Writing about Otters

See the little sled marks, heading straight into open water at the base of the tree? I'm fairly sure they are signs of an otter slide. Do you know what this means? It means that otters are gamboling within shouting distance of my house.

According to Dorothy and Nils Hogner, in their 1942 The Animal Book,

groups of Otter[s] go tobogganing together. . . . In winter they choose a snow bank with an icy pool of water at the bottom. With their short legs turned backwards they slide down these slippery places. They toboggan for the joy it gives them to whizz downhill as children enjoy coasting. The several Otters which use one slide seem to enter into friendly rivalry in their play which has no connection with the rough play of mammals in the breeding season.

While the Hogners shamelessly humanize every mammal they discuss in this book, their prose also displays a midcentury charm--a comfortable storytelling urge that I've noted in many other works of nonfiction published during this era. The descriptions in Olaus J. Murie's 1954 Animal Tracks (later reprinted as a Peterson Field Guide), though more exact, are almost as cozy as the Hogners':

One wintry day in southern Hudson Bay territory I was snowshoeing up a small stream when I spied a movement on the snowy streambank ahead. I realized that it was an otter, and the next moment it slid down the bank. Another one appeared, clambered up the bank, and slid down. A third appeared from a hole in the ice, and for several minutes I watched these frolicsome animals, climbing, sliding, climbing, sliding, over and over again--until they all disappeared under the ice. Their playtime was over, and they went on their way beneath the ice, as they so often do.

Compare those styles with the precision of Thoreau's December 6, 1856, journal entry:

Just this side of Bittern Cliff, I see a very remarkable track of an otter, made undoubtedly December 3d, when this snow ice was mere slosh. It had come up through a hole (now black ice) by the stem of a button-bush, and, apparently, pushed its way through the slosh, as through snow on land, leaving a track of eight inches wide, more or less, with the now frozen snow shoved up two inches high on each side, i.e., two inches above the general level. Where the ice was firmer are seen only the tracks of its feet. It had crossed the open middle (now thin black ice) and continued its singular trail to the opposite shore, as if a narrow sled had been drawn bottom upwards.

Thoreau goes on to describe the consistency of otter scat ("a mass of fishes' scales and bones") as well as variations in the animals' movements: "Sometimes one had trailed his tail, apparently edge-wise, a mark like the tail of a deer mouse."

To my surprise, my edition of James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1922) has nothing to say about the otter as a mythological force. All that human-like play should be ripe fodder for magical significance. But my abridged version of the journals of Lewis and Clark does contain a single reference to the animal, in Lewis's August 20, 1805, entry:

The tippet of the Snake Indians is the most eligant peice of Indian dress I ever saw, the neck or collar of this is formed with a strip of dressed Otter skin with the fur, it is about four or five inches wide and cut out of the back of the skin the nose and eyes forming one extremity and the tail the other. begining a little behind the ear of the animal at one edge of this collar and proceeding towards the tail, they attach from one to two hundred and fifty little roles of Ermin skin . . . covers the solders and body nearly to the waist and has the appearance of a short cloak and is really handsome. these they esteem very highly, and give or dispose of only on important occasions.

In his own journal entry, written fifty years after Lewis's, Thoreau notes the long history of otter hunting in North America ("the Pilgrims sent home many otter skins in the first vessels that returned [to England]") yet also remarks that "it is surprising that our hunters know no more about them." It seems that only Thoreau and his companions were hunting the otters of Concord, Massachusetts. "Our eyes go searching along the stems for what is most vivacious and characteristic, the concentrated summer gone into winter quarters. For we are hunters pursuing the summer on snow-shoes and skates, all winter long. There is really but one season in our hearts."