My friend Hayley once described to me a very spiritual evening encounter she’d had with an otter in the River Dart, less than a mile upriver from Totnes. Hayley had been staring into the water, seeing only her blurred reflection and stones and vague fish and the blackening ripples of the water, but then her reflection grew slick fur and whiskers and a button nose and became brunette not fair and was no longer in the water but out of it, only four inches in front of her face. She and her reflection – which she now realised was not a reflection but a real-life breathing medium-size otter – held one another’s gaze for what felt like a minute but was probably an unusually long eleven seconds.
I have seen an otter in a similar spot on the Dart, but it was a far more ordinary sighting: a shiny head of dampened fluff several yards away that I only fully realised did not belong to a bird as it made a dive for the riverbed. There are lots and lots of otters six miles upstream though, including one called Mr Squeaks, who is too old to swim properly any more and, when requesting fish, makes a noise suggestive of a forty-a-day Benson and Hedges habit, and another called Sammy, who sits on the head of a man named Tim upon request. These otters are not wild, and neither is Tim; they, and Tim, belong to the otter sanctuary at Buckfast, but the water in which they swim is pumped directly from the Dart, which runs alongside their enclosures. The river gets volatile here, as it arrives on flatter ground from the moor, and when it overflows its banks, otters – wild ones, not from the sanctuary – have been found out of their element, washed away into the surrounding farmland. In the 1800s otters were hunted a few miles north of here on the west branch of the river by men with poles who compounded the asininity of their actions by shouting, ‘Hoo-gaze!’: the otter hunting version of ‘Tally-ho!’ The otters did their best to escape by running at speeds up to eighteen miles an hour, hiding in their parlours – deeper, safer places than holts, beneath hanging rocks – or running up trees, a little-known otter skill I learned about from Tim when I visited the sanctuary.
After the fast stretch below Buckfastleigh the river widens and dozes for a few miles, even while it prevaricates most dramatically about its intentions, then hits Totnes and goes tidal with a dramatic seabird flurry. In the sludge beneath the main bridge over the water in the town there is typically at least one upturned shopping trolley. The muddled clangs of the business park drown out the sound of cormorants and greenshank. Close by are the railings, hooped barbed wire and graffiti of the long-abandoned former Dairy Crest site. But the river still has an old-fashioned way of feeding the mythology of the place. Even at its most urban it retains a wildness that has not quite been buried. Stories from its banks find their way up the hill into the pubs at night. Over a pint my friend Ru told me he’d watched the town seal sitting on the bank a couple of weeks ago, munching casually on a huge salmon. There is almost certainly more than one seal, but everyone seems to have made an unspoken agreement to amalgamate them into a single town seal, possibly because the idea of him gadding about on various adventures between the weir at the northern end of town and Baltic Wharf at the southern end creates a more pleasing image. Sometimes I feel like I am the only person to live within a five-mile radius of the place who has never seen the seal, and this can be very socially isolating.
Teenagers hurl themselves into the water en masse down near the weir on the first semi-hot day of the year, and on every other subsequent one. You can walk past them in the garb of a counterculture fool from the middle of the previous century and they don’t bat an eyelid. After nearly three years I am almost accustomed to it and have to remind myself it is nothing like the places where I spent my own youth. I seriously toned my look down the last time I went back to the town where I attended school, and kids still hurled abuse at me from across a street. I won’t go into the details of the conversation, but suffice to say it was significantly less polite than when a stranger in Devon shouted, ‘Get back to Woodstock!’ at me and I assured her that I’d been trying my hardest to do just that for several years with only sporadic success. The town where I grew up did not have a river; it had a park, which sometimes had puddles. You went to the park, drank Special Brew and either had a fight or a snog. My training from that habitat kicked in last summer when I was walking parallel to the Dart and a tall, slightly lairy-looking teenage boy dripping river water from his shirt
