An Otter Called Pebble Read online

  Just then, she saw something else on the bank below the logs.

  “Look!” she said. “A mud slide!”

  Tom’s eyes grew very wide. Then he started to run. Jasmine grabbed his arm.

  “We need to be quiet,” she whispered.

  They tiptoed across the bridge and over to the patch of bare mud leading down to the water. They crouched beside it.

  Jasmine sighed. “No footprints. Completely bare.”

  “That doesn’t mean there haven’t been otters here, though,” said Tom. “If they were here before all that rain, their footprints will have been washed away.”

  “Let’s look for other signs,” said Jasmine.

  They worked in silence for several minutes. Then Jasmine let out a cry of excitement. She clamped her hand over her mouth, horrified at the noise she’d made.

  “Tom!” she whispered, but there was no need. He was already beside her.

  “Wow,” he said. “That’s amazing.”

  They stared in delight at the top of a wet log covered in lichen. Scattered over the log were the little white bones of what had almost definitely once been a fish.

  They grinned at each other. A real sign at last!

  Tom took photos of the bones while Jasmine hunted for more evidence, her heart beating fast.

  “These bones look quite old, don’t you think?” said Tom. “If they’re two weeks’ old, the otters might be due to come back here.”

  He put his camera away and started scrutinising the roots around the tree stump. After a few minutes, he whispered, “Jasmine, look at this.”

  Jasmine looked. Tom was staring at a little pile of crumbly, greenish-white remains.

  “Do you think that might be spraint?” he asked.

  “We need to inspect it,” said Jasmine. “Where’s the silver foil?”

  Tom found the foil and smoothed it out on the ground. Using two small twigs, Jasmine picked up a piece of the crumbly stuff and dropped it on the foil. Then she bent down and sniffed.

  “Ugh,” she said, straightening up again. “That definitely smells fishy.”

  “Pleasantly fishy, with a hint of jasmine tea?” asked Tom.

  “Well, we’ll never know about the jasmine tea,” said Jasmine, “since my mum was so mean about buying it.”

  She poked it. “These could definitely be fish bones and scales. We might have actually found a holt!”

  “And all these things have been here for a while,” said Tom. “Which means the otters might come back tonight.”

  “Imagine if we see Pebble’s family swimming down the river!” said Jasmine.

  “Let’s watch from the bridge,” said Tom. “Then we’ll have a good view in both directions.”

  They leaned on the railings of the bridge, looking hopefully at the river, until the sun began to sink over the hills.

  “We should phone your mum,” said Tom. “We promised we’d be home before dark, and she’s going to walk Sky to the main road to meet us, isn’t she?”

  Jasmine sighed. “I guess so. We’ll just have to come back really early tomorrow.”

  Tom looked worried. “But he said we could only come just this once.”

  “It is just this once. It’s all part of the same thing.”

  “I bet he won’t think so,” said Tom.

  He paused. Then he said, “It’s already more than forty-eight hours since we found Pebble. It might be too late for her family to take her back.”

  Jasmine looked at him, outraged. “What are you saying? You think we should give up now, when we’ve found a holt they might come to tonight? Are you crazy?”

  “But what if he catches us in the morning and calls the police?”

  “He’ll never catch us. We’ll come really early, before he’s even up. Anyway, he’s not going to be looking out for us, is he?”

  But as they walked back across the field, a light came on in an upstairs window of Angus Mizon’s house. At the window, they saw a man lift a pair of binoculars to his eyes.

  “He’s watching us,” hissed Jasmine.

  They kept their heads down and quickened their pace. The binocular lenses glinted in the light of the setting sun.

  “I don’t like this,” said Tom. “He’s scary.”

  “It’ll be fine,” said Jasmine, trying to sound confident. “He’s just a grumpy old man. And we’re not going to let a grumpy old man stop us from finding Pebble’s family.”

  At five o’clock on Monday morning, Jasmine and Tom sneaked out of the house and walked back to the bridge.

  The world was very quiet, the early morning peace interrupted only by birdsong. They stood there for half an hour, as the sky gradually grew lighter. Then Jasmine heard a little movement in the log pile. Tom turned towards her with a gleam of excitement in his eyes.

  They fixed their gaze on the logs. There was a rustling in the undergrowth. Then a face appeared. A broad, furry, brown face with bright black eyes and long white whiskers.

  An otter!

  At last, at long last, here was a real live otter, right here on the riverbank, right in front of them.

  Tom beamed in rapture. Jasmine hardly dared to breathe. Could this possibly be Pebble’s mother?

  A little squeak came from the undergrowth.

  Jasmine’s heart thudded. She stared at the place where the otter had emerged.

  There was another squeak. And then a furry brown face appeared from the log pile. A smaller face this time, followed by a smaller body.

  A cub! A cub the same size as Pebble!

  Jasmine turned to Tom, overflowing with joy. But Tom didn’t look back at her. Somehow, without her even noticing, he had taken out his camera and was filming the otter and her cub.

  She turned back to the otters. To her delight, another cub appeared from the log pile. The mother led them to a small patch of flattened undergrowth a little way from the riverbank. The cubs began to play fight, rolling over and over, nipping each other with their tiny teeth. As they wrestled, they made little squeaking sounds.

  Jasmine and Tom stared in wonder. I can’t believe we’re seeing this, Jasmine thought.

  Suddenly, the mother otter reared up on her hind legs, like a meercat, exposing her pale creamy throat and underside. She turned her head in all directions, her bright intelligent eyes watchful and alert. Jasmine froze. Had the otter somehow caught their scent? They were downwind of her, so she shouldn’t be able to smell them.

  After a few seconds, the otter lowered herself on to all fours again. Leaving her cubs rolling over and over, biting each other’s tails, she lumbered towards the river and slid down the mud slide, pouring her sleek, lithe body almost soundlessly into the water. She dipped her head down, nosing below the surface. Then she arched her body and dived like a dolphin, disappearing into the depths. A few seconds later, she leapt up, shaking water from her whiskers, and raised her body half out of the water to look around.

  Again Jasmine froze, terrified that the otter had caught their scent. But she lowered herself back into the water and started nosing around just below the surface again. All they could see was part of her smooth back and her long thick tail.

  She arched her body and dived. They followed the trail of bubbles until her head popped up. She was chomping noisily, revealing pointed fang-like teeth at the sides of her mouth. She had clearly caught something, but Jasmine couldn’t tell what.

  Tom filmed and Jasmine watched, fascinated, as the otter swam and dived and popped her head up again, chewing and crunching. All this time, the cubs never stopped their exuberant writhing and wrestling in their makeshift playpen.

  And then the mother dived again. When she emerged, a small, wriggling, grey fish was clamped between her jaws. She swam to the bank, holding it in her mouth, and clambered up the mud slide. As she came towards her cubs, they stopped wrestling and started to make the same birdlike call that Pebble had been making when Jasmine and Tom first found her.

  The mother made the same call in reply. Then she dropped the fish at their feet. One cub immediately started eating, tearing at the fish and munching it. The other didn’t seem very interested. It snuggled up next to its mother and sniffed her. Mother and cub started grooming each other and rolling around together, while the other cub continued to tear at the fish.

  After a few minutes, the mother stood up and made for the mud slide, slipping into the water with barely a ripple. Again, she dipped and dived and nosed around in the water. She emerged with another fish, chewing and chomping. When she came up with a second fish, she swam to shore, climbed up on to the bank and released the fish beside the other cub. The first cub was still eating. The mother moved away from them and dried her fur, rolling on the ground and rubbing herself against the logs. She removed some bits of dirt from her fur with her claws. Then she went back to her cubs, who were finishing their meal.

  When they had finished eating, all three of them curled up together, grooming each other. One cub climbed on the mother’s back and fell asleep. The other one started to suckle. When it finished suckling, it fell asleep too. Their resting place was surrounded by tall plants and flowers, making them invisible to anyone walking along the riverbank.

  Eventually, the mother also closed her eyes. All three otters were fast asleep.

  Jasmine looked at Tom, her eyes shining. “Wow,” she mouthed. “That was unbelievable.”

  Tom lowered his camera. “Shall we go?” he whispered.

  Neither of them spoke until they were well away from the river. Then Tom said, “That was the most incredible thing ever.”

  A wave of pure joy flooded over Jasmine. “I can’t believe we found them! I can’t believe we’ve really found Pebble’s family.”

  “We need to tell Neil,” said Tom, “and then he can
bring Pebble straight back.”

  “Let’s phone Mum now,” said Jasmine. “She can call him. She’ll want to come and meet us to cross the road, too. You can send her the—”

  Tom clutched her arm. “Oh, no,” he said.

  “What?”

  She looked in the direction that Tom was looking.

  “Oh, no.”

  An old man was striding across the field towards them, a thick stick in his hand and a furious look on his face.

  “Hey, you!” he yelled. “How dare you trespass on my land?”

  Angus Mizon was trembling with rage.

  “You’ve got some nerve, strolling about like you own the place. Give me your names and addresses. I’m calling the police.”

  “Mr Mizon,” said Jasmine, “we’re Tom and Jasmine, and you told Mrs Thomas we could search for otters here. My dad’s Mike Green, at Oak Tree Farm.”

  The old man stabbed his finger in Jasmine’s direction. “I knew this would happen. I didn’t want to give permission in the first place, but she promised me it was only the once. I said to her, you let people come in once and they start taking advantage. Before you know it, you’ve got every Tom, Dick and Harry in the county thinking they can treat the place like a public park.”

  “It’s not like that,” said Tom. “Honestly it’s not. We found a holt last night, and we just came back to watch for otters this morning. This is the last chance we’ve got to reunite the cub with her family.”

  “I never gave you permission to come here this morning. Give me your names and I’ll call the police.”

  “We found otters,” said Jasmine.

  He snorted. “You think you found a holt, you mean. Well, you didn’t. There’ve been no otters on this river for fifty years.”

  “Well, there are now,” said Jasmine. “Show him, Tom.”

  Tom took out his camera. “We were standing on the bridge down there,” he said.

  He pressed “Play” and handed the camera to Angus Mizon.

  The old man stared as he saw Tom’s footage of the otters emerging from their holt. He kept his eyes glued to the screen, watching the mother fishing in the river and feeding her cubs. He didn’t move until the film had ended.

  When he raised his eyes from the camera, his expression was a strange combination of boyish excitement mixed with a kind of sadness.

  “I haven’t seen otters on that river for half a century,” he said. “Used to see them regularly when I was a boy. I’d come down here early in the morning and watch them for hours. Got to know where all their holts were, and when they had their cubs. Then the rivers got polluted, and what with that and the hunting, they all vanished. I never thought I’d see one again.”

  “And now they’ve come back,” said Jasmine. “All because you’ve kept your riverbank so lovely.”

  “This is the first otter family found in Sussex for forty years,” said Tom. “And we’re the only people in the world who know about it.”

  Angus Mizon grunted. “Well, it had better stay that way. I’m not having crowds of tourists trampling over my land, frightening them away.”

  “Of course not,” said Jasmine. “We won’t tell a soul. Except for Neil at the wildlife centre.”

  “Didn’t you listen to a word I said? You’re telling nobody.”

  “Mr Mizon,” said Jasmine. “I promise that if you let us do this, we’ll never set foot on your land again if you don’t want us to. But the whole reason we’ve been searching for these otters is to reunite the lost cub with her family. You want her to be with her family, don’t you?”

  “I don’t want a load of busybodies trampling over my farm,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t be like that,” said Jasmine. “Neil said when they release an otter, they do it very quietly, and they don’t reveal the location to anyone. The last thing they want is for people to come looking for otters and disturbing their habitats.”

  Angus Mizon was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Well, you’d better get this Neil person to give me a phone call. I’ll see what he’s got to say for himself. But I’m not having a load of idiots running about all over my land, and that’s final.”

  “That is such an amazing achievement,” said Mum, once she had seen them safely back across the main road, “that I might even forgive you for sneaking out of the house this morning. Although I can’t ever forgive you for crossing that road on your own.”

  “It was really early,” said Jasmine. “There weren’t any cars around.”

  “Even so,” said Mum. “It’s not so much you I’m worried about, Jasmine, but I’m responsible for Tom at the moment.”

  “Oh, thank you very much,” said Jasmine.

  “That video footage is incredible,” said Mum. “I sent it to Neil and he wants you to phone him as soon as possible.”

  They phoned as soon as they got back. Jasmine dialled the number and handed the phone to Tom.

  “You should speak to him,” she said. “You did the filming.”

  “But it’s your farm,” said Tom.

  “Go on. Put it on speakerphone, so I can hear.”

  But the voice that answered the phone wasn’t Neil’s.

  “Hemsley Wildlife Centre. Prunella Sharp speaking.”

  “Oh,” said Tom. “We thought this was Neil’s phone.”

  “It is. Neil is busy at the moment. Can I help you?”

  “This is Tom, from Oak Tree Farm,” said Tom. “You came to fetch Pebble, our otter cub. We’ve found her family and Neil asked us to call him.”

  “I think I already made it quite clear,” said Prunella Sharp, “that we would not attempt the release of an otter cub at this stage.”

  Tom looked murderously at the phone. “Can we speak to Neil, please?”

  “I’m afraid not. Neil is a very busy man.”

  “He asked us to call.”

  Prunella Sharp harrumphed like a horse. There was some indistinct murmuring in the background. Then Neil’s voice said, “Hello, Tom. Sorry I was out of the room when you called.”

  He told them how thrilled he was with their discovery. “And your film footage is extraordinary,” he said. “Amazing to see.”

  “Thank you,” said Tom. His face was pink with pride.

  “It’s wonderful to see breeding otters back in this area,” said Neil. “It’s a great indicator of how much cleaner the rivers have become. Fantastic news for wildlife.”

  “Will you bring Pebble back yourself?” Tom asked. “Or will it be Prunella Sharp?”

  Jasmine pulled a face. Please don’t let it be Prunella Sharp, she thought.

  “Actually, Tom,” said Neil, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t think we will be bringing Pebble back.”

  Tom’s mouth fell open. Jasmine stared at the phone in disbelief. What was he talking about?

  “I’m sorry,” said Neil, “but we’re not sure it would be a good idea to attempt a release.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s just very unlikely that the mother will accept her back after three days.”

  “But you have to try,” said Tom. “Why would you not try, when we’ve found her family?”

  “Well, we don’t know for certain that it is Pebble’s family,” said Neil. “I know it would be highly unlikely that there were two families with cubs the same age living on that stretch of river, but we can’t be sure. We don’t want to stress Pebble by attempting a release, only for her to be rejected. After all, she might already have been rejected by her mother.”

  Tom said nothing. He looked utterly forlorn.

  “I’m sorry, Tom,” said Neil. “You should be very proud of yourself. You’ve made an incredible discovery and taken the most amazing footage.”

  Jasmine could bear this no longer.

  “Give me the phone,” she mouthed. Tom handed it to her.

  “This is Jasmine,” she said to Neil.

  “Oh, hello, Jasmine.”

  “If the mother does reject Pebble,” Jasmine said, “she can go back to the centre, right? You said she’s doing really well, so she’ll be fine if she does. But it would be crazy not to try. They always tell us at school to keep trying. But you’re just giving up without even trying once. That’s not a very good example to set for children.”

  To her surprise, Neil laughed.