Gavin brooded over the owl. He was angry and upset that he had lost a little outlet for his restless and frustrated energy, a living creature to care for and protect. He sat in the reed hut silently fuming while the conversation flowed around him until his ears caught two of the few Arabic words he knew – ‘celb mai’, meaning water-dog, or otter. He was suddenly alert, the eagle owl momentarily forgotten. He had already become faintly otter-conscious during his time in the marshes, and had learned that the Marsh Arabs recognised four distinct types of otter – ‘common’, ‘black’, ‘red’ and ‘white’. At Abusakhair, about five miles west of the Persian frontier, on 29 February he was shown four otter skins, two of which appeared to be of the ‘black otter’ type and the others ‘common otters’. He bought one of each type to take back to England with him, but his mind had begun to turn to the possibility of acquiring a live otter, and he had asked Thesiger if he could enquire about getting an otter cub among the Ma’dan.
‘What was that about otters?’ he asked Thesiger.
‘I think we’ve got you that otter cub you said you wanted,’ Thesiger replied. ‘This fellow comes from that village half a mile away. He says he’s had one for about ten days. Very small and sucks milk from a bottle. Do you want it?’ Gavin was cautiously excited. It sounded exactly what he wanted.
The man got up and went out, and Gavin watched his canoe glide away silently over the starry water into the dark. After half an hour or so he came back, entered the hut and put the otter cub down on Gavin’s knee as he sat cross-legged in the firelight. The cub was a female, the size of a small kitten or a squirrel, with a stiff, tapering tail the length of a pencil. The creature looked up at Gavin, chittered gently at him and wobbled a little on his knees, for she was still unsteady on her legs. Then she rolled over on her back, revealing a round furry tummy and the soles of four tiny webbed feet, and exhaling a strange musty odour that Gavin found wholly agreeable. Gavin bought her for five dinar, the price to include the teat and the precious bottle – bottles being rare items in the marshes – from which she drank.
Gavin named her Chahala, after a tributary of the Euphrates down which they had paddled the day before. He cut a collar from the strap of his field-glasses and tied a six-foot string to it so that she could not wander away and be lost. Then he slipped her inside his shirt and she snuggled down into the warmth and darkness of a security she had not known since she was taken from her mother. From that moment Chahala accepted Gavin as her foster-parent, and never once showed fear of anyone or anything. When she was awake she would peer out from the top of his pullover like a baby kangaroo, or scuttle along at his heels whenever there was somewhere dry to walk on (for she hated getting her feet wet). She played like a kitten and answered to her name. When she grew tired she would give a bird-like chirp and paw at Gavin’s legs until he bent down, then she would dive head first into the friendly warmth and darkness of his pullover and fall asleep at once, head down and pointed tail sticking out of the pullover top. At night Chahala slept inside Gavin’s sleeping bag, usually lying on her back with her feet in the air inside the crook of Gavin’s armpit. Gavin slept fitfully, trying not to sink into too deep a sleep for fear of rolling over and crushing the tiny otter with his body. Sometimes in her sleep Chahala would utter a wild desolate little cry – three poignant, falling notes, resembling the syllables that made up her name. Often she would wake in the night, and would clamber out of the sleeping bag to relieve herself on the bare earth between the reed columns in the furthest corner of the mudhif. When she returned she would clamber on to Gavin’s shoulder and chitter quietly for her bottle, then hold it between her paws as she sucked it lying on her back, till she fell asleep again with the teat still in her mouth.
Gavin’s Arab companions called Chahala his daughter, and would ask him when he had last given her suck. This was ironic, for on the evening after leaving Dibin a discussion took place between Gavin and Thesiger about weaning Chahala. Both felt that the otter cub was old enough to eat something more substantial than the buffalo milk which had been her fare till now. This view seemed confirmed when Gavin tried to introduce a few drops of blood into the otter’s milk from a couple of sparrows that had been caught for her; the moment she smelt the scent of the meat she snatched at the carcases with savage greed and was evidently furious when they were taken from her. ‘Finish with milk,’ Amara said. ‘She is grown up now.’
And so it seemed. Gavin gave Chahala the chopped-up meat from the breasts of the two sparrows, and she wolfed them down and looked for more. From now on the young otter would be fed with such meat as could be found for her, mostly bird flesh.
The next night was bitterly cold, and for Gavin, who was obliged to leave his sleeping bag open to allow Chahala to come and go as she pleased, it was the most acutely uncomfortable of the journey. Unable to sleep, he lay shivering on the floor of the sarifa (guest house) of a local sheikh, listening to the jackals howling in the night while an icy wind tore through the gaps in the reed walls. As he lay there, fretful and anxious, his mind began to wander and ramble, and he tried to divine some reason why he was here, on the banks of this strange river, at a place whose name he did not even know. His musings, when he wrote them down, encompassed not just the journey but his whole meandering life; indeed, the one was but a reflection of the other. Nowhere did he make a more honest statement of his view of the course his life had taken – the puzzle of the quest whose goal he could not fathom:
I must be here for some purpose, I thought, for those who wake at night in desert and jungle to see the stars at strange slants in the sky have some goal before them, some enemy to conquer before returning home. The lines that drew them here would form some plan on paper, a firm design that showed the growth and aim of their endeavour, a geometry that expressed the journey of their lives. I tried to see my own like this and saw it as a doodle on a scrap of paper beside a telephone, formless, full of heraldic flourishes and ignoble retreat, with here and there a random line running far out on to the blank page; and at the end of one of these I lay now listening to the jackals skirling at the moon. What went ye forth for to see? A reed shaken by the wind?
Now, as the two-month journey drew towards its end, his perspective changed radically. At the beginning – goggle-eyed, his senses finely tuned and alive – he had seen the marshes as a glittering land of beauty and wonder, and he had looked and heard and touched and smelt and tasted with the uncritical enthusiasm of a child. Gradually his mood had passed to irritation and frustration, but now it had shifted again. He was a man too rawly sensitive to survive long without experiencing pain, and now he perceived the canker beneath the mask, the cruelty and violence, the widespread and innumerable manifestations of pain and horror and dying that characterised the life of both man and nature in the marshes – and not just in the marshes, perhaps, but in the very system of God’s creation itself. ‘How very heavy must be the heart of the Creator,’ he thought as he contemplated the sheer prodigality of destruction all around him.
The awareness of suffering, compassion for those who suffered, whether animal or man – these had not suddenly and spontaneously generated in Gavin’s mind since he arrived in the marshes. They had existed at one level or another of his consciousness since childhood; but it does seem that it was in the marshes, and more especially in those last days following the death of the eagle owl and the acquisition of the otter cub, somewhere between the Chahala and the Agra rivers of the Eastern Marshes of Iraq, that Gavin came to see these things more clearly than he had seen them before. This new clarity of perception embodied a philosophical shift that was to lead, step by step, to the ardent conservationist of future years.
But there was one more life to pay in this endless sequence of small and helpless deaths, and this death was to hurt Gavin above all others.
Gavin now had only one more night left in the marshes. It was a bitterly cold night again, and a keen wind – ‘as chill as the tinkle of icicles’ – rustled the dry re
eds of the hut. Chahala was restless throughout the night, and Gavin grew impatient with her; but in the morning, when he took her to a spit of dry land at the edge of the village for a walk, he realised that she was very ill. She was unable to move and lay on the ground looking up at him in a helpless and pathetic way, and when he picked her up she wished only to regain the warm security inside his pullover.
They paddled for an hour through the flower-choked waterways of a green, shallow marsh, and at the next island village they stopped. It was clear to Gavin when they landed that Chahala was dying. She was very weak now, and in the reed house she lay on her tummy in obvious distress, breathing fast. Gavin could think of nothing but castor oil to give her, but it had little effect. For two hours he sat with his otter cub, feeling helpless and hopeless, and then they were off again, with Chahala stretched out restlessly on the floor of the canoe beneath the shade of a little awning Gavin had rigged with a handkerchief stretched across his knees. He was to write with moving poignancy of the bitter moments that ensued:
Once she called faintly, the little wild lonely cry that would come from her as she slept, and a few seconds after that I saw a shiver run through her body. I put my hand on her and felt the strange rigidity that comes in the instant following death; then she became limp under my touch.
‘She’s dead,’ I said. I said it in Arabic, so that the boys would stop paddling.
Thesiger said, ‘Are you sure?’ and the boys stared unbelievingly. ‘Quite dead?’ they asked it again and again. I handed her to Thesiger, the body drooped from his hands like a miniature fur stole. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she’s dead.’ He threw the body into the water, and it landed in a brilliant carpet of white and golden flowers and floated on its back with the webbed paws at its sides, as she had been used to sleep when she was alive.
‘Come on,’ said Thesiger, ‘Ru-hu, Ru-hu!’ but the boys sat motionless, staring at the small corpse and at me, and Thesiger grew angry with them before they would move. Amara kept on looking back from the bows until at last we rounded the corner of a green reed-bed and she was out of sight.
The sun shone on the white flowers, the blue kingfishers glinted low over them and the eagles wheeled overhead in the blue sky, but all of these seemed less living for me than Chahala was dead. I told myself that she was only one of thousands like her in the marshes, that are speared with the five-pointed trident, or shot, or taken as cubs to die slowly in more callous captivity, but she was dead and I was desolate. The fault lay with whoever, perhaps more than a million years ago, had first taken the wild dog cub that clung to the body of its dead dam, and I wondered whether he too had in that half-animal brain been driven by the motives that in me were conscious.
The precise cause of Chahala’s death was never known, but Gavin bitterly reproached himself for it for a long time afterwards. At first he thought he had killed her by feeding her raw meat before she was properly weaned. Later it occurred to him that perhaps the heron she had eaten had ingested the digitalis poison which the Marsh Arabs used to drug fish, and it was that which had killed her. It is also possible that Chahala may simply have died as a result of drinking too much buffalo milk.
That evening the party returned to the Tigris, halting at a holy spot called Ezra’s Tomb, much visited by Muslim pilgrims. The local sheikh was away, but he had a European-style guest house in which Gavin and Thesiger could stay. Here Gavin finally gave way to the grief and desolation that had gripped him all day since Chahala died. ‘Gavin had hysterics,’ Thesiger recalled, ‘there’s no other way to describe it, and he went on about how he’d never forgive himself, he’d killed the little animal that trusted him, and so on. “I’d wanted something on which to lavish my affections,” he said, “and I’d found it and through sheer stupidity I killed it.” He was sobbing away and the tears were streaming down his face. It was just as well we were not in a public guest house in front of a lot of other people. It seemed to me extraordinary. I could have understood it if it was to do with a human being he was very fond of, but it amazed me that it was over an otter we’d had with us for less than a week. I’ve never shared Gavin’s sentiments about animals. Personally I think if people go to extremes where animals become more important than human beings then they ought to be locked up.’
FIFTEEN
Mijbil in Basra
Does not take root like the badger. Wanders, cries;
Gallops along land he no longer belongs to;
Re-enters the water by melting.
TED HUGHES, ‘An Otter’
The journey was over. In spite of all the hardships and tribulations he had endured, Gavin was to look back on his sojourn in the marshes as one of the happiest periods in his life. He dreaded the prospect of returning to nothing and no one in England, and he was grateful when Thesiger suggested that perhaps he should stay on in Iraq and join him on another foray into the marshes, and later, perhaps, spend the early part of the summer with him wandering on horseback among the pastoral tribes to the north. It was arranged that they would return to Basra to collect their mail and write a few letters and then set off again two or three days later. On 29 March 1956 they drove the sixty miles south to Basra and checked in as guests at the resplendent old British Consulate-General on the banks of the Shatt al Arab.
Gavin’s mail had not arrived, and he decided to hang on in Basra till it did. He wrote to Raef Payne in England telling him of his intentions:
I am staying on here … I have a burning but rather hopeless purpose in doing so; I had a tame baby otter which gave me all its heart and I gave all mine in return and it died yesterday. She was the size of a squirrel and fed from a bottle, slept in my sleeping bag at night and inside my shirt in the daytime. She knew her name and would come running to it, and was more affectionate than any dog. I killed her by allowing her to eat meat too soon, and I am desolate and full of self-reproach. My heart weeps for that curious little otter and I’m very very sad. Now I feel that I shall never be content until I get another, but it’s getting late in the year to get them at the right age. If I fail to get another now, I’m coming back specially in Feb next year just for that.
With an otter for company, Gavin explained, he felt he could forgo all the travails of human love and affection. Clearly, at that moment he saw an otter as the solution to the principal problems of his life – a comfort in his solitude, a cure for heartache. This extraordinary conclusion was to have profound consequences for his future life and career. His provisional plan was to leave Basra as soon as he had received his mail from England, catch up with Thesiger in the marshes and stay with him till he found another otter. This might keep him in Iraq for up to a month. It says a great deal for Gavin’s determination, or perhaps desperation, that he was prepared to put up once again with the many discomforts and torments of the marshes to achieve his goal. But he hoped this might not be necessary. ‘If I have the luck to get an otter earlier,’ he wrote, ‘I shall come straight back.’
After nearly two months in the wilderness Gavin seemed curiously disorientated and inarticulate, as though the endless hours of Arabic had deprived him of his customary command over his own language. He himself seemed aware of this. ‘Sorry this is a really dull and laborious letter,’ he concluded apologetically, ‘but you know the moods when ideas and words just don’t come and string themselves together. I’ll leave it open till Monday, April 2nd, in case I think of anything worth saying.’
On Sunday Gavin was invited by the Crown Prince of Iraq’s game warden, Robert Angorly, a British-educated Christian Iraqi, to a duck shoot on the Crown Prince’s fabulous marshes. There Gavin sat at the Crown Prince’s exposed and prominent shooting-butt with his feet in six inches of water – ‘the cynosure of every bird’s eye in the place’ – until after five hours he was rescued from his indignity. On Tuesday he added a postscript to his letter: ‘Have now received all my mail from England, and am pushing off again the day after tomorrow.’
Gavin never did return to the marshes. Aft
er finishing his letter he went out to post it. He was away for several hours, and when he returned to his room in the Consulate-General he was surprised to find two Marsh Arabs squatting on the floor. One of them was Hasan, a member of Thesiger’s tarada crew; the other was a stranger. Beside them was a sack that squirmed now and then. The Arabs handed Gavin a note. It was from Thesiger: ‘Here is your otter, a male and weaned … It is the one I originally heard of, but the sheikhs were after it, so I said it was dead. Give Ajram a letter to me saying it has arrived safely – he has taken Kathia’s place.’
Gavin had barely finished reading the note than another stranger appeared in the doorway; a tall, rugged-looking Englishman by the name of Gavin Young. He was an experienced Arabian traveller (and a future journalist, war reporter and author of distinction) who had accompanied Thesiger in the marshes a few years previously, and had returned on several subsequent occasions by himself – the only other European to have explored the marshes in recent times.
Young had just returned to Basra for a short visit after two years wandering in south-western Arabia for the Desert Locust Survey, and his first call was to the British Consulate-General. There he was surprised to see through a doorway two Marsh Arab friends, Ajram and Hasan, who jumped up when they saw him and ran forward to greet him with broad grins on their faces. Behind them was a slim Briton with long blond hair, who was deeply preoccupied in wrestling on the tiled floor with a sack that seemed to have a life of its own. Presently he looked up and smiled. ‘Please excuse me.’ he said. ‘My name’s Gavin Maxwell. I see you know these two. They’ve just brought me this down from the marshes. Stand clear a second. There’s something very interesting in this bag and it’s coming out.’
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