From the Field Notes of Colonel Aubrey Fitch-Harrington, FRS

Observations Upon the Fauna of Southern Africa — Volume III (In Preparation)

“The Cape Clawless Otter (Aonyx capensis) is the largest otter in Africa and the only species found in Southern Africa. It has no claws on the outer toes of its forefeet, and greatly reduced claws elsewhere. This is not a deficiency. The forefeet function as hands — coordinated, sensitive, used to find food by touch in dark water, under rocks, in river beds, in coastal rock pools. The author watched one searching a pool for forty minutes and wrote effective foraging technique before understanding that what he was watching was an animal using its hands. He revised the note. Hands is the correct word. The correct word was available from the first moment and the author chose a different one.”

It was working the pool with both hands.

That was what he wrote, and then crossed out, and then wrote again. The otter was in the shallow rock pool at the river’s edge, and its forefeet were moving the way hands move when hands are searching for something specific in a place they cannot see into. Lifting rocks. Feeling the underside. Moving to the next rock. Occasional retrieval — a crab, extracted from under a flat stone with the specific grip of fingers that knew what they were looking for.

He wrote effective foraging technique and looked at it.

The otter put its hand under a flat stone at the pool’s centre and felt around it and extracted something and ate it. A small crab. Gone in one movement.

He crossed out effective foraging technique.

He wrote: hands.

The river smelled of cold water and wet stone and something organic from the decomposition at the pool’s margins, the specific smell of a river system going about its work. The otter moved through it with the focused attention of something working and not distracted.

He watched for forty minutes.

The otter worked the pool systematically — not randomly, not by sight alone, but by touch, in an order that covered the available ground. Left side. The large rocks at the centre. The shallow shelf at the far edge. It knew what it was looking for by the shape of it under the hands: the specific weight and texture of a crab under a river stone, different from a frog in the mud at the pool’s edge, different again from a fish against the palm.

“It feels everything,” he said to Cetshwayo.

“Yes.”

“It finds by touch.”

“In the dark water, in the night. The eyes are not the primary instrument.”

The Colonel looked at his field notes where he had been writing about visual foraging, about the efficiency of the otter in clear water. He had been watching the wrong thing. The water in which it actually foraged — at night, under rocks, in turbid rivers — required a different instrument. The claws had been reduced to give the fingertips better access to the surfaces they were reading.