Chapter 11
Section 11 of Birds and All Nature, Volume 4, Number 5, November, 1898. Recorded for LibriVox.org by Geza Razdana. The Otter Nature, children, as you observe, gave my family a handsome coat. Now no bird can have fine feathers, nor beast of fine fur,
but men and women desire them for adornment, or possibly to keep themselves warm. So the hunters, finding it a paying business, shoot and trap us till places which once knew the otter know us no more. Such gentle animals as we are too. No little girl or boy would care to have more frolicsome playmate than a young cub otter. He will romp with you and play with dog or cat and sit up on his hindquarters and whistle and do even many quaint tricks to make you laugh.
To make him happy, you must have a little pond in the yard or a large tank, though he will run about the yard or house most of the time with the dog. Feed him at first on bread and milk, Then on fish, though you can train him to do without the ladder, and eat the leavings from the table. Such fun as we otters that live in the northern part of the United States and Canada do have in winter. No schoolboy enjoys coasting downhill more than we do.
Though we live in the water, you may say, and are known as the fastest swimming quadrupeds. Yet, in spite of our short legs, we can run over land tolerably well, too. So we trudge along till we come to a high hill, well covered with snow. Up we scramble to the top, lie down flat on our smooth jackets, bend our forefeet backward, and, giving ourselves a shove with our hind legs, down we slide head foremost.
Such fun as it is. Not till we get hungry or too tired to jog up the hill anymore do we give it up for that day. In summer we enjoy the same sport too. How? Oh, all we want is a clay bank with a good muddy surface,
and down we go to turn a somersault into the water of the creek below. Shooting the chutes, you little people would call it, I suppose. Though we call it our slide. Our homes are always on the banks of a stream. We begin to burrow three or four feet below the surface of the water,
forming a tunnel which leads to a chamber in the bank high and dry. That is called our den, and we line it with grass and live very comfortably. Being a hunted animal, our senses are very acute. When on land, we are always on the alert and, at the approach of danger, down we go into the water and hide in our dens.
After sunset, we go out to fish. We beat the surface of the water with our tails and frighten the scaly fellows, so that they seek refuge under stones or in holes in the bank. Then we catch our fish. For a change, we eat crabs, frogs, and sometimes small birds.
End of section 11. This recording is in the public domain.
