CHAP, xn.] HABITS OF THE OTTER. 99 



broken his leg, so severe was the bite : even when I came up, 

 i IK- otter seemed very little inclined to let go ; but at last did 

 so, and I sliot him as he splashed away. 



When one of these animals is surprised in an open place, he 

 will for some time trust to being concealed, remaining flat on 

 the ground, with his sharp little eyes, which are placed very 

 high on the head, intently fixed on you. Like all other wild 

 animals, he has an instinctive knowledge of how long he is un- 

 perceived, for the moment he sees that your eye is on him, he 

 darts off, but not till then. During the winter many of the 

 river and lake otters take to the coast, travelling a long way for 

 this purpose, sometimes keeping the course of the streams, but 

 occasionally going across the country. I have seen their tracks 

 in places at a very great distance from water, where they evi- 

 dently had been merely passing down to the sea. 



When on the coast, they frequent the caves and broken masses 

 of rock. The otters that live wholly on the coast grow very 

 large. It is easy to turn them out of their holes with terriers, 

 as long as you remain quiet and unobserved by the otter your- 

 self. If he once has found out that you are waiting to receive 

 him at the mouth of his hole, he will fight to the last rather than 

 leave it. I have been told that they bolt more readily to a white 

 coloured dog than to any other. All courageous dogs who 

 have been once entered at otters, hunt them with more eager- 

 ness and animosity than they do any other kind of vermin. 



The otters here are very fond of searching the shallow pools 

 of the sea at the mouth of the river for flounders, and I often 

 find their tracks, where they have evidently been so employed. 

 If surprised by the daylight appearing too soon to admit of 

 their returning to their usual haunts, they will lie up in any 

 broken bank, furze bush, or other place of concealment. 



At some of the falls of the Findhorn, where the river runs so 

 rapidly that they cannot stem it, they have to leave the water to 

 go across the ground ; and in these places they have regularly 

 beaten tracks. I was rather amused at an old woman living at 

 Sluie, on the Findhorn, who, complaining of the hardness of the 

 present times, when " a puir body could n'a get a drop smuggled 

 whisky, or shot a rae without his lordship's sportsman finding it 

 tut," added to her list of grievances that even the otters were 



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