Island Life: Otterpocalypse II

Early morning, a week or so ago. I’d just come downstairs, in my yoga clothes, ready for my daily strenuous yet peaceful and contemplative Ashtanga practice. Before I rolled out my mat, I glanced out the front windows at the pond, as I always do. Ripples! Oh, what kind of lovely ducks are visiting today? I wondered. Or maybe it’s a Great Blue Heron?

And then I saw it.

I flung on some sandals and ran outside, shouting and clapping my hands. “No!” I yelled. “Get out of here!”

The five-foot-long river otter, who had just finished pulling a bright orange goldfish out of the water, stared back at me. Then it hissed, and growled.

I hissed and growled back.

Unimpressed, it then caught and ate another fish.

When my husband and I moved here four years ago, we were surprised and delighted to find a whole school of large, spectacular koi living in the front-yard pond.

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I ordered a great big container of koi food online. I went out every afternoon and tossed a few handfuls in, loving how the fish swam close and gulped the food down. How they knew me, knew to watch for me. In the evenings, I loved taking a glass of wine out and sitting in my Adirondack chair, watching the koi move lazily around, catching the sunlight.

They were so cool.

Then came the Otterpocalypse. Over the course of three nights, barely a month after we’d moved in, a river otter came through and killed the entire school. It left their severed heads on the lawn, just to make its point clear. We know it was an otter because we saw the awful thing on the final morning, galumphing across the lawn. Giving us its little otter finger.

Let me explain what I mean when I say “otter.” Perhaps you are thinking about adorable, fuzzy, cute, sweet, playful sea otters.

Yeah. Those are cute. Totally cute. Just adorable. So fuzz, many sweet.

RIVER otters, on the other hand: not so cute.

Sorry to resort to stock photos here…I was too busy hissing and growling at our beast–and despairing–to take pictures of it.

I did get a photo later…of what’s left of one of our fish.

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Otterpocalypse the First, four long years ago, was so distressing, I didn’t post about it, or even hardly tell anyone about it. I just…stopped mentioning the koi.

A whole lot of other hard things were going on at the time, as well. We had just finished up selling a house and buying a house and moving to an island, as I mentioned, after which it seemed every single appliance in this house broke (expensively); then before we’d even unpacked, we turned around and moved Mark’s mom across two states into a senior community nearby; oh yeah and I’d just seen my mom through a course of chemo. A course that was ultimately unsuccessful, alas; I lost her the following year.

So whining about a wild animal killing some fish we hadn’t even bought–that we hadn’t even known were here–seemed kind of minor, even while it also felt like just one more damn thing.

And of course, we got over it. The house and grounds and pond and island and everything were so peaceful and lovely, we appreciated what we had. Like frogs!

And then. And then! One bright sunny day, perhaps two years ago, we were in the front yard and I noticed movement in the water. I turned and stared as an entire school of small black fish swam toward me.

We were baffled. What in the world?? Where had they come from? What kind of fish were they? They kind of looked like…carp?

Black goldfish?

It was very mysterious. I mean, we were thrilled, but…we hadn’t put any fish in there. And our pond, though water seeps into it underground from a nearby chain of wetlands and other ponds, doesn’t have any inlet streams or anything.

The spooky black fish were hard to spot; we only saw them every now and then, when the light was just right and they were out and about. Months would go by when we wouldn’t see them at all. So it was some time before we noticed that not only were all the fish growing bigger, but one of the new fish was a little bit mottled. Like…maybe it had some orange on it?

And then another one showed orange, and then the first one got more orange, and so it went–

And that’s when we, at long last, realized that what we were almost certainly looking at was the Children of the Koi. The fry who had been too small to get hunted down in the Otterpocalypse.

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Glorious days! The school grew–both in number, and the fish themselves got larger. More of them got oranger and oranger. Eventually, one and then a few others turned entirely orange, while some remained all black, and a third group hovered somewhere in between. We loved our new fish!

I didn’t feed them. Though I still have a big (and no doubt stale) supply of koi food in the garage, we reasoned that if we did not teach these fish to come up to the bank and expect treats when someone approached the pond, they might be better equipped to escape being hunted. So they remained shy of us, except during “spring hijinks” time, when they wallowed about in the shallows, chasing each other around and ignoring onlookers while they engaged in, you know, wink wink nudge nudge.

And they obviously don’t need to be fed. Whatever else happens in that pond–even down to it freezing entirely over in the winter–there’s enough food to supply a healthy school of fish.

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We’re not naive. We always knew the otter might come back–even was likely to come back. We’re actually working on replacing our fences, in hopes that this will discourage such invasions; right now, the fence doesn’t even go around the back side of the pond (which is how the deer can walk across it when it freezes over).

But it’s one thing to know that something may happen, and another to confront its hissing, growling, fish-chomping reality.

It’s at this part of our us-versus-nature adventures that we always start talking about guns. When we were being bedeviled by the raccoon (and its mother) a while back, my husband said, If only… He said the same thing this time, and I confess I was thinking about it too.

But we’ve never owned guns, we’re totally not gun people; I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to shoot one; and what would we do with a five-foot-long dead otter anyway? Assuming we even managed to hit what we were aiming at. What we really need to do is move forward with that greatly improved fence.

And hope that the Children of the Koi had enough time on this side of the veil to spawn some Children of the Children of the Koi.

There is a lesson here, obviously. About nature and wildness and trying to hold onto an agenda in the face of the greater world’s much larger, much more impersonal agenda. About letting go, appreciating what exists when it exists. About the cycle of life, and the fact that death is a thing, and that it happens to everyone, and we mostly don’t know when, or under what circumstances.

And even about the fact that otters need to eat too, and that they were here before my husband and I and our surprise koi ever were.

Yet I still mourn the loss. I don’t know if this otter got all the fish; it’s the time of year when they’re pretty scarce, moving slowly and hanging deep under the surface, preparing to hunker down entirely for winter. (The frogs are mostly gone now too, though I still hear an occasional ribbit out there.) Maybe a fish or two escaped those sharp and terrible teeth.

And if they didn’t…well, the pond still explodes with dragonflies and damselflies come springtime, and the frogs will be back, and bats flitter about, and our yard will once again bloom with butterflies and hummingbirds and flowers both wild and planted, and island life is still very good.