As is often the case, I awoke this morning to the sensation of our cat walking gingerly across my head. Sleek and silky, with luxuriant dark fur, Winnie reminds me of the river otter I saw yesterday afternoon crossing the road and heading upstream into our backyard beaver pond system.

I’d been hoping the otter I have been seeing in the waterways nearby would find our ponds, which are fed by several small streams flowing out of the surrounding hills. Though the ponds turn a light brown this time of year from the clay-rich soil leaching from their banks, they support a healthy variety of life, from frogs, fish and crawdads; to ducks, herons, kingfishers and osprey; to beaver, muskrat, raccoon, mink…and now otter.

A descendant of the diverse weasel family, the river otter is a pinnacle of evolution if ever there were one. While their kin adapted to every other habitat in North America—the ermine and pine marten, to the snowy north woods; fisher, the ancient forests; mink, the riparian zones; badger, the arid plains; and wolverine, the mountainous high country—river otters are masters of inland waterways and freshwater lakes. To those who know them, “otter” is synonymous with the word “play.” Among the most spirited of species, they clearly enjoy themselves in the water, delighting in games with each other like tag and hide-and-go-seek. They also enjoy snow sports: otter “slides” are a familiar sight on snowy slopes along frozen rivers in winter.

Like every other fur-bearer on the continent, otters were nearly decimated during the mindless fur trade era. Unbelievably, otters are still killed in traps set by nineteenth century throw-backs even today. Others are shot by selfish humans unwilling to share aquatic resources that otters had adapted to hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens reached the Western Hemisphere.

The threat of human greed is even more pervasive for sea otters, who have all but lost their ability to move about on land, giving themselves and their terrestrial origins up to their oceanic habitat. Unlike commercial fishermen, they don’t sit out the storms in a cozy home or a dry shack heated by an oil furnace; they spend day and night floating among the coastal kelp beds.

River otter are more than welcome to stay as long as they like here in our beaver ponds. Hopefully we’ll get an occasional glimpse of them swimming fluidly by, or moving on land with their trademark weasel-esque, undulating lope. I’m just glad Winnie is lighter afoot when she tip-toes across my head in the morning.