Mijbil the Otter: Class 10 First Flight · Chapter 6

6.1 Before you read

Have you ever begged your family for a puppy, a parrot or a fish tank? Now picture a pet that needs a bathtub, a stream and endless patience. In 1956 the Scottish writer Gavin Maxwell chose exactly such a companion: an otter (ऊदबिलाव), an animal almost nobody in Britain kept at home. This chapter is his true account of his first weeks with Mijbil. Read it in your NCERT book; this page is your study companion beside it.

The house felt empty. After the death of his dog, Maxwell could not face getting another one, yet he missed having an animal around. His remote home, which he calls Camusfearna, is a cottage on Scotland's west coast with the sea almost at its door. Because Maxwell tells his own story using I, he is the narrator as well as a character, and we see everything through his eyes.

6.2 Reading the story

The piece has four numbered parts. Part I gets the otter into Maxwell's hands. Part II shows the two of them getting to know each other. Part III is a frantic flight towards Britain, and Part IV shows Mij puzzling the people of London. Notice how often the mood swings between delight and disaster, as in Fig. 6.2.

6.2.1 Part I: The long wait in Basra

The story opens in southern Iraq early in 1956. Maxwell has been toying with the idea of an otter, rather than a dog, for his waterside cottage. His travelling companion casually names the obvious source: the Tigris marshes, where otters are everywhere and local people often keep tame ones.

In Basra, where they collect post at the British Consulate-General, only the friend's letters have come. Maxwell's cable home brings no answer, and three days of attempts to telephone are defeated by a fault, a religious holiday and yet another breakdown. The friend goes on ahead; Maxwell's mail finally turns up five days later.

When he goes up to his bedroom to read it, two local men are waiting there, squatting beside a sack that twitches now and then. A note from his friend explains everything: the otter has arrived.

6.2.2 Part II: Getting to know Mij

Maxwell looks back on that moment as the start of a lifelong obsession; he has since met many otter owners, and they are all hooked too. The creature that tumbles out looks nothing like a pet. Plated with dried mud like a coat of armour, it reminds him of a tiny dragon from medieval pictures. Only after a month is all the mud gone and his real brown coat visible.

Maxwell names him Mijbil, or Mij for short. Zoologists later find that Mij belongs to a kind of otter that science had never described. They name it Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli, Maxwell's otter, after the man who brought it to their notice.

For his first day Mij keeps his distance, showing neither affection nor anger, and picks the spot on the floor furthest from Maxwell. But in the early hours of the second night he climbs up and sleeps tucked behind Maxwell's knees till morning. From then on, he is curious about everything around him.

On a home-made harness, Mij is taken to the bathroom, where he spends a joyful half hour in the tub, diving, rolling and churning up the water. Maxwell learns that this is typical: to an otter, still water is a waste, so every bowl gets tipped over or, failing that, climbed into and splashed until it spills. Two days later Mij slips out, races to the bathroom, climbs the tub and twists a tap open within a minute. Later, when he turns a tap the wrong way and it tightens, he chatters at it in annoyance.

Within days the lead is no longer needed: Mij trots after Maxwell and answers to his name. Play fills his days. A rubber ball becomes a football that he dribbles with all four paws or tosses high with a jerk of his head. His favourite trick is to lie on his back and roll marbles about on his tummy without losing one.

6.2.3 Part III: Trouble on the way to London

The peaceful days in Basra end with one big worry: how to get Mij to Britain. The British airline will not carry animals, so Maxwell books another airline to Paris and on to London. Mij must travel in a box no more than eighteen inches (about 45 cm) on each side, placed on the floor at Maxwell's feet.

An hour before leaving, Maxwell shuts Mij in the new box to get him used to it, and goes out for a quick meal. He comes back to find the box ominously quiet and streaked with dried blood around its air holes. When the lid comes off, a worn-out, bloodied Mij clings to Maxwell for comfort; in his panic he has shredded the box's lining. Clearing out every sharp scrap takes time, and now there are only ten minutes to departure and five miles (8 km) to the airport. There is nothing to do but put the unhappy otter back and keep the lid shut with his hand.

A breakneck drive and some furious officials later, Maxwell is in his front-row seat with newspaper spread round his feet. He confides the whole drama to the air hostess and gives her Mij's fish to keep cool. When she suggests he might like to hold his pet on his lap, he is deeply grateful. As he admits, he did not yet know otters.

The moment the lid lifts, Mij is gone, racing down the cabin. Chaos follows: passengers cry out, and one woman, standing on her seat, takes him for a rat. Maxwell lunges for a vanishing tail, misses, and ends up with curry all over his face. The unruffled air hostess sends him back to his seat and takes over the search herself. Before long Mij finds his own way back, calling out as he recognises his friend, and leaps up to nuzzle him.

6.2.4 Part IV: Mij in London

In Maxwell's London flat, where they stay for nearly a month, Mij has a box of toys, among them a small turtle's shell from his home marsh. His best game, though, is one he makes up himself. A suitcase bent on the journey now shuts with its lid on a slope. Mij turns it into a slide for a ping-pong ball: ball at the top, a sprint to the bottom, an ambush, and back up again (Fig. 6.3). The game can hold him for half an hour.

Outside, Maxwell walks him on a lead like a dog, and Mij soon develops fixed little rituals, the way some children must avoid every crack in the pavement or touch every pillar along a corridor. Only on the return trip, never when setting out, he pulls Maxwell across to a primary school opposite the flat, which has a low wall about two feet (60 cm) high. Up he jumps and races along the top from end to end, while the classes inside forget their lessons.

Few Londoners have ever seen an otter, and their guesses astonish Maxwell. People name almost every member of the otter's own family except the right one. Then come wilder ideas, from a walrus and a hippo to a seal pup, a squirrel, a young bear, a beaver, a leopard and even a dinosaur. The prize goes to a labourer digging in the road. He stops work, stares as though someone is making fun of him, and then gruffly asks Maxwell to explain what on earth the thing is meant to be.

6.3 Thinking about the text

Strong answers about this piece rest on what Mij does and on how Maxwell tells it. Treat each of Mij's actions as evidence: it shows a quality, and often a feeling as well. The table below collects the evidence for four sides of his nature.

6.3.1 What we learn about otters

• They are rare enough in Britain that most Londoners could not recognise one.
• They love water and keep it moving: splashing, tipping bowls over and sitting in them.
• They are playful: they juggle small objects while lying on their backs and can throw a ball with a flick of the neck.
• They are intelligent, quick learners: Mij learned his name, followed on and off the lead and worked a tap.
• They can be tamed and grow deeply attached to one person.
• They belong to the weasel family (mustelids), and Mij's kind was new to science.

Why is Mij's kind called Maxwell's otter? Zoologists who examined him found that he belonged to a race, or subspecies, of otter that no scientist had described before. When a new animal is named, it is often named after the person who brought it to light, so the new subspecies became Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli. Today it is counted as a subspecies of the smooth-coated otter, the same species that lives along many Indian rivers.

6.3.2 Reading feelings from actions

Maxwell cannot ask Mij how he feels, so he reads the otter's moods from his behaviour and tells us what he thinks Mij feels. Try the same skill yourself.

6.3.3 How Maxwell tells it

Maxwell is a naturalist, so he watches closely and records small details: which way a tap turns, how long a game lasts, how far a wall runs. He is also a comic writer. He laughs at himself as much as at Mij, and he often describes the otter as a mischievous small boy with moods, games and private rules. Giving human feelings and habits to an animal like this is called anthropomorphism.

Much of the humour comes from surprising comparisons. A simile (उपमा) compares two things using like or as, and hyperbole (अतिशयोक्ति) exaggerates on purpose. Fig. 6.4 sets four of Maxwell's comparisons side by side, with what each one makes us see.

6.4 Thinking about language

NCERT's language work grows out of the story. It looks at how Maxwell describes Mij's daily habits, the detailed phrases he builds in front of nouns, and the way he measures things that cannot be counted.

6.4.1 Past habits: would and used to

To describe things that happened again and again in the past but no longer happen, English offers two tools: would + verb and used to + verb. Both work for repeated actions:

• Every Sunday my grandfather would cycle to the river for a swim.
• In Class 3 we used to swap cricket cards at lunch.
• Each time the ball reached the bottom, Mij would pounce on it.

Only used to works for past states: situations, feelings, beliefs and possessions that stayed the same for a while. Verbs such as be, have, own, live, know, believe and like describe states, so would sounds wrong with them in this meaning.

• ✓ Our town used to have only one cinema. ✗ Our town would have only one cinema.
• ✓ I used to believe the moon followed our car.
• ✓ My aunt used to be a hockey player.

Two more points help in the exam. Would needs the past time to be clear already, so a story often begins with used to and continues with would. And used to has negative and question forms with did: I didn't use to like okra. Did you use to live in Patna?

6.4.2 Noun modifiers

A noun modifier is a word that stands before a noun and tells us more about it. The noun being described is the head. Adjectives are the most common modifiers (a narrow lane), but English also lets one noun describe another (a cricket ground, a steel tumbler). Proper nouns can do the job too (the Mumbai local, a Diwali sale).

Modifiers can be stacked. Adjectives come first, and noun modifiers stand right next to the head: my old school cricket bat, a crowded Mumbai local train. A noun used as a modifier usually stays singular: we say a shoe shop, not a shoes shop, and a ten-rupee note. The story has many examples, such as the Consulate bedroom (proper noun), the chromium taps (noun), a low wall (adjective) and a terrapin shell (noun).

6.4.3 Quantity phrases

Nouns such as rice, advice, smoke, furniture and information are uncountable: we cannot say two advices or a furniture. To count or measure them we put a quantity phrase in front: a grain of rice, a word of advice, a puff of smoke, a piece of furniture. When Maxwell half-expected Mij to shake off a cloud of dust, the phrase made us picture a large amount.

6.5 Speaking and writing

6.5.1 Speaking: feelings without words

Maxwell never hears Mij speak, yet he reads the otter's moods from his body: a chatter means annoyance, a chirp means welcome. You will practise the same skill in a game of dumb charades.

6.5.2 Writing: describing someone you love

A good description does what Maxwell does. It shows a person or animal through what they do, then says what those actions reveal about how they feel and who they are. Plan yours in four moves, as in Fig. 6.7.

6.5.3 Beyond the text: should wild animals be pets?

Maxwell's adventures happened about seventy years ago, and laws and attitudes have changed a great deal since then. In India, all three of our otter species (the smooth-coated otter, the Eurasian otter and the Asian small-clawed otter) are protected under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. Catching, keeping or selling them without permission is a crime.

Trade in wild animals across borders is controlled by an international agreement called CITES. In 2019, India was among the countries that proposed moving the smooth-coated otter, Mij's own species, to the treaty's strictest list, which bans commercial trade in wild-caught animals. Airlines, too, now have detailed rules for carrying animals, with approved crates, health papers and special permits for wild species.

6.6 Fog

Have you watched winter fog roll over a city like Delhi or Kolkata? One minute the street is clear; the next, buildings melt into grey. Later, the fog slips away just as quietly as it came. Carl Sandburg turned such a morning into a tiny poem of six lines.

The poem at a glance. Form: one stanza of six short lines, about twenty words, in free verse. Speaker: an unnamed observer looking at a city by the sea. Central idea: fog behaves like a cat. It arrives without a sound, settles for a while to watch, and then leaves whenever it likes.

• Arrival (lines 1–2). The fog does not roll or crash in; it pads in on “little cat feet”. The image makes its coming silent and gentle, so nobody notices until it is already there.
• The pause (lines 3–5). Like a cat crouched on a wall, resting on its haunches (bent back legs), the fog settles high above the water and the rooftops and seems to gaze down at everything. It is resting, not threatening.
• Departure (line 6). Then, with no warning or reason, it simply goes, exactly as a cat wanders off once it has seen enough. Nothing is harmed, and the scene is clear again.

6.6.1 Metaphor, imagery and free verse

Sandburg never says the fog is like a cat, so this is a metaphor (रूपक), not a simile. Because the comparison runs through the whole poem, it is an extended metaphor. Count the cat clues: the soft feet, the crouching on haunches, the watching, and the silent coming and going. Many exam answers also call it personification (मानवीकरण), since the fog is given the behaviour of a living creature.

The imagery (बिंब) is mostly visual: we see grey softness over water and roofs. It also works through silence, and the soft s sounds in the middle of the poem add to the hush. The tone is calm and observant; the mood is quiet, a little mysterious and peaceful. There is no fear in the poem, even though fog can hide a whole city.

There is no rhyme scheme, no regular beat and no fixed line length. Poetry like this is called free verse (मुक्त छंद). The short, loose, unrhymed lines suit the subject: they are light and shapeless, like fog itself.

6.7 Board exam practice

CBSE papers test this unit with extract-based questions, short answers of about 40–50 words and long answers of about 100–120 words. The model answers below rely on the story's events rather than memorised lines, and each one lists the key points an examiner looks for.