Remember I told you the Cherokee called this valley Tsiyahi — Otter Place — for the river otters that once played in these streams? And remember I said the otters were mostly gone? Well. I saved the good news for later on purpose, because this is one of the few stories out of these mountains that ends better than it started.
For a long stretch, the otters really were gone. Trapped out for their fur, driven off by dirty water and lost habitat, they vanished from these creeks for something like fifty years. The Otter Place with no otters. It sat that way for generations — just a name on a map, a memory of an animal nobody living had seen swim here.
And then folks decided to fix it. On a winter day in February of 1986, biologists carried eleven river otters down to Abrams Creek — that's the very stream that runs right through this cove and pours off at Abrams Falls — and let them go. Just turned them loose to see if they'd take. And they took. Over the next several years they brought in more, better than a hundred otters released across the park's waters, and the animals dug in, paired up, and got to the serious business of making more otters.
So today, if you're quiet and lucky along Abrams Creek at dawn or dusk, you just might see one — a sleek dark shape sliding through the water, rolling, fishing, playing the way otters do, like the last two hundred years never happened. The Cherokee named this the Otter Place. We nearly made liars of them. And then, for once, we made it true again. I don't know about you, but I need a story like that every now and then.
Photo: Dmitry Azovtsev · CC BY-SA 3.0
