that no other otter in the river could boast, and perhaps he was rather conceited about it. Two other things he might have been a little conceited about with small blame were his wonderful powers of swimming and his knowledge of all the river lore. These he owed mainly to the patient teaching of his mother. j THE YOUNG ANIMAL. All young otters, you must know, have to be taught to swim by their mothers, and at first, when they are very young and babyish, and have only just opened their eyes on the world, they do not like the water at all. This one, after-a ride or two on his mother's back, soon lost his fear of the water, and indeed was' always the boldest of the three silky-coated little cubs that ' she taught so carefully. She not only taught -them how to swim' but also- how to dive swiftly into the pool and yet make no "sound; how to steal unawares upon a fish; how to chase and corner the lightning-like salmon and sea trout, and how to search in the mud for eels, which, of all: things in the river, are an otter's greatest dainty. She taught them table manners also, so that they* could eat fish in' the way that every well-bred otter does, beginning at the head and working down towards the tail, which he must always leave. * When he has caught a little fish it is quite good manners to swallow it whole in the water, but a larger one that lias to be taken ashore and eaten under the critical eyes of owls and bats and other censorious night creatures must always be treated according to; the strict conventions of the river. These things and many others he learnt from his mother, and now there was no young otter in the river who could chase and tire a fish so well, or whose manners gave less cause for spiteful comment to- the sharp-voiced, scandal-loving bats. AFTER SALMON. This night he was going upstream to hunt in a favourite pool for salmon. He and his kind did not kill a great many salmon or sea .trout in spite of what all thefishermen said. They lived on other things besides, and led the waterhens, and frogs, in particular, a terrible life. On occasions, too, when food was scarce in the river they would make long expeditions inland and prey upon rabbits and rats, and also, let it *be whispered, ehickens, if they could get them. It is true that an otter would /sometimes chase aad kill a salmon for the mere joy of hunting, but salmon were many and otters were few, .so it was scarcely fair of the fishermen when they caught no fish tb blame their -bad luck upon, the otters. Presently the otter arrived at his pool, ajjd he was not long in finding a salmon which had just come' up from the sea and was resting himself behind a "huge rock in mid-river. Like a flash, the salmon had gone and the otter was after him, not swimming on top of the water now but following the twisting fish into the deepest parts of the pool, and only coming up to breathe at intervals., Just then a man who. had been spending the evening fishing for sea trout came walking along the bank, and in the light of the rising moon saw the salmon spring high out of the water and return a couple of yards further on ! with a resounding splash. The otter's head'bobbed on the water for a moment, and the man on the bank spluttered something about a "river stinkin' with otters." Then he watched, on the surface of the still pool, the swirls and ripples which marked the path of the otter and his prey. PRETTY PLAY IN THE WATER. Once or twice the otter snapped at the salmon, and floating away on the surface showed that he had not altogether missed. Finally the salmon, tired out by endless twists and leaps he had been forced to make, was hunted into a shallow and there the chase ended with the otter seizing him by the shoulder and dragging him ashore. The fisherman was very still, watching the salmon being taken ashore, when in the moonlight he saw the spots on-the otter's flanks. He had never seen a spotted otter before, and his surprise caused him to make an almost imperceptible sound. Almost imperceptible, but the otter heard it, and with a swift, noiseless movement he was into the pool and away, leaving his hard-won salmon on the bank. THE DEATH SENTENCE. The next day the fisherman sought out his friend the Master of Otter Hounds, and told him all about the wonderful spotted otter —what a fine great otter it was; how it had killed a big salmon for, mere sport and left it on the bank (which, in the circumstances, was a slander); how the fishing in the river was being ruined By such otters, and so on and so forth at the greatest length, until the Master promised to have a by-meet the next week. "A spotted otter," he said; "I've never seen one. I should like to kill one like that." Those words- were the otter death sentence, for one morning about ten days later he was "marked" in his holt by the hounds, driven out by the terrier, and hunted for three hours up and down the river. Strong as he was, his strength gradually failed; his dives belbw' the water to escape the hounds hfl/>n.nie shorter and shorter, and finally,

dead beat and unable to go a yardfurther, he was caught and killed in his favourite salmon pool. "It was-a pretty hunt',' ' the' Master- said, but that did not make it any better sport for "the otfc*.