124 SECRETS OF ANIMAL LIFE 
inadequately appreciated by those who hold to a 
conception of the struggle for existence which is too 
literal and wooden to be accurate. 
Another attractive feature about the otter is its 
nomadism; it has the roving spirit. ‘“ The home- 
less hunter,’ Mr. Tregarthen calls it, “‘ the Bedouin 
of the wild.” “It has been known to travel fifteen 
miles in a night, and not infrequently the holts where 
it lies up during the day are ten or twelve miles 
apart.” It passes from tarn to stream, from river 
to shore; it swims far out to sea and reaches isolated 
rocks; it wanders along the cliffs and explores the 
caves; it crosses the heather-covered hills, and even 
the mountain passes, sheltering among the bracken 
or in the heart of a cairn; it neither stores nor 
hibernates, but is always on the move—a gipsy 
among carnivores. 
Resourceful is the appropriate word for an otter. 
For it is equally at home on land and in water, by 
night and by day, inadry burrow or on a shelf under 
a waterfall; it can enter the water without a splash, 
swim near the surface with scarce a ripple; it can 
dive in a spiral full fathoms five, and lie under the 
bank ona stream for hours with its nostril in a space 
between water and earth. It knows its own foot- 
steps in the thicket and will not retrace them; it 
never goes back to a kill, for that way danger lies; 
it will carry a water-trap on its shoulders and 
wrench it off on the alder-roots; it will dive at 
the flash of the gun and elude the bullet; it is 
an outlaw of unsurpassed alertness and resource. 
