Watched by Wild Animals

by Enos A. Mills

After half an hour of coasting all collected at the top of the slide for wrestling contests. A number dodged about, touching, tagging, rearing to clinch and then to roll over. Several exhibitions were occurring at one time. A few times one chased another several yards from the crowd. Once a number stood up in pairs with forepaws on each other’s shoulders and appeared to be waltzing. Finally there was a free-for-all mix-up, a grand rush. One appeared to have an object, perhaps a cone, which all the others were after. Then, as if by common consent, all plunged down the slide together. At the bottom they rolled about for a few seconds in merry satisfaction, but only for a few seconds, for soon several climbed up again and came coasting down in pairs. Thus for an hour the play in the frosty moonlight went on, and without cry or uttered sound. They were coasting singly when I slipped away to my campfire.

The otter is one of the greatest of travellers. He swims the streams for miles or makes long journeys into the hills. On land he usually selects the smoothest, easiest way, but once I saw him descend a rocky precipice with speed and skill excelled only by the bighorn sheep. He has a permanent home range and generally this is large. From his den beneath the roots of a tree, near a stream bank or lake shore, he may go twenty miles up or down stream; or he may traverse the woods to a far-off lake or cross the watershed to the next stream, miles away. He appears to emigrate sometimes—goes to live in other scenes.

These long journeys for food or adventure, sometimes covering weeks, must fill the otter’s life with colour and excitement. Swimming miles down a deep watercourse may require only an hour or two. But a journey up stream often to its very source, through cascades and scant water, would often force the travellers out of the channel and offer endless opportunities for slow progress and unexpected happenings. What an experience for the youngsters!

They may travel in pairs, in families or in numbers. The dangers are hardly to be considered. The grizzly bear could kill with a single bite or stroke of paw; but the agility of the otter would discourage such an attack. A pack of wolves, could they corner the caravan, would likely after severe loss feast on the travellers. The only successful attack that I know of was by a mountain lion on a single otter. Yet so efficient is this long-bodied, deep-biting fellow that I can imagine the mountain lion usually avoiding the otter’s trail.

The long land journeys from water to water appear to call for the greatest resourcefulness and to offer all the events that lie in the realm of the unexplored. Between near-by streams and lakes there are regular and well-worn ways. By easy grades these follow mostly open ways across rough country. It is likely that even the long, seldom-used, and unmarked ways across miles of watersheds are otter trails that have been used for ages.

Fortunate folks, these otters, to have so much time, and such wild, romantic regions for travel and exploration! After each exciting time that I have watched them I have searched for hours and days trying to see another outfit of otter explorers. But only a few brief glimpses have I had of these wild, picturesque, adventurous bands.

In all kinds of places, in action for fun or food, frolic or fight, the otter ever gives a good account of himself. He appears to fear only man. Though he may be attacked by larger animals this matter is not heavily on his mind, for when he wants to travel he travels; and he does this, too, both in water and on land, and by either day or night. To a remarkable degree he can take care of himself. Though I have not seen him do so, I can readily believe the stories that accredit this twenty-pound weasel-like fellow with killing young bears and deer, and drowning wolves and dogs.

The otter is a fighter. One day I came upon records in the snow far from the water that showed he had walked into a wild-cat ambush. The extensively trampled snow told that the desperate contest had been a long one. The cat was left dead, and the otter had left two pressed and bloody spaces in the snow where he had stopped to dress his wounds on the way to the river. On another occasion the fierceness of the otter was attested to by two coyotes that nearly ran over me in their flight after an assault on the rear guard of a band of overland otter emigrants.