With considerable difficulty Gavin struggled off the island in his waterlogged boat and regained the house at nine in the morning. All that day until four o’clock in the afternoon he wandered and called, and with every hour grew the realisation of how much his animal companion had come to signify to him. ‘I resented it,’ he wrote, ‘I resented my dependence upon this subhuman presence and companionship, resented the void that his absence was going to leave at Sandaig.’
In this mood of reasserted human independence Gavin began to remove the remaining evidence of Mij’s past existence, taking away first his drinking bowl and then his half-full bowl of rice and egg. While he was thus occupied he thought he heard a muffled sound like the hoarsely whispered ‘Hah!’ that Mij used when he interrogated an empty room. Gavin went to the front door to look out but, as before, there was nothing there; he returned through the kitchen-parlour and suddenly stopped, for there on the floor in front of him was a large, wet footprint; and then he heard the sound again:
‘Hah!’
And there was Mij, soaking wet, his harness broken, bouncing and leaping about him like an excited puppy. He must have been caught by his harness for a day or more, Gavin realised – and then he realised something else. ‘I knew by that time that Mij meant more to me than most human beings of my acquaintance, that I should miss his physical presence more than theirs, and I was not ashamed of it. In the penultimate [sic] analysis, perhaps, I knew that Mij trusted me more utterly than did any of my own kind.’
In July 1956 an incident occurred at Sandaig which, rightly or wrongly, has been considered to have played a significant, indeed catastrophic part in the course of Gavin’s subsequent life. It took place during the visit of Kathleen Raine.
Kathleen had been staying at Sandaig alone, looking after Mij while Gavin was away. She was one of only three people in the world to whom Mij extended his whole-hearted affection, the other two being Gavin himself and Mary MacLeod. Her mere presence could send the young otter into ecstasy, and while he was rumbustious and possessive in her company, she for her part established a strange, deep bond with him and accepted his exuberant horseplay without complaint. Mij, she perceived, was the bond that united herself and Gavin, and was equally attached to them both. Mij slept curled up in her bed, as he did with Gavin, and each morning would call her to follow him as he bounded over the grass to the burn. Such time as was not taken up with Mij she devoted to prettifying the house. ‘Like some shrine I tended Gavin’s house,’ she recorded later, ‘happy to scatter, as I thought, fairy-gold for him to find; shells and stones from the shore, things I had made or done for him.’ Kathleen had stayed on longer than planned, and was at the house when Gavin arrived late one evening with the English friend he had first met in Basra, Gavin Young. Gavin, it seems, was outraged to find Kathleen still in residence at Sandaig and told her, very brusquely, to leave immediately. Kathleen was deeply hurt and angry. There was a violent altercation outside the house.
‘May God forgive you!’ Kathleen cried.
‘He will,’ Gavin snarled in reply.
Gavin Young was highly embarrassed. ‘It was a very odd, dramatic, storm-ridden evening, all blasted trees,’ he told me. ‘And there were these figures shouting at each other and Kathleen Raine pointing her fingers very dramatically. I didn’t know what was happening.’ Years later Kathleen recalled: ‘I was so wretched. I had been thrown out of the place I most wanted to be. Instead of welcoming me and saying, “Well, do stay for supper,” I was just thrust out of the door. I felt I had sown Sandaig with invisible treasures – but he couldn’t get me out of the door fast enough.’
Kathleen left, and toiled up the hill in the gathering stormy dark, sobbing, torn apart. Eventually she arrived at Tormor, where she proposed to stay the night with Mary and John Donald MacLeod, but she was so distraught that she could not settle, and after a while she left and made her way down the track that led for a mile and a half over the moor and peat bogs to Sandaig. The house was quiet, there were no lights in the windows, and a fitful gale blew in from the sea. There, halfway between the bridge over the burn and the house, stood the rowan tree. Beside herself with anguish and weeping aloud, she laid her hands on the trunk and called upon the tree for justice.
‘Let Gavin suffer, in this place, as I am suffering now!’ she cried.
She was calling for the loosing of the lightning from the magic tree. To Kathleen this was not so much a curse as ‘a desperate heart’s cry for truth’.
Just what events, if any, were brought about by that curse is a matter for a later stage of this story. More than a decade was to pass before Gavin began to take the implications on board, and by then, it is true, he had suffered many terrible blows. The first of these was not long in falling.
Gavin and Mij left Sandaig on 6 October 1956, travelling by car to Inverness to catch the night sleeper to London. Mij seemed to accept without question the transformation of his life from a wild state to the circumscribed condition of a domestic animal. At the station hotel he lapped milk from a saucer while Gavin took tea; he boarded the train as though he had done so every day of his life; and he quickly settled back into his old surroundings in the studio flat in Avonmore Road. Nothing, indeed, seemed able to diminish the intense and boundless joie de vivre of this extraordinary animal. He took his eels in the bath as he had done in the ever-changing, free-flowing Sandaig burn; he walked the London streets on a lead as contentedly as a dog; and he greatly enjoyed shopping at Harrods. One day Gavin took him to buy a toy at a novelty shop nearby, where he was given the choice between an india-rubber mackerel that wheezed or a chocolate éclair made of plastic. Mij chose the éclair and trotted happily home holding it between his jaws. As they passed the door of the pub on the corner a swaying figure emerged, saw Mij, and exclaimed ‘Good God!’ To which a voice behind him shouted, ‘You’ve got ’em again, Bill – you’ve got ’em again!’
So Mij settled down to London life for the winter, demonstrating in the metropolis the same charmed life and invulnerability to physical injury that had preserved him from the stormy seas and jagged rocks of the West Highlands. Once he fell from the gallery of Gavin’s flat to the parquet floor below, landing as if he had dropped on to a feather bed; once he caught his head in a slamming door and walked away without a murmur of complaint; on another occasion he chewed a razor blade into tiny fragments without suffering so much as a scratch. But London was hardly an ideal environment for such a creature, and as the weeks went by Mij became an increasingly difficult tie for Gavin, whose writing required that he should travel away from home from time to time.
In desperation Gavin tried to board Mij in the sanatorium of the London Zoo, where he displayed total indifference to lions and tigers and other predatory beasts, but cowered in fear before the aviaries containing the eagles and other great birds of prey that were an otter’s only natural enemy in the Iraq marshes. The zoo proved no place for Mij, however. Alone in his cage he at first wailed piteously and dug till his feet bled at the iron and cement that enclosed him. Then he turned his back on the world, burrowing far into the sleeve of the sheepskin coat Gavin had left behind for him, and refusing all food and attention. Within a couple of days he had sunk into a coma that would have led inexorably to self-willed death.
Advised that he should return from his travels at once if he wanted to see his otter alive again, Gavin hurtled through the fog of the East Midlands in his Grand Prix Maserati at speeds of up to 145 miles per hour, till a sudden rending sound brought the car to an abrupt halt, the cockpit filled with blue smoke and the rear-view mirror showed a thin black trail of oil stretching away down the road behind. Abandoning the car, Gavin dashed for the nearest railway station, jumping on to the last possible train as it was moving out of the station. He arrived at the zoo just before it closed for the day. Mij lay motionless deep inside the sheepskin coat. He had fouled his bed and his fur stank like an ill-kept ferret. When Gavin put his head inside the coat and touched the otter’s face,
Mij awoke as from a trance and emerged to race around his cage and greet his saviour with a frenzy of joy.
Only on one other occasion did Mij ever go back to the zoo. Gavin obtained the zoo’s permission to erect at the back of the Aquarium a large glass tank which he had hired for the day at the prodigious cost of ten shillings a minute, and asked the painter Michael Ayrton to come and make drawings of Mij as he cavorted underwater in pursuit of goldfish. An underwater view of an otter in action was a rarity in those days, and Gavin was unprepared for the virtuosity that he saw through the transparent walls of the tank: ‘His speed was bewildering, his grace breathtaking; he was boneless, mercurial, sinuous, wonderful. I thought of a trapeze artist, of a ballet dancer, of a bird or an aircraft in aerobatics, but in all of these I was comparing him to lesser grandeurs; he was an otter in his own element, and he was the most beautiful thing in nature I had ever seen.’
The problem of what to do with Mij whenever he went away continued to dog Gavin. He advertised in the papers for a temporary home, but none of the forty replies he received offered a satisfactory solution. He approached retired zoo keepers, but none seemed keen to turn their hand to their old job again, no matter how temporarily. Among his friends and contacts in the zoological world Gavin put out an urgent plea to find him, by hook or by crook, a full-time otter-keeper. But by the time one was found and engaged it was too late.
EIGHTEEN
The death of Mij
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
ALEXANDER POPE, An Essay on Man
The new year of 1957 found Gavin and Mij holed up in Avonmore Road while Gavin frantically tried to finish the overdue manuscript of A Reed Shaken by the Wind. He was once more penniless, and Mark Longman agreed yet again to help him out. By the end of January the book was critically late, and Mark Longman noted: ‘Gavin Maxwell must deliver 40,000 words within the next week if we are to achieve publication in the autumn.’ As soon as a chapter was written Gavin would ring his typist, a teenage girl by the name of Beryl Borders, who had typed his previous book, to come and collect it. She would pick up the manuscript from Gavin’s flat the same evening, take it back to her foster-father’s office in the Inner Temple and type till two or three in the morning, then walk all the way home to Streatham when she had finished. By dint of such Stakhanovite labours on the part of author and typist alike Gavin was able to deliver six chapters by the end of the week. A month later he delivered several more, and a covering note which read: ‘Apologies for this scrawl; I have writer’s cramp and my secretary is ill (so is my charlady, and I also have incipient housemaid’s knee and otter-keeper’s head).’
Time was so short that Longmans were forced to set the text piecemeal in galley as it came in. ‘Gavin is our most difficult author,’ his editor advised the production manager. ‘The MS, although incomplete, is to go straight into galley. I’m sorry we have to do it this way but this book has involved negotiations of the utmost difficulty.’ Toiling away by day and night, sustained by tall glasses of well-watered whisky, a limitless supply of cigarettes and Beryl Borders’ selfless toil, Gavin finally completed the manuscript of Reed on 18 March. With an ebullient and endlessly demanding otter for company it is extraordinary that he was able to put one word after another at all.
Gavin’s plan now was to spend the spring and summer alone with Mij at Sandaig – indeed, without an otter-keeper or otter-kennel to look after Mij, he had no alternative, no matter how much he may have wanted to resume his travels abroad. Shortly before finishing Reed he had put forward the idea of doing a light-hearted book about Mij called Otter Nonsense. This was to be a short book, only 30,000 words or so, but it was to be profusely illustrated with photos and Michael Ayrton’s drawings of Mij swimming in the glass tank at the London Zoo. Longmans liked the idea, paid out an advance and fixed a delivery date for the end of June 1957.
Gavin hoped to be able to write Otter Nonsense at Sandaig without any distractions other than those provided by his subject. But first he needed a fortnight’s freedom from Mij’s incessant demands so that he could put his affairs in London in order before his departure. He therefore arranged for Kathleen Raine, with whom he was again reconciled, to take Mij up to Sandaig during the Easter holidays, two weeks ahead of his own arrival there, and on 6 April 1957 he drove Kathleen and her otter charge to Euston station to catch the night sleeper to the north. Under the astonished gaze of the other passengers, Gavin walked Mij on his lead down the platform to his sleeping compartment, followed by Kathleen carrying Mij’s special travelling basket containing his chocolate éclair and other toys, his cod-liver oil and unpolished rice, his spare harnesses and leads. Gavin stayed long enough to watch Mij settle down and curl up in the wash basin, then, as the guard’s whistle blew, bade them both goodbye. Next day, from the Scottish terminus at Mallaig, Kathleen and Mij continued to Sandaig by sea in Bruce Watt’s boat.
Never had Sandaig seemed more beautiful to Kathleen than it did then, nor had she ever felt a stronger sense of coming home. The poignant beauty of early spring was all around her – the scent of young birch leaves in the air, the song of the green linnet among the alders, the primroses, anemones and golden saxifrage blooming brightly among the green, sheltered banks. At her side, at the edge of the sea or along the burn, bounded the irrepressible young animal companion she loved so much. ‘Never had I been so happy,’ she was to write; ‘every hour of every day was filled with beauty.’
Each day as she walked with Mij around the Sandaig hinterland Kathleen realised more and more clearly that Mij was essentially a wild animal, and that his bond to her was one of personal affection and no more. Each day she grew more and more anxious about the hazards inherent in these walks, for Mij, roaming free, could go where she could not – up cliffs, past waterfalls, round rocky headlands at high tide. Sometimes he did not answer her call, and sometimes he gave her the slip completely, so that she returned to the house alone, only to find him already there, curled up under the blanket on her bed. Once he was out all night, and though he eventually came back of his own accord, the danger signs were there to see. Mijbil was showing dangerous signs of independence. Kathleen prayed that he might remain unharmed until she could hand him over to Gavin safe and well. She tried to undo the curse she had made at the rowan tree the previous year, asking the tree to forget her past anger.
Kathleen was perhaps unwise to have ignored Gavin’s instruction and allowed Mij to run free, without his specially designed harness and the lead that could be attached to it in an emergency. But she felt the harness was more a danger than a safeguard; she feared Mij might get snagged on some tangle of wire, or caught up underwater and drowned. Three days before Gavin was due to arrive, she had second thoughts and tried to put the harness on, but Mij wriggled too vigorously and nipped too hard for her to be able to complete the task. On 14 April Mij wandered again, this time a great distance, for he was seen at the village of Arnisdale, eight miles south of Sandaig by sea, but recognised for what he was and left unmolested to return home in his own good time.
Kathleen also disregarded another of Gavin’s instructions – not to take Mij north up the shore of the Sound of Sleat, for in that direction lay the village of Glenelg, and people, and potential danger. But on 15 April, the day before Gavin was due to set off from London, Kathleen made a fateful misjudgement. Every day during her stay she had taken Mij south down the shore; but that last day when she came to the mouth of the burn she turned north. The tide was in and Mij ran into the sea as he always did. This time, however, instead of swimming about along the edge of the tide, exploring the shallows and hunting among the in-shore weeds and rocks, he swam directly out to sea, suddenly wild, and deaf to Kathleen’s urgent calls. She stumbled along the boulder beach in the direction of the cavern known as Joe’s Cave, trying to follow her charge, but she coul
d no longer see his little black head in the water, and after much frantic searching along the shore she realised that she had lost him and turned back alone towards the house.
Mij, meanwhile, had regained the shore at some point further to the north and continued his explorations inland as far as Glenelg. There he was seen by a man in his hen run, who would have shot him had he not observed that the otter was not the slightest bit interested in his chickens and correctly judged it was probably the tame one that was reputed to belong to ‘the Major’. Late in the day, with the light beginning to fade, Mij turned back for home. Lolloping along the ditch at the side of the road, he had just reached a sharp bend where a little churchyard stood between the road and the sea at Glenelg when a lorry drew up alongside him and the driver got out. Mij stopped and waited as the man, a roadmender from Glenelg, went to fetch something from the back of the lorry, and was still waiting when the man came back. Mij had never had any reason to fear or distrust human beings.
‘That night,’ Kathleen wrote, ‘I could not sleep; I hoped against hope that in the morning I would hear Mij whistling again at the door, left open for him. I lay in anguish, listening to a storm the like of which I seemed never to have heard, the wind full of lamenting voices as the ragged cloud flew over the moon from the south west as the gale raged. Anger and grief were in the wind; and though I did not know it, all was over, Eden lost, its gates closed against me for ever.’ In the morning she continued her search, even after she heard that an otter had been killed by a workman on the road.
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