We meet at last: the otter by Bonner McAllester

“…heaven to me consists in a complete communion with the otter nature.”

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, Dec. 1840

When can we meet the otter? When enter that complete communion so appreciated and described by Thoreau? For most of us, this happens only in winter when the otter obligingly leaves the book of her travels plainly written for anyone to read.

We do have get outdoors. The TV nature program will not do, nor will neither the excellent You-tube nor the Field Guide to Mammals with its photos and words. The otter lives outdoors, in nature, and the first gift she gives us, if we are inclined to be receptive, is a reminder that this is our world, too. We grew up here, in evolution, and are still most strongly adapted to a life in the wild. Don’t think so? Ask if the world which formed us is made of plastic and steel, credit and text-message. Ask if our evolution was shaped by rocks and rivers or by micro-chip and drone-warfare. We are babes in the technological age, up the cyber-creek without much paddle. When the going gets too weird for us, we do well to go home for the holidays, at least.

Home for humans is wilderness. We may not think so, as we recall the living rooms of our childhood, or our grade schools and early playgroups. If we could hark way back, though, we’d find ourselves outdoors with the rocks and trees, the hills and plains, the rivers and the otter. They are all still there, not just like they were in our evolutionary formative times perhaps, but there just the same if we can only remember.

The otter is a good guide back for us humans. She is social and a traveler, plays and works hard just like us. If we are lucky enough to get out in the winter we can read her blog along the brooks and remember ourselves as human animals.

Here she came snuffling along a partially open brook, leaving muddy footprints whenever she walked on the snow. Here she had crayfish for lunch and here a huge trout from a tame pond where the fish were fed all summer by a man who loved to see them churn the surface once a day. Here she traveled in a long-bodied lope, and here gave it all up for tobogganing. She does this all year ‘round, on leaves or grass or a clay brook bank. But in the snow it is easiest for us to read. Picture her taking a running start, then folding her front legs down by her sides, with hind legs and long tail trailing. She sails along the wind-packed snow on her thick belly fur and she can do it on the flat, down a slope, or even up-grade fairly steeply.

What inspires her to this sort of travel? Who knows and who cares. She just gets the wild urge, same as we do sometimes to skip a little or run instead of chugging along in our pedestrian way. We are not so different: love our babies, play with them; get with friends, chat and snuffle. Take off on our own sometimes for new territories and places to forage for what we like best. Loving the family, loving our independence, too.

Thoreau gives us intersection with or introduction to the otter:

“ (She) travels a more wooded path, by water-courses and hedgerows—I by the highway – but though (her) tracks are now crosswise to mine, our courses are not divergent, but we shall meet at last.”

Like to meet an otter? Look around a brook course for five toes in a muddy track larger than a house-cat’s. Look for joie de vivre!



Bonner J. McAllester

This essay originally appeared in the January 2010 issue of The Monterey News.