Ring of Bright Water

Fülszöveg

In this now famous book Gavin Maxwell tells of
the lonely, roadless cottage on the West Highland
seaboard which for ten years has been the back-
ground to his foreign travels, and which he looks
upon as his real home.
When he first came to the cottage, Camus-
fearna, it was an empty shell, uninhabited for
years. " A Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family
Robinson instinct is latent in most of us, perhaps
from our childhood games of housekeeping," he
says ; and since, " if one waits long enough prac-
tically every household object will sooner or later
turn up on the beaches within a mile of the
house his cottage has been furnished in this
way with little recourse to shops.
Mr. Maxwell writes movingly about his re-
mote home, about the unspoilt landscape and the
wild life he has encountered there. But the
4 hero' of the book is perhaps his pet otter,
Mijbil, who shared the cottage with him. After
his dog had died, Gavin Maxwell brought this
otter cub back from the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

In this now famous book Gavin Maxwell tells of
the lonely, roadless cottage on the West Highland
seaboard which for ten years has been the back-
ground to his foreign travels, and which he looks
upon as his real home.
When he first came to the cottage, Camus-
fearna, it was an empty shell, uninhabited for
years. " A Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family
Robinson instinct is latent in most of us, perhaps
from our childhood games of housekeeping," he
says ; and since, " if one waits long enough prac-
tically every household object will sooner or later
turn up on the beaches within a mile of the
house his cottage has been furnished in this
way with little recourse to shops.
Mr. Maxwell writes movingly about his re-
mote home, about the unspoilt landscape and the
wild life he has encountered there. But the
4 hero' of the book is perhaps his pet otter,
Mijbil, who shared the cottage with him. After
his dog had died, Gavin Maxwell brought this
otter cub back from the Tigris marshes; it turned
out to be a creature unknown to science, and was
later christened by the scientific world with
Maxwell's own name. The otter, as intelligent
and affectionate as any dog, ran free at the cottage,
always returning at night to sleep in the author's
bed. The part this charming pet played in the
author's life ended abruptly and tragically;
Mijbil,trusting and confiding as always, was arbit-
rarily killed by a road-mender with a pickaxe.
The only thing to do was to find another pet
otter and in this the author was assisted by the
weird coincidence of encountering a tame one in
Scotland, the property of a doctor on leave from
Nigeria. Gavin Maxwell acquired it and Edal,
the new otter, became MijbiTs successor at
Camusfearna, " playing in the burn and sleeping
before the hearth."
Ring of Bright Water marvellously evokes the
world of Camusfearna and gives a glimpse of the,
affections and background of a very accomplished
writer.
The book is well illustrated with 69 photo-
graphs taken by the author himself and*there is
also a large number of drawings by Peter Scott,
in the text, as well as line drawings by Michael
Ayrton and Robin McEwen. Vissza