MIJBIL THE OTTER

handed me a note from my friend: “Here is your otter...” With the opening of that sack began a phase of my life that has not yet ended, and may, for all I know, not end before I do. It is, in effect, a thraldom to otters, an otter fixation, that I have since found to be shared by most other people, who have ever owned one. The creature that emerged from this sack on to the spacious tiled floor of the Consulate bedroom resembled most of all a very small, medievally- conceived, dragon. From the head to the tip of the crossed my mind (a thought) came into my mind a stone's throw a very short distance cabled sent a message by telegraph squirmed twisted about thraldom (old fashioned) being under the control of fixation a very strong attachment or feeling medievally- conceived an imagination of the Middle Ages tail he was coated with symmetrical pointed scales of mud armour, between whose tips was visible a soft velvet fur like that of a chocolate-brown mole.

He shook himself, and I half expected a cloud of dust, but in fact it was not for another month that I managed to remove the last of the mud and see the otter, as it were, in his true colours. Mijbil, as I called the otter, was, in fact, of a