Tarka the Otter/Introduction
Introduction
Men speak to each other of what they have heard, seen, touched, smelled, tasted. They agree that thunder is terrifying, that the sky is blue, that gorse is prickly, that sulphuretted hydrogen is foul, that sloes are acrid. But whether our five senses convey to any two of us exactly the same impression, we know not nor ever shall know. When we travel beyond sensation or perception to the working of the intelligence we know far more of each other. Yet a man’s mind is a mystery to his own brother, and a woman’s to her own sister; and between man and woman, in the matter of identity of understanding, there is a fixed and impassable gulf. In fact, we know nothing about our fellow men and women; and yet for centuries men have written, and still find courage to write, what is called history—the story, that is to say, of the relations of individuals and of groups of men with each other. Moreover these histories, unless shown to be false, tend to be accepted as true; though he would be a bold historian indeed who would claim to have penetrated to the inner truth of any historical transaction. For always there remains the insurmountable fact that we are and must continue profoundly ignorant concerning even those who are nearest to us.
But if the historian of men’s lives be audacious, much more so is he who would write of the lives of other animals. In some cases we may be fairly certain that those animals possess the same five senses as ourselves; but some may possess more, and some fewer; and in any case we cannot be sure that the quality of the sense is at all the same. The mystery of their daily lives is more impenetrable even than that of our own; and yet we can only employ the same means to pierce into it that we can employ with each other—observation and imagination. Moreover, our powers of observation are necessarily limited, because we cannot (except with the help of cumbrous appliances, and then not for long) live up in the air or under water; while our powers of imagination, being confined within the bounds of our human experience, may easily lead us hopelessly astray. The biographers of animals, in fact, are apt to endow their heroes and heroines with human attributes, and to make them think as human beings. I am myself a sinner in this respect, and it is in consequence of this sin that I am asked to introduce to the public Mr. Williamson’s far sounder and deeper biography of Tarka, the Otter. If I have any claim to take by the hand one whose excellent work enables him very well to walk by himself, it is rather because I am an historian of one phase of human nature and in that capacity have been driven to exercise observation and imagination.
But, it may be objected, an historian’s business lies with musty papers and printed books. In a great measure, to his misfortune, it does; but these are not his only documents. Old buildings, old roads, and old tracks are a few among many others; and these the biographer of the wild animal shares with him; for the otter, as Mr. Williamson shows, has his world-old haunts and tracks, and not the otter only. Who, for instance. would assign any age to a badger-earth or to a peregrine falcon’s eyrie unless he knew it to be recent? And, to descend to more precise matters, a stag’s shed horns of last year are a document, if not human, at any rate cervine, from which he who runs may sometimes read much. Mr. Williamson is always on the watch for such documents as these, and he knows how to interpret them.
But it is not he who runs but rather he who remains still that is the best observer of wild creatures; and it is easy to see that Mr. Williamson has waited immovable through long hours of darkness and of daylight, of fair weather and foul, with eyes, weary it may be, but always alert and vigilant. And he has studied the ways not of one wild creature but of many, and thus has been able to understand, in some measure, the relations of the different creatures to each other. Nor is he less attentive to their environment, for he is familiar with wild plants and wild flowers as with wild animals; and I will venture to guess that nothing that passes within range of his vision remains unnoticed. He may be watching two otters at play, but, if there be a grass-snake on the opposite bank, a patch of butterfly orchis peeping through a gap in the fence, and two carrion-crows mobbing a buzzard overhead, he will surely mark one and all of them.
Of knowledge and observation, then, he has a rich treasure to pour down before us, and he has, moreover, the imagination that not only further enriches but also beautifies it. Finally he has the literary skill to present to us his wares in a most attractive form. If anything, his artistic conscience is rather too sensitive, and at times possibly he carries the work of finishing and polishing to excess; but before we can find fault he wins us back by such a touch as this: “He (the otter) rolled, shook himself, and set off again, roaming round the fen until he heard again the cry of running water. The cry came out of a hollow whose sides were scarred by the sliding of broken hummocks, the faint cry of a river new born.”
The spirit of Dartmoor and of Exmoor is, above all, the spirit of the waters, and to Mr. Williamson it is a spirit so familiar as to have become a part of himself. He loves the air, as witness his pictures of raven and peregrine and other birds. He loves the earth, as testify his studies of fitch and fox and badger. But above all he loves the water—afresh, brackish, salt; mist, rain, snow, ice—he follows it lovingly in all its forms. For him, I think, as for some others of us the Spirit of God still moves, as before the creation, upon the face of the waters.
And now it is time for me to drop Mr. Williamson’s hand as a leader, and leave him to guide his readers over moor and fen and meadow, over land and stream and sea, in the track of Tarka the Otter. I have been privileged to follow him earlier than other men; and if all shall find the journey as full of interest and joy as myself, then our author will have made for us a happier and more beautiful world, a world in which we can seek refuge among the toils and the worries of life, and be thankful.
J. W. FORTESCUE.