Can I take him home...

Of course, the answer is no.

Now for the story... Mischa and I were sitting on the very bench from which I saw the otter some weeks back and we heard a noise. A grunting squeaking calling that was definitely mammal.

"It's there, in the ferns! Just behind you!" Mischa whispered. "Don't move! Don't turn!"

We were still as stone and waited. The sounds retreated and departed. I stood and walked into the wood, by the hut that stands there. I thought I could hear a sound in the trees and my ears were ringing with the desire to hear, to locate, to find. And then I looked down.

"It's a baby stoat!" I whispered. And at first Mischa thought I was joking.

I was pulling out my phone so slowly, so quietly, my eternal desire to grasp Gaia. But the baby did not move. He looked up, alert and questioning. And of a sudden I felt that my force-field, my hollow place, had shrunk to allow in this wild being and he was undaunted.

Of course, the reason is that a baby does not know what to fear. He heard rustling and perhaps thought it was the return of his mother. He saw the shape of what... a tree? Something surely that he had never seen.

And yet I felt the potential, the promise, the imaginal future of a world where the human is not the enemy and my heart surged.

We were concerned about the baby as he was still there fifteen minutes later. We called a wildlife rescue centre and they advised us, as we expected, to leave him be and leave the area. He was old enough, apparently, to cope alone - but more likely, with us gone, he and the mother would be reunited.