There was not much snow on the ground in the forest, only the northern slopes were covered with a blanket of white. The white cover was nowhere as spectacular as it used to be in the past. Lao Bu was troubled. He told me that in the course of the past few years the sand storms have reached as far west as the Changbai Shan Conservation Area. Mild winters are now very common. It only remains to be seen how that will affect the forest ecosystem. According to the results of foreign environmental specialists' monitoring, the size of the ice sheet in the Arctic Circle decreased by 40% over the course of the last 25 years. Currently, it is melting at the rate of 9% every ten years. If it continues at this rate, it will have completely melted by the end of this century. A huge ice shelf on the Antarctic continent, known as the Larsen B Ice Shelf (it has a total area of 250,000 m2), broke away from the polar ice cap and is now drifting freely in the ocean. Behind it are ten other ice shelves that are sooner or later going to break off. The next one to go is the Wilson Ice Shelf. It is 200 metres thick and it weighs 5 billion tons … Suddenly, the sound of flapping wings cut in. Lao Bu has sharp eyes. He said it was a flock of hazel grouses. A Few days ago he spotted another flock of about twenty or so. This made me think of the several wild geese that we saw the day before on our wander through the forest. We startled them from their hideout by the side of a stream which had not yet frozen over. They took off in quick flight. Their wings made a loud swooshing sound as they daringly swept over our heads.
At that point I realised with a silent shock: Wild geese are migrating birds, yet these geese did not fly away last autumn. There can only be one reason for why they stayed behind and that is that the temperature here was adequate.
Since the arrival of the otter, I changed my fishing place. I would walk instead to a river bend some 2.5 kilometres upstream. I also blocked up the front door and instead used the back window of my room as the main entrance. I hacked a small access path from the back of the hut. I did all I could not to disturb the otter's activities. Otters have a heightened awareness of their territory and I had no desire to scare it away with a careless mistake. But no matter how many precautions I took, neighbours are neighbours, so it was inevitable that we would occasionally bump into each other. It gradually started to get used to my presence. It would often watch me from afar, occasionally making crowing noises. I interpreted these as both a warning not to cross into its territory and a way of saying hello to me.
I have always heard people say that otter pups can be trained and kept as pets. They are similar to cats and dogs in the way they form close relationships with humans, unlike wolves and foxes that cannot resist the call of the wild. For wolves and foxes, there would always be one day when they leave you. In the Medieval period, people in some Asian and European countries would train otters to catch fish. This custom is still practiced today in Japan, the Philippines, India and some remote water regions in China. Although fishermen in China are more practical, they mostly prefer to use cormorants, as they can serve for as long as twenty years. In the Polish historical annals, there is a record of an otter named Neptune that was trained to carry out dozens of orders, which is more than any dog could. Its level of intelligence could be compared to that of a domesticated gorilla. That is why the marshal who owned Neptune presented it to his king, which guaranteed him a spot in the historical annals.
I would have loved to follow Jane Goodall's example and try to get closer to my new neighbour. But due to financial reasons, this observation station was going to be taken down the following year so I had no excuse for continuing my research. So I decided that it would be best if I just kept the otter at a distance, respected its wild nature, its territory and its rights and never let it become trusting of humans. What might happen otherwise is that the next person it comes across may be a hunter. At that I had no idea that our paths would cross so soon.
One evening at dusk, I noticed that the splashing sound in the lake was not quite right. It sounded as if some large fish had got itself stranded in the shallows and was thrashing around in desperation to free itself. I went to check what was causing such a commotion and it turned out to be the otter. It was twisting and turning violently. It seemed that it was entangled in something. One moment I could see the white skin on its underbelly, and the next moment it plunged into the water again. It was desperately trying to wriggle free of its constraints. At the sight of a human, it did not only not try to evade me, but rather with great difficulty half swam, half waddled towards me. I quickly picked up a dry branch and stepped into the icy cold water. I hooked the stick around the back of its body and started pulling it towards the shore. As soon as the otter sensed the force of the stick pulling it in, it instinctively opened its mouth and grabbed the stick firmly with its teeth. I could instantly feel the force of the otter biting down on the stick. It was so sharp that it felt as if an electric current was suddenly flowing through the stick and it made my arm vibrate with the impact. The otter's black pearl-like eyes shone with a fiery, piercing look. It was the kind of look that signalled fury in an utterly hopeless situation. Besides piercing me with a furious look, the otter lifted its snout from the water and emitted angry hissing sounds in my direction. Its bared canine teeth with droplets of water rolling off of them shone like rows of tiny sharp knives in the twilight. It turned out that the otter had become entangled in a torn fish net. Its whole body was trapped and it was hardly able to move at all.
