Last weekend of last deer season — a not-so-good deer season, for me. We’d had ‘way too much rain early in the year, which flooded the swamp we generally hunt in, and kept it flooded for over two months. That’s not a condition we’d usually complain about, but this year, instead of knee-deep water, it was 20 feet deep! That might still have been okay, but we never got ducks: too warm, in spite of having plenty of water early for a potentially great duck season.
In the Good Old Days, we’d have turned to the ditchbanks and loaded up on rabbits and quail, which had been moved out of their regular habitat by all the water. Now there are so many coyotes, that the rabbits, once hemmed up on the ditchbanks, were scarffed up by the wild canines within a couple of weeks, and the fire ants have decimated the quail population.
So, the last weekend of the season, we hied ourselves out to Cousin Jack’s place, close to the Big Hongry Territory. Early that Saturday morning I slipped across the heavily-frosted pasture toward a favorite clearing just across a little branch.
Well, “little branch” may not be a correct description. Though the water trickling down the stream was clear and less than two feet deep in most places, with plenty of sandbars to step across on without getting your feet wet, the almost-sheer banks were about 15 feet deep. I paused at the top of the bank to check out the easiest place to cross. Yet before I could move, a movement around a bend caught my eye. It looked like a bow wave of a ship, and I eased my gun up, thinking I could be back at the cabin for breakfast, if a buck just hove into view 30 yards away between those steep banks. Sure enough, brown fur was visible at the water’s edge!
Swimming brown fur. It was an otter!
We’ve always had otters in the Mammy Grudge at Brownspur, and I’ve spent many an hour watching them play. Most wild animals have a well-developed play instinct, but God gave otters an extra dose. Several times I’ve seen otter families spend hours on a mud-bank water slide, the adults obviously wetting themselves down and slicking up the banks before calling their pups to join the frolic. I once watched an otter couple make love with such abandon that if I had had a video camera, it might have been a pornographic film. Yet I had never watched one catching fish before, except for one time seeing an otter swimming away from a beaver dam with a probably four-pound bass in its jaws. I couldn’t paddle fast enough to catch it, either!
This hill otter was swimming along either side of the deeper pools, poking his (yes, it got that close!) nose into underwater pockets and beneath drift piles and around stumps, moving swiftly enough in a couple of circuits of each pool to drive the resident panicked perches into the middle. Then he’d dive into the school of fish, which would literally explode into the air, the fish desperate to escape. But the otter was too quick; he’d always come up with a perch, then swim over to a sandbar to eat it. He’d hold the head between his paws and start eating at the tail, shearing off bites and chewing them well before swallowing. When only the head was left, he’d shove it into his mouth, chew briefly, then gulp it down with his head nodding up and down, whiskers clearly visible. He caught and ate one larger bream straight down the bank from where I watched, motionless and fascinated. He never saw me.
I never got to my stand until almost ten o’clock. I watched that otter work that little branch for his breakfast for most of the morning, then when he went out of sight back upstream, I finally crossed the branch, but sat on a log close enough to see the otter if he came back.
I have often maintained that, for most hunters, the gun in hand is merely an excuse for being in the woods, observing God’s Great Outdoors close at hand. No, I didn’t get a deer. So?
