It is dawn in Shetland. The sky silvered and golden, the tide on the flood as a man rows forth in his little yellow boat, determined to lure forth his unexpected new friend – not to confinement, but to her wild and natural state.
But, as the camera-drone rises to show us, the sinuous otter swirling in his wake, absolutely in her element, has no intention of going anywhere.
At least, not very far...
Central to the power of Charlie Hamilton James’s delightful documentary Billy and Molly: An Otter Love Story is that it is not a gooey, patronising ‘Disney’ film of the ‘Well, hi, li’l feller!’ variety.
Not one of those white-saviour tales where someone rescues, domesticates and ‘tames’ a wild animal to the point of taking it out for walks on the lead, letting it play in the bath with their offspring or doing that cynical, gropey Johnny Morris schtick as if the beast were but a cuddly toy.
And there is tragic Scottish precedent for that.
The great thing about Billy and Molly is that, in the bleak mid-pandemic spring of 2021 – and, be assured, Shetland does good bleak – man and beast really saved each other.
Shortly after Billy Mail returned in 2018, with wife Susan, to Shetland, he lost his father to cancer. His mother wilted into a care-home and, in 2020, succumbed to Covid.
Billy Mail with Molly the Otter in Shetland
Billy had to deal with all this on top of the many privations we are all so eager to forget from that international ordeal.
And, in his late fifties, contemplate not just his own mortality but his probable childlessness (though Susan has two offspring from a previous marriage.)
Then, in March 2021, everything changed. ‘I was looking out the window and I saw this otter fishing in the sea,’ recalls says Billy.
I wondered how close I could get, so I hurried down to the pontoon while she was underwater, phone in hand, in case she came close enough.
‘Then she popped up right in front of me and started to eat the crab she had caught. Then halfway through she turned and looked me straight in the eye.
‘I immediately knew something was very badly wrong because there’s no way a healthy otter would remain so close. And then I saw how emaciated she was...
‘Molly was desperate, starving, and was probably going to die. She was eating crabs, which is a bad sign, because it takes more energy to catch them than they get out of them.
Billys unique relationship with Molly the Otter has been made into a documentary film
‘Her bones were hanging out, her flesh falling off. When animals are desperate, they seem to know humans can help them.
‘Otters are not given to be friendly towards humans, but she made that connection, and she didn’t really have any fear, and that lack of fear turned to curiosity.
She took a step toward us, and we took a step towards her, and the rest is history.’
Days later, Billy and Susan learned a very dead adult female otter had been found locally a week or two before.
‘Molly,’ as Billy dubbed her, was an ill-trained orphan. One immediately to feed, and, somehow, tactfully to mentor.
Responsibly, he sought advice from the outset from the local wildlife sanctuary. Cautiously, he began dropping fish – haddock, mostly – for Molly to eat.
Made her a basic shelter with an upturned boat; a coil of rope beneath for a bed.
And became almost the critter’s mother, joining her for walks, exploring rock-pools – as any otter tends and trains its young – and even making a singular diversion to which Molly took ecstatically.
Molly was originally found emaciated and Billy helped feed her back to health
‘When he built the ball-pit, I was crying with laughter,’ Charlie Hamilton Smith beams. ‘She would roll around and play, and he would love it.’
But, while Billy befriended the animal, at no point did he try to make her a household pet.
Otters are among our most elusive wild animals, primarily – at least in the West Highlands – maritime, and by preference nocturnal.
Their dense, fine, insulating fur was at one time most prized, not least by the Russian nobility. And, till very recent decades, not least in Britain, they were savagely persecuted.
Anglers and gamekeepers hated the competition; the mass of countryfolk thought otters vermin.
Incredibly, it was as late as 1981 before they won full protection in law and, given their shyness, it is very hard to number them, though there are thought to be about 8,000 in Scotland.
I first encountered otters camping for a night in Skye in July 1985, glimpsing their roiling in the Broadford shallows as the dawn loomed over Wester Ross hills, listening to their cheery whistles.
But when I first met one close, some fifteen years later – a big dog-otter, crossing the road as cool as you please in the Harris township of Direcleit, he looked at me, I looked at him – and I instinctively took a step back.
Molly in the waters off Shetland
Something in the lolloping creature’s eye, in a fraction of a second, left me in no doubt whatever that, if I dared mess with him, I would not just be chancing a nip. Rather, life-changing injuries.
Just as Billy Mail’s dog, Jade, drops her ball frequently in instinctive subservience to Molly. While local seals at once slide from their skerries when, slight as she is by comparison, the otter approaches.
This is an apex-predator, the one I saw that Harris afternoon was the size of a Labrador, and its teeth can bite effortlessly through bone.
‘There was never any question of “taming” Molly or bringing her inside,’ confides Billy.
‘She was a wild creature and I was always careful about that. I never even tried to touch her – she could easily have taken my finger off.
Sometimes she’ll stick her paw up through the boards of the pontoon and she’ll let me stroke her paw.
‘It’s always on her terms, and that’s fine because I never wanted to domesticate her. I just wanted to keep her alive.’
That we shifted as a nation from a kill-them-all outlook on otters is largely down to two men.
Molly joins Billy as he rows out
Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, published in 1927, fast became a children’s classic.
And then, in 1960, Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water – a delightful account of his life in a remote cottage south of Glenelg, complete with pet otters – became a global bestseller.
But, by the law of unintended consequences, it destroyed his life – his solitude and writing-routine wrecked by the thousands of readers determined to seek him out, out of the blue and without invitation or appointment.
And, some would argue, did untold long-term harm to the Gaelic language and Highland culture, as tens of thousands in the decades since, and in Maxwell’s wake, sought new lives in the north and west of Scotland.
Maxwell died in 1969 when he was still only 55. He was essentially in permanent adolescence – a highly strung chap of arrested development, a heavy drinker, the sort of high-maintenance friend who thought nothing of ringing someone up at two in the morning to declare that, if they did not come round immediately, he would kill himself.
And his absurd huggy-kissy devotion to his otters drove the creatures quietly demented.
To the point where two of them savaged, respectively, Maxwell’s young stepson, his teenage ward Terry Nutkins – the future Animal Magic presenter lost a couple of fingers – and an unfortunate visitor, Caroline Jarvis.
The animals were fast confined to strict no-contact captivity, as the ‘Camusfearna’ idyll collapsed.
Molly offers a paw of friendship through a gap in the pier
Maxwell’s first otter, Mijbil, had earlier perished at the hands of a local roadman – slain with one blow of a spade because the creature had never been given the least reason to fear a human.
‘My experience with otters since those days,’ the late Terry Nutkins confided to Maxwell’s biographer in 1993, ‘is that adult otters can undoubtedly be explosive, unreliable, untrustworthy animals.
‘But in the case of Gavin’s pet otters there was an extra dimension. Edal and Teko – and Mij, too, for that matter – were subject to unusual pressures.
‘They were humanised otters, kept under unnatural domestic conditions with the pressures of humans on them all the time. This may have been bearable to them when they were young cubs, but once they had grown up it could well have been too much for them.
‘Otters react to people’s feelings, and Gavin heaped all his feelings on his otters. He used to get terribly childish in their company... a very odd look on his face when he rolled around with them on the floor, exchanging saliva with them, blowing in their fur, desperately trying to communicate with them and make them become part of him...’
The Mails have been far wiser, though Susan does chuckle about Billy’s outlay for a second deep-freeze, the original now full to the brim with Molly’s fish.
And the miniature of their house he built outside for the otter, complete with Ring camera so they can enjoy Molly’s periodic visits.
And she still enjoys joining him for the odd stroll – though her cubs, now Molly is a parent herself, are as wary of humans they ought to be.
Billy and Molly: An Otter Love Story premiered some months ago in Austin, Texas and again, in Montrose, in September.
Such was Scottish demand for tickets that there had to be an unscheduled second screening.
Charlie Hamilton James is scarcely a novice. The renowned wildlife filmmaker was a mere 16 when he first worked with Sir David Attenborough on still another of that national treasure’s television glories, 1990’s The Trials of Life.
And Charlie stresses how multi-dimensional his latest movie is. ‘People think it’ll be a story about a bloke and an otter, but it’s about love, childlessness, overcoming – it has a lot of emotional layering in that it took a while, that trust between me and Billy, as we became closer friends.
‘If you’re putting your whole life into my hands to tell your story, it’s a precarious thing and takes a lot of trust. It was lovely of him to open up about things he had held tight.’
And of that break of day scene with Billy’s rowboat, Molly gambolling behind? ‘Of all the things I’ve ever shot, that moment is the pinnacle,’ says Charlie Hamilton James.
‘The dawn light and the otter swimming. It was so insanely beautiful. My hands were shaking as I tried to control the drone.
‘For someone who spends all my life working with emotion and aesthetics, that was the lucky pinnacle of it all and I’m glad I didn’t screw it up.’
And Susan’s gentle narration – she shares that role with Billy – takes the film into a whole new dimension. Her voiceover ‘is so important,’ says Charlie, ‘because it adds an emotional depth.
‘The head of National Geographic Talent said to her after the premiere that it was one of the best voiceovers he’d ever heard.’
But of the man and the otter? ‘I think we found one another at a point of crisis,’ says Billy.
‘I was stressed out and a bit ground down – but this little creature took me out of myself and transposed me into the very simple world of an animal that’s going to die unless I intervene. Ultimately, I think we saved each other.’
Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story now streams on Disney+ and is being broadcast on the National Geographic channel.