The Rarities

The Rarities by E.V. Lucas (1906)

"The Rarities" by E.V. Lucas is an essayistic reflection on the rare and fortunate encounters with wildlife that punctuate an otherwise ordinary life, prompted by a recent stay at the country home of a friend whose garden is graced by a trout-stream and a cedar tree. The narrator begins by describing the particular pleasure of at last finding conditions perfect for idle reading beside running water, a longing he has carried since childhood. The setting is idyllic: warm sun, a burbling current, the plashing of a fountain, sweet scents, bright phloxes and dahlias, and the momentary visit of a peacock butterfly on the open page of his book. From this contentment he moves to reflect on how rarity is entirely a matter of perspective. What is commonplace to one person is a wonder to another: swallow-tailed butterflies are ordinary on the cliffs near Dieppe but thrilling to the English schoolboy; foxes at play are routine to a gamekeeper but unforgettable to a town dweller. For the narrator, who lives far from water, the kingfisher occupies this category of the marvellous. He records his sightings with the precision of a naturalist keeping accounts: one on the Rother near Midhurst, another near Abingdon, a third at Burford Bridge, a fourth in the valley between Rievaulx and Helmsley. Four kingfishers across a long and not indolent life, despite at least two weeks spent searching for the bird along the quieter stretches of the Avon near the Combertons and about Harington Weir. Last week, sitting motionless by the stream, he adds a fifth: a jewel of a bird that darted through the air and burned bright against the dark depths of a yew before vanishing almost before he had registered its presence. The encounter with the kingfisher leads him to the still greater rarity of the otter. His friend recently witnessed one climb from the water and stroll along the bank, bright-eyed and inquisitive; the narrator himself has never seen a wild otter, only those at the Zoo, which he notes with affection as the one Zoo animal that seems genuinely content, so at ease in its native element that he feels no sorrow for it. This reflection draws him back to the single otter hunt he ever joined, seventeen years earlier in Sussex. The pack had come all the way from Wales, led by an owner who was a ruin of a man, paralysed below the waist and with only one arm, yet strapped to a faithful pony and possessed entirely by the passion of the chase. The narrator remembers this figure, whom he calls a stricken centaur, patrolling the banks hour after hour and urging on his hounds with shouts and cries, and is grateful that on that occasion no otter was killed. This gratitude is deepened by a passage he has re-read in the autobiographical reminiscences of Albert Pell, which recounts the story of Sir John Lawes's tame otters at Rothamsted. The pair lived by a pool in the park and, when Sir John returned from London by carriage, recognised the paces of his horses at a distance, emerged from their retreat, and ran ahead of the carriage to the Hall, jumping at the horses' noses until the basket of fresh fish he always brought them was emptied. Taken to Sir John's Scottish forest, they ranged freely, going off each evening on fishing excursions in wild Highland waters and returning reliably before daylight, until a gillie killed the female and the bereaved male grew increasingly irregular in his habits, staying out for longer and longer periods until he finally disappeared altogether. The narrator then turns to what he considers a still more remarkable claim to distinction: coming upon the dead body of a badger lying in the mouth of its burrow during a Sunday morning walk in Sussex. He has known badgers to be present within half a mile, and the previous year was distressed when a party of men with eight dogs were permitted by the farmer to dig out and kill two young badgers. This badger's death is a mystery, but it lay peacefully with its black-and-yellow head resting between its long-clawed paws, resembling a sleeping bear. Its skin is now kept in the house as what the narrator calls a bloodless trophy and proof that England is not yet wholly tamed.

By E.V. Lucas · First published 1906 · Genre: Essay, Nature Writing, Autobiography · 1,730 words

First lines

I have been staying in the remote country with an aristocrat, by which, of course, I mean not a man with two motor-cars, or a man with illustrious quarterings, but one through whose garden runs a trout-stream. I used to think that the possession of a cedar alone conferred aristocracy, and I still think that in some measure it does; but a stream with trout in it...! Moreover, this friend of mine has a cedar too.

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kingfishers · otters · badgers · wildlife · nature writing · personal essay · English countryside · 19th century · rarity · memory · nostalgia · streams

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