Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [86]
She was playing with me.
Every time I started toward her, she would dive down and reappear behind me. It reached the point where I did not even have to start swimming. As soon as we made eye contact, she dove. Was she swimming around me, or under me? I found out moments later when, treading water forcefully, I kicked something with my right foot, hard. There was no mistaking what it was.
I immediately tensed. Had I hurt her? Would she vanish now—or interpret the kick as an attack and react offensively?
Seconds later, she popped up, staring at me. Clearly, I had not hurt her. I surmised that from an otter’s standpoint my accidental kick was all part of the game.
This continued for nearly half an hour: me spinning in the dark water, her diving back and forth beneath me, until she finally grew tired of the diversion and swam off. I watched her depart, having burned every bit of adrenaline my body was capable of producing. We had interacted in her habitat for some thirty minutes without a hint of a hostile gesture on her part. She had bumped me several times; I had kicked her unintentionally and ungently. Why had she remained behind to play when the rest of her family had hastily departed as soon as I had entered the water? I thought I knew the answer.
She must be a teenager.
Surely, that was it. A wary cub would immediately have sought protection from the adults in the group. An adult would have departed in a more leisurely fashion or might possibly have reacted aggressively. But a young adult—teenagers are the same everywhere, with an innate curiosity and a zest for entertainment that transcends species. I have observed this trait in gorillas and elephants, in dolphins and sharks. I don’t know for a fact that my playful friend was a juvenile, but she was certainly not full-grown. Any natural aggressiveness she might have possessed had been canceled out by a desire to amuse herself at the expense of the strange visitor to her watery world.
Sometimes in life we get lucky.
When told this story, those knowledgeable about the behavior of giant otters in the wild are united in their opinion that by entering their domain, I had taken a real chance. But if you want to experience that which is out of the ordinary, you have to take chances. Whether the object of your interest be giant otters, or big cats, or big fish, or big bugs, or tiny ants, if you want to understand them or get to know them more than just a little, you have to enter their realm. You cannot get this from television, or from movies, or even from reading.
Go. See. Touch. Listen, smell, and try to understand. And while you’re learning, you are free to marvel at some of Nature’s most exquisitely designed creatures. They may bite, they may sting, but you risk your life every time you cross the street or stand in a wet shower or bathtub. The rewards to be had from such potentially lethal everyday endeavors are miniscule compared to those to be gained from watching a leopard hunt or making eye contact with a shark, or from espying the ripple of color that is a snake retreating in haste into the depths of the rain forest.
Hearing or reading these stories, people sometimes ask me, “How can you do these things?”
To which my answer and explanation is and always will be:
“How can you not?”
CONCLUSION
BUT WHAT GOOD IS IT?
It’s a question I’m often asked. What’s the point of such encounters? Nearly being eaten, or stung, or bitten, or poisoned, being parasitized, risking not always replaceable parts of your body, and for what? What’s the point? Why choose to voluntarily invite such experiences when one could be lounging on a beach in the Tuamotus, or strolling through the Prado, or ordering schlag with your coffee at an outside table at Demel?
The answer is that I’ve done those things, too: There’s just not very much drama in them (well, maybe the bill at Demel). It’s all grist for the writer’s mill. The more so if you write fantasy or science fiction. I’m a firm believer that to create otherworldly settings you have to