The same
day that the river otter researchers were due to come to the Iceberg lodge to give a
presentation on their research, we found a dead river otter floating in the
lagoon. It was floating intestines up; we went over to it because at first I thought we were looking at the back
of a seal’s head. Turns out, not so
much. River otters are a little like
big, streamlined brown ferrets; they are so adorable that they even look moderately cute when
floating head-down in salt water. My clients in the canoe were clucking and making how sad
noises. So, we looked at the dead
otter, and I made the mistake of telling my clients that this was
the third dead otter we’d found in the lagoon in a month, and that,
coincidentally, a team of river otter researchers from the University of
Wisconsin would be coming over to give a presentation on their research in just
a few hours. Immediately, a few people
in the boat asked if we ought to bring the dead otter back to the lodge, so
that the researchers could do an otter autopsy and try to find out why the
otter had died. I wasn’t totally sure
if the otter team’s research goals included playing CSI: Aialik Bay – as my
clients very obviously wanted to do - but I figured they would probably be
interested in the otter. I asked if
everyone was OK with having a dead otter sitting in the back of the canoe for
the rest of the tour. Surprisingly,
everyone was.
So we
turned the canoe around, and after a few minutes of searching, resighted the
otter. Now that I knew that I had to
pick the thing out of the water, it suddenly looked a lot less cute and
pathetic, and a lot more dead. But the
coat seemed to be in good shape, and it seemed to be pretty much intact and
un-decayed. At least, as undecayed as a
zombie floating dead river otter can look.
I maneuvered us as close to the otter as I could, which was complicated
by the fact that all of the clients on the boat were looking over their
shoulders to try and watch their guide do something gross in the name of
science. I reached into the water,
trying not to picture what would happen if the otter suddenly woke up and sank
its zombie teeth into my hand.
I grabbed
the zombie otter by the tail and pulled.
The first thing I noticed was that a waterlogged river otter is actually
quite heavy. The second thing I noticed
was the vibration as the tail vertebrae dislocated from the spine. The third thing I noticed was that this
otter was definitely a male. I pulled,
and the otter slid up the side of the canoe, its big rat-like feet dangling
over the gunnel. The otter felt even
heavier. Then the otter’s pelt started
to split open along the back like someone undoing a zipper. The smell hit us like the world’s worst
port-a-pottie, and I immediately dropped the otter back into the lagoon. The smell, unfortunately, stayed around
(albeit in a much diluted form) for the rest of the canoe tour, probably
because I had managed to liberally spritz my clothing with otter juice in the
process of hauling him into my canoe. I
used the boat pump (normally used to pump rain water out of the canoes) to pump
a few quarts of lagoon water into the boat to try and dilute the smell, which
sort of worked. The clients coped
admirably – fishing him out was their
idea, after all – and we finished the rest of the tour without incident. I left one of the other guides to put my
boat away, and immediately went to shower and wash my clothes.
The
researchers were, indeed, interested that we’d found so many dead otters in
such a short span of time, although they said that from what they’d seen of the
otters, they all seemed to be pretty healthy.
They did not, however, seem terribly interested in haring off into the
lagoon to relocate the dead otter after hearing my clients’ description of its
condition.
One of the
maintenance men, however, did go haring off into the lagoon after the otter,
and returned with it floating in a five-gallon bucket. (The trick to keeping the smell at bay is to
keep them submerged at all times. Going
forward, if any guests want to bring back dead animals they find in the lagoon,
I will lasso them with the canoe’s bowline and drag them behind the boat like a
sea anchor.) He plans to drop the otter
into a crab pot for a few weeks, to let the crabs (and any other sea creatures
with indiscriminate gustatory habits) strip the meat away from the
carcass. We’d be left with a jumble of
bones which he could theoretically glue and wire back into shape, sort of like
a very complicated tinkertoy project. I
would like the skull for the interpretive corner at the guide desk, which is
already liberally covered with various parts and pieces of dead animals (seal
and otter pelts, snail shells, urchin tests, bird feathers, and a bear
skull). Ultimately, the zombie otter
stayed in the bucket for over two weeks, and every day it looked a little more
like a giant floating mass of hair that someone had pulled out of a shower
drain. It disappeared from the bucket
shortly before the maintenance man left to visit his wife. I am hoping that M did not show up at home
after being gone for two weeks with a decayed otter in tow…
A few days
later, I got the fright of my life when the canoe’s drain plug got knocked
loose during a tour, instantly unleashing a torrent of salt water flooding into
our boat. Fortunately, we were in the
mouth of Addison creek, which is a great place to have a canoe emergency
because the water is only four feet deep.
Even though hearing the water rushing into the canoe was quite alarming,
I also realized right off the bat that this was a situation everyone would be
walking away from – since if the canoe sank out from under us, this is pretty
much what we would do. I shouted at my
clients to paddle, got the boat to shore, hopped out in knee deep water and
spent a few minutes wresting the drain plug back into place. (When used correctly, the drain plugs have a
lever that allows them to expand once they’ve been inserted into the draining
hole. In this case, someone had expanded
the drain plug before inserting it, so the plug didn’t fit securely in the
drain, and got jostled out.) Once the
flooding stopped, I unloaded everyone on the creek bank, and pumped the water
out of the canoe. We paddled back to
the lodge, while I tried to pretend that I hadn’t just had the fright of my
life.
