The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
While there’s whisky and otters, it’s still a wonderful world – despite the storms
It was hot in the late afternoon, and the day’s work was done. I had dutifully sipped water through the working hours because it’s the right thing to do, and now I was ready for something other than water.
It is a delightful curiosity of the single malt whisky known as Talisker Skye that in dreariest mid-December it insinuates a warming distinction to the drinker’s innards, yet in a mid-August heatwave with a couple of ice cubes to razor-sharpen its edginess, it cools the troubled mind of a writer who is not crazy about heatwaves.
I know, I know – the whisky police will foam at the mouth at the thought of ice in Talisker.
I don’t care.
I had bought a new bottle that morning. Now there was the familiar ritual of the unwrapping and the uncorking and the freeing of elemental warm notes and verdant richness.
I know that because it says so on the box. I don’t disagree. When I pour, I also uncork 50 years of memories of the Isle of Skye. I am a placid and sparing drinker of Talisker, but I have long been addicted to Skye.
Talisker is five things in my life forby the distillery at Carbost and the bottle in my hand.
Firstly, it is a river, short, sweet and eventful, cliff-girt from its source on Stockval, washing the flank of Croc na h-Ioliare, which is the Hill of the Eagle on its brief voyage to the sea.
Secondly, it is Talisker Bay, a west-facing bight out of Skye’s Atlantic coast, blacksanded, rock-sculpted, storm-bruised and quietly, brutally beautiful.
Thirdly, it is Talisker House, which is the only large house in the world I covet. It sits back from the shore under the mighty rock profile of Preshal and graced by tall trees.
Fourthly, it is the burn that flows dyestraight from the house to the bay and into the river’s last gasp.
Fifthly, Talisker means otters.
The musky language of otter spraints is a pervasive presence along both banks of the burn.
If you have a practised eye at reading their hieroglyphs, they can tell you how long gone the otter may be.
To an otter nose, they are vocabulary, an identifiable calling card and information about whether the caller had any business being there or not.
You see an otter at its amphibious best (water sprite, land weasel) on a burn like this: narrow, shallow and low-banked.
This otter had been sunning itself. I saw it stir, stand, shake itself, then set off weaseling along the bank, rippling as it ran. Brightness flooded the burn where the trees ended, and the otter took to the water there. I imagined it would swim flat out for the river and the sea, but you can never tell with otters.
Suddenly, its bubbling, vee-shaped wake was heading upstream towards me. I stood dead still against a tree trunk. Be a tree, I told myself.
The otter swam past six feet away, preceded by its shadow, just ahead and slightly to the left. It curved towards a small slope on the further bank, which it hit running.
About a dozen yards away, the otter stopped dead, turned his head and neck, half raised one forefoot and stared back at me.
It uttered a single syllable, something between a gasp and a grunt.
Then it turned, flowed back into the burn and swam past me again. This time, the shadow trailed a foot or two behind.
For as long as it was underwater, I could follow as quickly and noisily as I liked, and when it surfaced I crouched and froze.
The next time the otter surfaced it stepped out on to the bank and looked back, stared at my crouched shape.
But the otter is of the weasel tribe, and weasel also means curiosity. It stood on its hind legs, the better to see and scent, just like a weasel.
When it dropped to all fours again, it turned for the water, and all the way to the first breaking wave of Talisker Bay, it flowed between water and dry land with pure otter fluency, and in the waves it vanished.
Its tall, two-footed pose stirred another memory.
Suddenly I was back in Alaska, and a grizzly bear sow at 20 paces stood in that same two-footed stance – the same except for the considerable difference that when it stood like that, it was about eight feet tall.
“What’s she doing?” I asked my guide. “Oh, just having a look.” “Having a look at us?”
“Oh no. She knows what I look like. She’s having a look at you.”
Sometimes when I pull the cork from a new bottle of Talisker at the end of a heatwave-wearied writing session, and slip a couple of ice cubes into a favourite glass, scent and taste, then something untoward happens.
In this case, it was an association of ideas that reminded me that for all its repertoire of storms, this world is still capable of wonders, too.
It is a delightful curiosity of the single malt whisky