Dip of paddle, blue of sky, murmur of campground sounds receding as pine-bristled slopes slip by. Pale yellow silty muck wavering through green waters. Chat of junco, resounding rat-tat-tat of flicker, shadow of kingfisher clicking, flick of fin. Cool air hangs above the water, sunlight beams hot and intense from above. I nose between fallen trees, my kayak awkward – a straight, unyielding sixteen feet that has none of the give and curl of most of the bodies that navigate these shores. I wonder how I appear to my onlookers as I un-merge from the bright blue shape, sprouting legs and hands, leaving my long, flippered limb behind. A red squirrel twirls a cone, tail a bottlebrush of flame where the sun peeks through. Lodgepole pines whisper softly and a grey jay sporting a bright white collar cocks his head. No one remarks on anything out of the ordinary.

The passage of many feet is evident all along these varied shores in trails large and small; most parallel the water’s edge, some go up and over hills between bays. Which feet is mostly beyond my ability to discern, save for the occasional patch of mud that reads like a large-print headline: moose was here. I imagine that Tlingit and Tagish people, part of this land for millennia as the ice sheets permitted and known now as Carcross/Tagish First Nation and Teslin Tlingit Council, would see much more than I do. More still without the brief – in terms of their history as a people – and violent treatment they’ve received at the hands of my culture. The area around this lake, translated as ‘where the wolves come to fish’, is important enough to today’s Carcross Tagish citizens that it is listed in modern treaties as a priority for a park. Over twenty years after signing, this park remains without official status. The Yukon government campground is busy with campers, fishers and soon, hunters.

Could that smear be the wash of a porcupines tail, that dimple a portion of the broad pad of a wolf? I see but don’t understand the soft fuzz of underfur on a rose bush, broken grass stems. I wish for a nose that could follow the day’s old scent of tiny feet scampering over soft needles; ears to hear the thrum of a rapid heartbeat through a rotten log; eyes to parse the closed wing of a comma from its background of broken bark.

Here, at a place where the roots of two large pines fan up towards the sun, a trail makes a dark swathe through copper needles, fringed by brittle horsetail and fireweed with blooms still tight. Even my nose can scent the smell of fish. Or rather, a ‘fishy’ smell, for a fresh fillet like the pike I ate for breakfast has none of this aroma. On a tangled pile of grass I spy a dark coil specked with transparent sequins. More sequins become apparent, catching the light, some embedded in dry grey clumps, others scattered about the duffI wrinkle my nose as I peer closer at the coil, topped by a transparent, jelly-like substance. This I do understand, in my way: to biologists, this place is a river otter latrine. It serves as much more than a pit stop. They glean, I think, much more than we can know from each other’s leavings here.

I have watched many an otter slipping out of the water, sliding full-length, rubbing face and belly and back against the undergrowth or needle bed. The purposes are many, inasmuch as we can know another’s intent: they deposit scent from their chin glands, they pick up smells to carry with them, they clean and dry their coats like a chicken having a dust bath. It looks like it feels wonderful. Generally this is followed by a galumphing round of sniffing, visiting piles like this one, obvious to me, and other places that hold interest to which I am blind. Often they scrabble through debris and scrape it into a stack – the best guess of science is that this sets their scat and the aptly-named scent jelly into the air currents for better broadcasting. Finally they hunch their bodies up like inchworms, extend their tails out straight, stamp their back feet and make their deposit. Sprainting, in biologist-speak. It is quite the ritual.

I trace the edge of a blade of grass with my fingertips, imagining the otter who left this mark. I wonder what they imagined upon noticing the scent of another of their kind, of other species. Do they have a concept of ‘us’ and ‘them’, or concentric circles of relationships, or categories like potential prey or predator, family, person-to-avoid, person-to-attract? I wonder if there is an image, or the scent equivalent, formed in their brain, when they smell someone familiar, the way I might see my brother’s face in my mind when I receive a text. And what, I wonder, will they think of me. I don’t know what I am leaving of myself in passing, in fingering the leaves of a stalk of fireweed, in tying the bowline of my kayak about the rough bark of a pine, in breaking off a twig to poke at the clump of fresh scat.

Otter mothers often have children close by and males often form multi-age roving bands. Some otters, though, spend most of their time physically apart from conspecifics. We, western scientists, that is, call them ‘solitary’. I am suspicious that in our cultural fear of ascribing too much sentience to nature – for then, surely, we would have to turn our societal underpinnings on their heads – we underestimate the complexity of information other animals pass back and forth through scent-based message boards such as these. Am I truly solitary hunkered in my cabin, if I maintain meaningful social connections through language instead of touch: text, email, old-fashioned letter writing?

I unlock a metal box strapped to a pine, steel on steel jarring in a soundscape of wood and water and wind. I open a plastic case and with the push of a few buttons I am gifted with the sights and sound of all who passed by this place in the last months. I devour the images greedily, hungry for the intimacy the camera provides. I see those who have left the tracks I noticed and many whose passing was invisible to me. A lynx pads, a coyote trots, a spruce grouse trundles, all appear unconcerned. A shambling black bear snuffles loudly at the box and fogs the lens; my brain conjures damp warmth and a foetid smell. Shoots push upwards about the edges of the frame as it flickers from day to night, rain to sun to shadow. I thrill beneath the momentary stare of a pale wolf, though I know it isn’t me he sees – and that brings with it a strange guilt. It’s a kind of twinge at the back of my neck, like I’ve just read a very engaging letter that wasn’t intended for me. And I’m not correcting the sender. I think of the Indigenous teaching of reciprocity and wonder what I could give back to these animals who have granted me, even unwittingly, these moments of closeness. Is it enough that my work is in service to ‘conservation’? I revel in a family of otters clambering over each other, wrestling and rolling in a lithe mass, chirping, grunting and mewling. Two youngsters bat at each other with forepaws and fall over repeatedly. I am delighted and enthralled. I also ache to have been there.

As a scientist, I value the distance the cameras place between me and their subjects; as much as I seek out moments that feel like kinship, I also know that in many, if not most, cases my mere presence causes stress in members of other species. An animal becoming habituated to my presence, paradoxically, can increase their risk of harm if they generalize my ‘safeness’ to other humans. Practically, the cameras allow a multiplication of observers – I have twenty-four such cameras about the convoluted shoreline of this lake. They watch, day and night, while I sleep, while I paddle, while I drive the three hours from the campground back to my cabin and attend to other parts of life. Cost-effective, I suppose, their time valued less than mine were I to simply stay and wait and watch, the way human people have done for millennia to learn their way into relation with the more-than-human world. I try not to think about the unmentioned costs of the plastic, the minerals, the labour that went into these cameras, their batteries, my computer. I can’t not think about the cost of generations failing to learn that we depend on all other beings, getting so caught up in being human, first and foremost, that we forget there is another way to be.

There are, of course, other ways.

There is sitting still and waiting.
There is drowsing in the sun, allowing the stillness of sleep to convince the wild world that in this moment, at least, I am not a threat.
There is a decoupling from the productivist mindset that would call that ‘doing nothing’.
There is closing my eyes and opening my ears.
There is seeing, really seeing, each sparkle of sunlight off a ripple as it travels to the shore.
There is attending to a swallowtail crawling from its own skin and uncurling crumpled, wet wings, from the moment the first crack appears to when she lifts off on perfect yellow kites.
There is writing words on a page, a paper page, and there is allowing the words to trail off, yielding to the ineffable.

Maybe my attention is one thing I can give back.

One video in particular catches my imagination, for the rare interaction it features. I lean back against a pine, setting the camera on my knee so that the image fits against my frame of view. A beaver enters from frame-left, chirring what might be a warning, or indignation. I can emulate it fairly closely by sucking in air between my lower lip and upper teeth, as I might if I were talking to a squirrel. She (I do not know the animal’s sex or gender but I will not use the word ‘it’) rocks back and forth ever so slightly, one forepaw raised, water pooling beneath her and trickling back down the worn path underneath her tail into the flattened grass at the edge of the lake. The butt end of a long willow branch, chiseled to a fine point, lies at her side. My brain fills in the end of the branch trailing in the water off to the left. The object of the beaver’s attention is a young otter entering from frame-right, uphill. I can’t help but imagine that he has just pulled up short, having been careening down the trail. He is reared up, revealing the paler fur of chin and chest. He weaves his upper body sinuously from side to side, a cobra poised to strike – except that he looks more uncertain than anything. I simultaneously make all sorts of assumptions and am filled with questions: is he focused on sight or smell? Is this his first encounter with this beaver? How often might he find himself nose to nose, unintentionally, with another creature? All the wonderings of how he perceives himself and those with whom he is in relation. His nose and whiskers twitch as he slides his muzzle first one way, then the other, never still.

The otter begins his own mewling chirps, muffled somewhat by the rather large grayling dangling from one side of his mouth. His short fur is spiked into tufts, darker than the chestnut of the beaver. Fish and tufts notwithstanding, it is easy to see in the lines of the otter the promise of a racing kayak; the beaver on the other hand could be mistaken for a snub-nosed barge. This analogy might persist if you had only ever seen these animals swimming at the surface, beavers as wedge-shaped heads trailing wedge-shaped wakes, a branch held awkwardly in the mouth, while otters plunge and curl like seals and raise their heads high. To see a beaver torpedoing through the depths, however, propelled by powerful webbed hind limbs, is to recognize the error.

My questions resume: Why didn’t the otter eat where he caught the fish, why carry it all this way up and over the rise? Is he avoiding sharing, did he steal the fish? Does he simply have a favorite spot to lunch? I rewind and replay, the animals shifting back and forth in a jerky dance on the screen. I watch the grayling’s snout bob against the ground, shining scales becoming dulled with dirt and needles. It’s movements are so different to the darting dance of life. I play to the end.

The beaver remains implacable, continuing to chirr. I can only think she was using the trail as a shortcut to a cache, a place where she is storing branches of willow and aspen for the long winter. She must have a lodge nearby, doorways opening into the water and soon, under the ice. Why she would choose the up-and-over route, instead of swimming around, I do not know.

Finally the otter seems to admit defeat. He retreats a few steps, still facing the beaver, then spins and jounces up the trail, humping his body with each lope. The beaver, surprising me, waddles back one step at a time, eyes and nose remaining trained up the trail in the direction of the disappearing otter. She exits the frame. Do I imagine the faint splash marking her her re-entry into the water?

*

I lie in my tent, grateful for the shell of fine webbing that confines the mosquitoes to a drone, trying not to think of where the material comes from or under what conditions it was made. I am resentful of the nylon fly that separates me from the dusk that passes for night in northern summer, too practical to risk a night-time drenching. I listen to the slap of waves, thoughts wandering. I have actually seen very few otters in the flesh during my intermittent weeks traveling the waterways from camera to camera. Even when it’s simply a trio of heads snaking across the mouth of a bay or a distant clambering onto the shore, each glimpse is precious, hoarded. In those encounters, I feel honest. My brain probably expands those slim frames into fuller memories, drawing on what I’ve seen on screen. Maybe that’s not so bad. I realize that in those moments, my head doesn’t fill with questions.

I will spend days this winter, hunkered in my tiny cabin, buffered from driving wind and cold by woodstove and carbon-costly foam insulation, totally absorbed in fragments of summer 300km away. Isn’t it a bit of a marvel that my brain can even accept that? I will only once see a beaver and an otter occupy the same frame. I will attempt to identify individuals and piece together stories, to language their sounds and actions, to infer intent and thought. All of this from sight and sound, yet the synaesthesia of memory will provide the soft touch of a breeze on my face, the sea-smell of lakeshore, the movement of my kayak beneath me as I watch a shoreline trail at a moment I wasn’t there. My palms will feel warmth radiating from the thick pine needle duff under summer sunlight and my fingers will slide over dense silky fur.

I will have to think a moment – no, I haven’t ever touched an otter.

Will this act of attention be less honorable because the otters didn’t know I was watching? Less an act of relation because it is mediated by technology? A loon’s call floods my meandering thoughts. I try to be here, only here, at least until the echo fades.

Notes:

Watch this short film, An Otter’s Point of View, by a younger Kim Melton from 2015. It’s filled with clips that show the hidden lives of animals in the Yukon, especially otters at play.