A Reed Shaken by the Wind (23 page)

I learned the story by degrees; he was still much too angry to want to talk unless to an enemy. During the night our bamboo canoe-poles had been taken, and worthless poles of
mirrdi,
the big reed, substituted for them. (The two are barely distinguishable, but the bamboo poles, which are imported, are tough and valuable, while those made from the local reed are worthless and weak.) It had been some phase of this substitution that I had seen when I had woken in the night to see the youth standing naked on the platform, and his nudity had no doubt been designed to suggest that he had but that instant woken from sleep, aroused by the poles slipping down on to him from where they were propped. When the substitution was discovered Thesiger had taxed him with it and received an insolent reply that those battered and crooked reeds were the poles with which he had been entrusted the evening before. Thesiger then boxed his ears, but he kept on protesting his innocence.

Those are the kind of circumstances in which I am perpetually amazed and abashed by other people’s unfaltering conviction that they are acting rightly. Had I been Thesiger I should by then have been convinced that I had made a mistake and was beating up the wrong man; the situation, too, would not have been easy to redeem. Thesiger, however, was tormented by no such doubts, and at length the boy had offered to restore the poles.

It took him some time, for he had distributed them among all the neighbouring houses. Each time he returned with one he said that it was the last of which he knew anything, but each time threats had driven him out again until at last the collection was complete. Thesiger had left the house then, and had become immediately engulfed in the hostile crowd where I had glimpsed him.

“We were running quite a big risk, really,” he said; “they might easily have turned savage and got out their rifles—and all the time you were wandering about the village taking photographs as if you were a tourist in the Vatican City!”

When all the canoe-poles had finally been collected a passenger whom we had carried with us for the past twenty-four hours had reported that his club had been stolen during the night. Thesiger sent Hassan back to tell the tearful youth that unless it were given up at once the Englishman would come back. Without word or demur the boy produced the club from beneath the reed matting on the floor.

“That,” said Thesiger, “is what happens when you take their sheikhs away. No village with a sheikh would have dared to try that on. I told you they’d want watching.”

We made an hour’s journey through flower-choked waterways in low green marsh, and stopped at another big island village. It was plain to me when we landed that Chahala was dying. She was weak but restless, and inside the house she sought the dark corners between the reed columns and the matting walls. She lay belly downward, breathing fast and in obvious distress. Perhaps something in our huge medicine chest could have saved her, but we thought only of castor oil, for everything she had eaten the night before was still inside her. The oil had little effect, and though she sucked almost automatically from her bottle there was little life in her. I had sat hopelessly beside her for a couple of hours when Thesiger came in from doctoring. “Better get out for a bit,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on her. It’s hell for you sitting in here all the time, and you can’t do her any good. This is your last marsh village, and you may never see another.”

I went out, and remembered things that I had wanted to photograph and always postponed. Then I found that the
shutter of my camera was broken, and I went back into the house.

We left an hour later. When I felt the warmth of Chahala next to my shirt again I felt a moment’s spurious comfort that she would live; but she would not stay there. She climbed out with a strength that surprised me, and stretched herself restlessly on the floor of the canoe, and I spread a handkerchief over my knees to make an awning of shade for her small fevered body. Once she called faintly, the little wild lonely cry that would come from her as she slept, and a few seconds after that I saw a shiver run through her body. I put my hand on her and felt the strange rigidity that comes in the instant following death; then she became limp under my touch.

“She’s dead,” I said. I said it in Arabic, so that the boys would stop paddling.

Thesiger said “Are you sure?” and the boys stared unbelievingly. “Quite dead?” they asked it again and again. I handed her to Thesiger, the body drooped from his hands like a miniature fur stole. “Yes,” he said, “she’s dead.” He threw the body into the water, and it landed in the brilliant carpet of white and golden flowers and floated on its back with the webbed paws at its sides, as she had been used to sleep when she was alive.

“Come on,” said Thesiger, “Ru-hu-Ru-hu!” but the boys sat motionless, staring at the small corpse and at me, and Thesiger grew angry with them before they would move. Amara kept on looking back from the bows until at last we rounded the corner of a green reed-bed and she was out of sight.

The sun shone on the white flowers, the blue kingfishers glinted low over them and the eagles wheeled overhead on the blue sky, but all of these seemed less living for me than Chahala was dead. I told myself that she was only one of thousands like her in these marshes, that are speared with the five-pointed trident, or shot, or taken as cubs to die
slowly in more callous captivity, but she was dead and I was desolate. The fault lay with whoever, perhaps more than a million years ago, had first taken up the wild dog cub that clung to the body of its dead dam, and I wondered whether he too had in that half-animal brain been driven by the motives that in me were conscious.

T
HE
journey was over; on the evening of the day that Chahala had died we reached the Tigris at Ezra’s Tomb. The sheikh in whose house we stayed was away in Baghdad, and the building was shuttered and deserted but for one old negro retainer. Thesiger, however unsentimental about animals his own outlook, was deeply sympathetic to my abject dejection at the death of Chahala, and I felt it strange that I could have travelled so far alone with one Englishman and known so little of him.

He was returning to Basra only to collect his letters, before leaving to spend the early part of the summer among the pastoral tribes; now he suggested that instead of going back to England I should stay with him. “You’ll be able to see another way of life; and,” he added, “you can get another otter.” I did not need the extra bait; I realised now that I had dreaded returning home, and to remain in Iraq seemed reprieve.

And so it was arranged that we should stay in Basra only long enough to collect and send letters, and leave together after two or three days. But the plan proved as insecure as had earlier projects for travel in Iraq.

From Ezra’s Tomb we drove some sixty miles to Basra, and when we reached the Consulate-General we found that Thesiger’s letters had arrived but mine had not. I cabled to England, and when, three days later, nothing had happened, I tried to telephone. The call had to be booked twenty-four hours in advance, and could only be arranged for a single hour of the day, an hour during which, owing to the difference in time, no one in London was likely to be available. On the first day the line was out of order; on the second the exchange was closed for a religious holiday. On the third day there
was another breakdown. I arranged to join Thesiger at Adb el Nebi’s
mudhif
in a week’s time, and he left.

Two days before the date of our rendezvous I returned to the Consulate-General late in the afternoon, after several hours’ absence, to find that my mail had arrived. I carried it to my bedroom to read, and there squatting on the floor were two marsh Arabs; beside them lay a sack that squirmed from time to time.

They handed me a note from Thesiger. “Here is your otter, a male and weaned. I feel you may want to take it to London—it would be a handful in the
tarada.
It is the one I originally heard of, but the sheikhs were after it, so they said it was dead. Give Ajram a letter to me saying it has arrived safely—he has taken Kathia’s place. …”

I untied the sack and out of it stepped a small creature quite unlike any otter I had ever seen. He raised to me a blunt face with a black-button nose like a koala bear; then he looked round him and shook his short mole-like fur.

But Mijbil, an otter of a race quite unknown to science, deserves a book to himself; a book that I shall write when my memories of his year with me are less troubled.

Gavin Maxwell was, in the words of
The Times,
‘a man of action who writes like a poet’. More than that, he was also a conservationist, an explorer, a secret agent, a racing driver, a naturalist and an historian. As his biographer, Douglas Botting, summed up: ‘never had the simple life been pursued by so complicated a character’. Some of these complications were inherent in a child born the same year as his father died, in 1914, and brought up in splendid care-free isolation on the Wigtownshire coast of Scotland by an eccentric widowed mother. His memoir of childhood,
The House of Elrig
(1965), describes an idyllic absorption in natural history and zoology. His paternal grandfather was the prolific writer, Sir Herbert Maxwell, his maternal grandfather the uncrowned prince of the English Borders, Alan Percy, 8th Duke of Northumberland. Gavin was always keenly aware of his aristocratic heritage, with its attendant clannishness, and of the fact that both the Maxwells and the Percys were members of a religious cult: the Irvingite or Catholic Apostolic Church which believed in the reincarnation of the twelve apostles and an imminent second coming. He was well prepared to accept the peculiarities of any indigenous culture on its own merits.

His schooling, a succession of disasters all the way up to his time at Oxford, gave him a lifelong sympathy for the despised and oppressed. Having already proved himself a loner and a hardy traveller in the Arctic with Peter Scott, he was ideal material for covert operations in the Second World War. He served in the Special Operations Executive, charged with training operatives who would be sent behind enemy lines on missions of sabotage. It was in this capacity that he spent some time on the west coast of Scotland, where he returned after the war to buy Soay, a small island off Skye and the setting for his first business, a shark fishery, which in turn formed the basis for his first book
Harpoon at a Venture
(1952). He tried his hand at freelance journalism and painting, and wrote two books about Sicily,
God Protect Me from My Friends
(1956) and
The
Ten Pains of Death
(1959). In between these projects he took the journey to the Middle East with his friend, the veteran traveller Wilfred Thesiger, which would result in
A Reed Shaken by the Wind
(1957). Here his exceptional talent was revealed for the first time.

On his return from Iraq he moved into his new Scottish home at Camusfearna, and began to study the otters he had acquired on his journey through the marshes, which culminated in the publication of
Ring of Bright Water
(1960). With the worldwide success of this tale, and the subsequent film, Camusfearna became a wildlife preserve with a collection of otters at its heart.
The Otters
’
Tale
(1962), and
The Rocks Remain
(1963) continue the narrative of a passionate but accident-prone naturalist on the west coast of Scotland. Maxwell travelled to Morocco several times over the course of the 1960s, researching his history,
Lords of the Atlas,
which appeared in 1966. This travel book – part history, part investigative journalism, part romance – studied the Berber dynasty, the Glaoui, that acted as regents of southern Morocco for the French colonial power. It became one of the bibles of British Orientalism in the late twentieth century and a fitting swan-song to Maxwell’s oeuvre. Douglas Botting’s definitive 1993 biography,
Gavin Maxwell, A Life
tells of the ups and downs of Maxwell’s emotional life – possibly affected by an inherited form of manic-depression. While Gavin loved and even married women (the poet Kathleen Raine and Lavinia Renton) he was primarily homosexual.