The Otter Who Carried the Lantern

The ferry across the river at Hollin Reach was a flat boat on a rope, and the ferryman was a rat called Reuben, and on the night this story happened, Reuben had a cold.

He had it badly. He was lying in the boathouse with a bit of sacking over him and his nose the colour of a rosehip, and every so often he sneezed, and the whole boathouse rang with it, and the ferry, tied up outside, knocked against the post as if to say it had heard.

“Can’t be done,” he said, when Meg looked in. “Can’t pull the rope. Can’t see straight. Can’t be done.”

Meg was an otter, and she had come by, as she did most nights, on her way down to the pools below the weir where the fish were slow. She had not come to be given a job. She stood in the doorway and dripped.

“Then there’s no ferry,” she said.

“There’s the log,” said Reuben.

Meg knew the log. Everyone on the river knew it. It was an old alder that had come down across the water at the top of the reach, years back, and it made a crossing of sorts for those who did not mind heights, or wet feet, or the way it moved when the river was up. On a ferry night nobody used it. On a night with no ferry, it was the only way over for anyone who could not swim, and a great many things on a river cannot.

“They’ll want the lantern,” said Reuben, and sneezed. “Can’t see the log without the lantern. Can’t find the end of it. Somebody’ll go in.”

The lantern was hanging on its hook above his head: a small brass one with a glass door, that had been on the ferry longer than Reuben had, and burned a stub of candle, and gave, all things considered, more light than it had any business to.

Meg looked at it. She looked at Reuben, who was looking at her.

“I don’t carry things,” she said.

“Nobody else is here,” said Reuben, quite reasonably, and blew his nose.

So that was that.

He lit it for her, with his paws shaking, and shut the glass door, and she took it by the ring in her teeth, which was the only way she had of taking anything, and it was heavier than it looked and warmer than she liked, and the light of it swung about the boathouse and made everything twice its size. Reuben got back under his sacking.

“Hang it on the alder,” he said, muffled. “The stump end. High up. And bring it back.”

“Bring it back,” said Meg, round the ring, and went out into the night.

Now the thing about an otter is this. Put her in the water and she is the fastest, easiest, cleverest thing on the river, and she knows it. Put her on the bank and she is a long wet animal with short legs, going along like a sack of something, and she knows that too. Meg would have been at the top of the reach in the time it takes to say so, if she could have swum it. She could not swim it. The lantern would not have cared for that. The lantern had to go by land, and so, it followed, did Meg.

She set off along the bank path.

It was a good enough path, as bank paths go. It had been made by the feet of everything that lived along the river, and it went where they went, which was close to the water, in and out of the roots, under the willows, over the little side-streams on their stones. The night was clear and still and there was no moon. That was the point. On a moon night nobody needed a lantern. On a night like this, the water was only a darker dark, and you found the edge of it by falling in.

Meg went carefully. The lantern swung and the light swung with it, and the roots came up out of the ground and went down again, and things scattered ahead of her and were gone. Once she stopped and put the lantern down to rest her jaw, and sat by it, and the river went past beside her, close enough to touch, making the small sounds it made, and she looked at it for a while, and then she picked the lantern up again.

The first trouble was the reeds.

Halfway up the reach the bank went flat and boggy and the path lost its nerve and turned inland, through a bed of reeds taller than a heron, which rustled. There was no wind to speak of, but reeds do not need much, and what there was came through them in long dry sighs and found the lantern and made the candle lean. Meg watched it lean. She had seen a candle go out. It went sideways, and then it went small, and then it was not there, and this one was doing the first of those.

She turned her back to the wind, which is what you do, and went through the reeds sideways, with the lantern in the lee of her, and the candle stood up again, and said nothing, and they came out the other side.

The second trouble was the road bridge.

The river went under it and the path, being sensible, went over, up a bank of nettles and across and down the other side, and Meg was halfway up the nettles when a light came along the road. It came fast, and it was very bright, and it swept across the top of the bank like a hand and was gone, and a noise went with it, and then it was dark again and much darker than before. Meg stood in the nettles with her eyes shut. When she opened them the lantern was still lit, and small, and hers, and she was surprised by how glad she was of it. She crossed the road at a run, which for an otter on land is not a run, and went down the far side into the roots again, and the river was there, and she breathed out.

The third trouble was the weir.

Above the bridge the river came down over a weir, a long slope of stone with the water running white over it, and the noise of it filled the whole valley, so that you stopped hearing it after a while and only heard everything else less. Meg loved the weir. She had gone down it a hundred times, on her back, for no reason at all. But you did not go up it, not with a lantern, not with anything, and the path went up beside it in steps cut into the bank, wet steps, and steep, each one higher than an otter’s legs were built for.

She went up them one at a time. She put the lantern on the step above her, and climbed, and picked it up, and put it on the step above that. Seven steps. On the fifth she stopped and looked down, at the white water going over and over in the dark, and the little of it that her light caught, and thought that it was a very fine thing to look at, and that she would come back and look at it properly some other night, when her mouth was free.

At the top the river was quiet again, wide and black and slow, and there, a little way up, lay the log.

It was a great dark thing across the water, going from the stump on this bank to a tangle of roots on the far one, and there was nothing whatever to show where it was. Meg went to the stump. There was an old nail in it, up high, which she had never noticed, and which Reuben plainly had, and she got up on her hind legs and reached, and hung the lantern on it, and let go.

It swung. Then it stilled. And the light went out along the log, the whole length of it, and there was the crossing: a path across the river, wet and shining, with the water going by black on either side, and the far bank waiting.

Meg sat down under the stump and let her jaw hang open for a while.

They came soon after. She had thought they might not, and then a vole came, a young one, out of the grass, and stood at the near end of the log, and looked along it into the light, and went over, quick and low, and was gone into the far roots. Then two more. Then a shrew, who talked to herself all the way across and did not stop on the other side. Then a whole family of mice, in a line, the smallest at the back, who stopped in the middle to look down at the water and were told not to, and went on.

Meg watched them. Nobody thanked her. Nobody knew she was there. That, she thought, was probably the proper way for a lantern to be.

Last of all came the toad.

She heard him before she saw him: a slow, damp, deliberate sound in the grass, like someone very old getting out of a chair. He came to the end of the log and stopped and looked at it. He looked at it for a long time. Then he got up onto it, and went along it, one leg, and another leg, and a bit of a rest, and another leg, and Meg, sitting under the stump, found that she was holding her breath for him, and let it go, and held it again, and the toad went on, at the pace of a toad, across the middle of the river with the light on his back and the black water going by, and reached the far side, and climbed down, and was gone, and had not hurried, and had not needed to.

The river was empty. The grass was still. Nothing else was coming.

Meg got up, and reached for the lantern, and took it off its nail.

The way back was the way she had come, but it was different, the way a road is different going home. The steps by the weir went down instead of up. The bridge was dark and stayed dark. The reeds had stopped sighing. She went along the bank path under the willows with the light swinging and her jaw aching and the river going by beside her, and she did not stop to rest, because she could see the end now, and the end was the boathouse, and a hook, and being done.

Reuben was asleep. He had got right under the sacking and was making the small whistling noise of a rat with a cold, and she did not wake him. She got up on the bench, and up on the shelf, and hung the lantern on its hook above his head, still burning, a little stub of it left, and got down again, and stood a moment in the door.

Then she went out and slid into the river.

It took her, the way it always did, all at once. The cold and the dark and the easy pull of it, going down, and her legs that had been the wrong shape all night were suddenly the right one, and she turned over twice for the pleasure of it and let the current have her. There was nothing to carry. There was nothing to hold. There was only the water, and the way down, and the pools below the weir where the fish were slow.

Behind her, in the boathouse window, the lantern burned down its last little bit.

And the river went on to the sea in the dark, which it knew the way to, and did not need a light, and all the small things that had crossed it were home, and dry, and asleep.