The life of Gavin Maxwell - author of "Ring of Bright Water" - combines high adventure, encounters with wildlife, passionately descriptive writing and a deeply troubled personality. Homosexual, but briefly married and a longstanding friend of the poet Kathleen Raine, eccentric and solitary, he found the call of the wild irresistable. It was Wilfrid Thesiger who gave Maxwell the otter Mij which set him on his new life's course, and it was the otters at Camusfearna which were to make Maxwell's name famous.