The music on the banks of the Otter was gentler, but that fitted in with its character: it’s a redder and sleepier and narrower river than the Dart, more crowded in by its banks. The early 1980s heroin party anthem ‘Golden Brown’ by the Stranglers tinkled through the trees from a portable stereo near a tent on a rocky inlet just downstream from the spot we chose for our beaver stake-out. Stephen, Sarah and I stood quietly in a dark spot under an ash tree and waited for it to finish and, almost exactly on cue with its final bars, a beaver of not dissimilar colour to the one celebrated in the song swam out from the opposite bank. It was far more serene than I imagined, much more serene than the otters we’d just seen, but when it clambered out onto a small sandbank just upstream and began scratching itself that serenity abruptly vanished. ‘It looks like a giant tea cosy,’ observed Sarah, accurately. ‘Is it scratching its nipples?’ A few nights earlier Sarah had gone down to the kitchen in her house to get a glass of water and seen a larger-than-average badger munching through a dish of her housemate’s cat’s food then watched, alongside the cat in question, as it waddled out through the cat flap. ‘I really didn’t think my week could get any better after that,’ she said. ‘But I was wrong.’ As for me, any bitterness I’d been quietly nursing about Hayley’s encounter with the otter on the Dart or Ru and the town seal abruptly vanished.
Beavers are vegetarians, and – contrary to what you might have read in the fiction of C. S. Lewis – not the kind who sneakily eat fish as well. What is a little mind-boggling is that not more than twenty human generations back seeing one would have been a fairly normal thing. ‘I saw a beaver today!’ would still have been a more noteworthy statement than ‘I saw a duck today!’ but not by much – maybe, say, comparable to a person from our present British century seeing a particularly excellent swan. Beavers were last spotted in Britain in the sixteenth century. The thickness of their pelts and the fact that their castor sacs contain castoreum, which was used as a tincture in perfume, meant they were hunted to extinction. You don’t hear many people banging on about wanting a perfume that smells of castor sacs these days so you’d hope that, were beavers to return to the UK in large numbers, they’d have a much easier time. Their ability to fell trees – earlier, upstream, Stephen had shown us teeth marks in fallen willows – and dam rivers also has a positive effect on the environment, preventing floods and creating wildlife-friendly pools and bogs. After a grooming session, this one – a female – swam another fifteen yards upstream and began to munch loudly through a bank of Himalayan balsam. I thought instantly of my mum, who’d had big problems with balsam in her garden in the past, and I drifted off into a daydream set on her birthday next year: me and the beaver, driving up to Nottinghamshire, Crosby, Stills and Nash on the stereo. ‘Don’t worry,’ I tell the beaver. ‘We’ll be there soon. I know it’s a long way but we’re almost done. Try not to scratch your nipples too much.’ I pull up outside my parents’ house, leaving the car in the lane, not the driveway, out of sight of the house. I ring the doorbell then instruct the beaver to hide behind the hedge or one of my mum’s larger plant pots, just to make the occasion that bit more special for everyone.
Whereas otters live in holts, beavers live in lodges. This is one of many things I love about beavers. It tells you what you need to know about them straight away: they’re a bit fancy but not too fancy. This particular beaver lodge had been built into the bank of the river directly opposite us, amid the roots of overhanging trees. Spotters from Devon Wildlife had thought there were three kits living in the lodge with this beaver and her far more publicity-shy male friend, but six days after my visit, a couple of days after my fruitless search for Flaviu on the moor, a photo was taken by a resident of the local village which clearly showed five kits sitting in the shallows at the edge of the river. The evening I saw this, I instantly dropped everything and drove back to the Otter and, after sitting on the bank for very little time at all, saw what I had been not quite optimistic enough to bank on: two kits swimming out, serenely, following the exact same route that their mum had the previous week, climbing the bank and chomping on the balsam, albeit with considerably less volume. After a quarter of an hour a dog walker called David arrived. David had been there the previous week, standing close to Sarah and Stephen and me on the bank, and in total had been watching the beavers for over three years, since before their presence on the Otter was even revealed in the news. ‘The male never comes out,’ he told me. ‘The female’s very casual now, though. I held a branch of willow in the water for her not long ago and she started to chew it.’
David is a mechanic who walks his obedient and lovely dogs along the Otter every night. He probably knows the beavers’ movements as well as anybody.
