Otter Tale

One evening I go out by the seashore – I tell myself I’m going to get some exercise, but really I’m going to potter and rummage around in rock pools looking for groatie buckie shells. And this thing happens.

I look up from my rockpooling and realise I’m not alone. Maybe 15 feet away, an otter is trotting up the beach.  His pace looks unhurried and purposeful. A couple of times he stops to snuffle at the ground at his feet, and at no point does he look at me. I have the impression I’m quite irrelevant to him.

Orkney otters, like otters elsewhere, are shy around humans, and the nearest I’ve come before to an encounter has been finding spraints on rocks, so this is exciting for me.  I start thinking about posting the video I’ve just taken onto my socials, and the caption I’ll add: “Some days I feel beyond lucky to live where I live”.  The word “lucky” strikes me, and I wonder what I mean by that? Because I don’t believe in luck.

It seems to me that, by and large, we go about the world and things happen, and then – as I’m doing in this example right now – we tell stories about the things that happen.  We’re compulsive story-makers.

Sometimes, if we think we perceive a connection between actions we take and things that happen, then we may tell a story about ‘achievement’ or ‘reward’ or alternatively ‘failure’ or ‘punishment’.  As well as story-telling creatures, we are also pattern-hunters, and we think we scry connections everywhere.  I notice a story starting in my head about how the otter sighting is a reward for me going out of my way for someone earlier in the afternoon. I stomp that story out before it can fully form, not least because it relies on other ideas I find incongruous (such as there being some-one? ‑thing? in a position to make assessments and hand out rewards or punishments…). This story comes, and I let it pass.

If there doesn’t seem to be a connection, and we like the things that happen, then we tell a story about our good luck.  If we don’t like the things that happen, we call it bad luck. Either way, I think the ‘luck’ angle does something interesting – it performs a kind of claiming. It claims “this thing that happened is somehow about me”.  It says something like, “I’m special” (and that’s equally true whether we liked the thing that happened or didn’t like it:  I sometimes find myself asking people in therapy who’re bemoaning their bad luck: “what makes you think you’re that special?”).

And the truth is, it may be – it is – a special experience for me to encounter an otter; but it doesn’t make me special. (And if I were in any doubt about that, the otter’s disinterest reminds me).       

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Another story forms in my mind: I start to imagine the story the otter tells.

(I can’t even know whether otters tell stories. That’s how obsessed we are: we make up stories for other, non-human inhabitants of the world, and sometimes we even believe those stories are truly theirs!)

Probably as he approached the shore, he paused in the shallower waves for a bit, observing the big two-leg creature hunting in the rock pools, and weighing up whether it seemed safe to move forwards. He couldn’t figure out what food the two-leg wanted, because it mostly seemed to come up empty-pawed.  Perhaps it liked shellfish, because it sometimes held a shell in its paw; but they seemed to be empty shells, and tiny.

I imagined an otter would find it ridiculous, putting all that effort into hunting tiny, empty shells with no food inside.

And then I remembered the videos I’ve seen of otters playing with pebbles https://youtu.be/U7bvq0VEnYA?si=g8jYGRoXJWifyDzk.  I don’t know if the otter-pebble-tale is true, but a story that accompanies the videos says that some otters carry a favourite pebble around with them their entire lives. 

And I thought: maybe an otter who has a special pebble would understand a human having a special shell. That’s a story I like.