*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75899 ***

TARKA THE OTTER




_Henry Williamson has also written_

 THE OLD STAG
 SUN BROTHERS
 THE LONE SWALLOWS

_Published by E. P. Dutton & Company_




TARKA THE OTTER HIS JOYFUL WATER-LIFE AND DEATH IN THE COUNTRY OF THE
TWO RIVERS BY HENRY WILLIAMSON WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE HON. SIR
JOHN FORTESCUE K.C.V.O.

[Illustration]

PUBLISHED BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY FACING ST. THOMAS'S CHURCH ON FIFTH
AVENUE IN NEW YORK




Tarka the Otter, Copyright, 1928 By E. P. Dutton & Company :: All
Rights Reserved :: Printed in U.S.A.




TO WILLIAM HENRY ROGERS




CONTENTS


 INTRODUCTION
 THE FIRST YEAR
        CHAPTER ONE
        CHAPTER TWO
        CHAPTER THREE
        CHAPTER FOUR
        CHAPTER FIVE
        CHAPTER SIX
        CHAPTER SEVEN
        CHAPTER EIGHT
        CHAPTER NINE
        CHAPTER TEN
 THE LAST YEAR
        CHAPTER ELEVEN
        CHAPTER TWELVE
        CHAPTER THIRTEEN
        CHAPTER FOURTEEN
        CHAPTER FIFTEEN
        CHAPTER SIXTEEN
        CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
        CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
        CHAPTER NINETEEN
        LAST CHAPTER




INTRODUCTION


Men speak to each other of what they have heard, seen, touched,
smelled, tasted. They agree that thunder is terrifying, that the sky
is blue, that gorse is prickly, that sulphuretted hydrogen is foul,
that sloes are acid. But whether our five senses convey to any two
of us exactly the same impression, we know not nor ever shall know.
When we travel beyond sensation or perception to the working of the
intelligence we know far more of each other. Yet a man's mind is a
mystery to his own brother, and a woman's to her own sister; and
between man and woman, in the matter of identity of understanding,
there is a fixed and impassable gulf. In fact, we know nothing about
our fellow men and women; and yet for centuries men have written, and
still find courage to write, what is called history--the story, that
is to say, of the relations of individuals and of groups of men with
each other. Moreover these histories, unless shown to be false, tend
to be accepted as true; though he would be a bold historian indeed who
would claim to have penetrated to the inner truth of any historical
transaction. For always there remains the insurmountable fact that we
are and must continue profoundly ignorant concerning even those who are
nearest to us.

But if the historian of men's lives be audacious, much more so is he
who would write of the lives of other animals. In some cases we may
be fairly certain that those animals possess the same five senses as
ourselves; but some may possess more, and some fewer; and in any case
we cannot be sure that the quality of the sense is at all the same. The
mystery of their daily lives is more impenetrable even than that of our
own; and yet we can only employ the same means to pierce into it that
we can employ with each other--observation and imagination. Moreover,
our powers of observation are necessarily limited, because we cannot
(except with the help of cumbrous appliances, and then not for long)
live up in the air or under water; while our powers of imagination,
being confined within the bounds of our human experience, may easily
lead us hopelessly astray. The biographers of animals, in fact, are apt
to endow their heroes and heroines with human attributes, and to make
them think as human beings. I am myself a sinner in this respect, and
it is in consequence of this sin that I am asked to introduce to the
public Mr. Williamson's far sounder and deeper biography of Tarka, the
Otter. If I have any claim to take by the hand one whose excellent work
enables him very well to walk by himself, it is rather because I am an
historian of one phase of human nature and in that capacity have been
driven to exercise observation and imagination.

But, it may be objected, an historian's business lies with musty papers
and printed books. In a great measure, to his misfortune, it does; but
these are not his only documents. Old buildings, old roads, and old
tracks are a few among many others; and these the biographer of the
wild animal shares with him; for the otter, as Mr. Williamson shows,
has his world-old haunts and tracks, and not the otter only. Who, for
instance, would assign any age to a badger-earth or to a peregrine
falcon's eyrie unless he knew it to be recent? And, to descend to more
precise matters, a stag's shed horns of last year are a document, if
not human, at any rate cervine, from which he who runs may sometimes
read much. Mr. Williamson is always on the watch for such documents as
these, and he knows how to interpret them.

But it is not he who runs but rather he who remains still that is
the best observer of wild creatures; and it is easy to see that Mr.
Williamson has waited immovable through long hours of darkness and of
daylight, of fair weather and foul, with eyes, weary it may be, but
always alert and vigilant. And he has studied the ways not of one wild
creature but of many, and thus has been able to understand, in some
measure, the relations of the different creatures to each other. Nor
is he less attentive to their environment, for he is familiar with
wild plants and wild flowers as with wild animals; and I will venture
to guess that nothing that passes within range of his vision remains
unnoticed. He may be watching two otters at play, but, if there be a
grass-snake on the opposite bank, a patch of butterfly orchis peeping
through a gap in the fence, and two carrion-crows mobbing a buzzard
overhead, he will surely mark one and all of them.

Of knowledge and observation, then, he has a rich treasure to pour down
before us, and he has, moreover, the imagination that not only further
enriches but also beautifies it. Finally he has the literary skill to
present to us his wares in a most attractive form. If anything, his
artistic conscience is rather too sensitive, and at times possibly he
carries the work of finishing and polishing to excess; but before we
can find fault he wins us back by such a touch as this: "He (the otter)
rolled, shook himself, and set off again, roaming round the fen until
he heard again the cry of running water. The cry came out of a hollow
whose sides were scarred by the sliding of broken hummocks, _the faint
cry of a river new born_."

The spirit of Dartmoor and of Exmoor is, above all, the spirit of the
waters, and to Mr. Williamson it is a spirit so familiar as to have
become a part of himself. He loves the air, as witness his pictures of
raven and peregrine and other birds. He loves the earth, as testify
his studies of fitch and fox and badger. But above all he loves the
water--fresh, brackish, salt; mist, rain, snow, ice--he follows it
lovingly in all its forms. For him, I think, as for some others of us
the Spirit of God still moves, as before the creation, upon the face
of the waters.

And now it is time for me to drop Mr. Williamson's hand as a leader,
and leave him to guide his readers over moor and fen and meadow, over
land and stream and sea, in the track of Tarka the Otter. I have been
privileged to follow him earlier than other men; and if all shall find
the journey as full of interest and joy as myself, then our author
will have made for us a happier and more beautiful world, a world in
which we can seek refuge among the toils and the worries of life, and
be thankful.

J. W. FORTESCUE.




THE FIRST YEAR




TARKA THE OTTER


CHAPTER ONE


Dimmity on meadow and water, the eve-star shining over the hill, and
Old Nog the heron crying _kra-a-ark!_ as his slow dark wings carried
him down to the estuary. A whiteness drifting above the sere reeds of
the riverside, for the owl had flown from under the middle arch of the
stone bridge that once had carried the canal across the river.

Below Canal Bridge, on the right bank, grew twelve great trees,
with roots awash. Thirteen had stood there--eleven oaks and two ash
trees--but the oak nearest the North Star had never thriven, since
first a pale green hook had pushed out of a swelled black acorn left
by floods on the bank more than three centuries before. In its second
year a bullock's hoof had crushed the seedling, breaking its two ruddy
leaves, and the sapling grew up crooked. The cleft of its fork held the
rains of two hundred years, until frost made a wedge of ice that split
the trunk; another century's weather wore it hollow, while every flood
took more earth and stones from under it. And one rainy night, when
salmon and peal from the sea were swimming against the brown rushing
water, the tree had suddenly groaned. Every root carried the groans
of the moving trunk, and the voles ran in fear from their tunnels. It
rocked until dawn; and when the wind left the land it gave a loud cry,
scaring the white owl from its roost, and fell into the river as the
sun was rising.

Now the water had dropped back, and dry sticks lodged on the branches
marked the top of the flood. The river flowed slowly through the pool,
a-glimmer with the clear green western sky. At the tail of the pool it
quickened smoothly into paws of water, with star-streaming claws. The
water murmured against the stones. Jets and rills ran fast and shallow
to an island, on which grew a leaning willow tree. Down from here the
river moved swift and polished. Alder and sallow grew on its banks.
Round a bend it hastened, musical over many stretches of shillet; at
the end of the bend it merged into a dull silence of deep saltwater,
and its bright spirit was lost. The banks below were mud, channered
by the sluices of guts draining the marsh. Every twelve hours the sea
passed an arm under Halfpenny Bridge, a minute's heron-flight below,
and the spring tides felt the banks as far as the bend. The water moved
down again immediately, for the tide's-head had no rest.

The tree lay black in the glimmering salmon pool. Over the meadow a
mist was moving, white and silent as the fringe of down on the owl's
feathers. Since the fading of shadows it had been straying from the
wood beyond the mill-leat, bearing in its breath the scents of the day,
when bees had bended bluebell and primrose. Now the bees slept, and
mice were running through the flowers. Over the old years' leaves the
vapour moved, silent and wan, the wraith of waters once filling the
ancient wide river-bed--men say that the sea's tides covered all this
land, when the Roman galleys drifted up under the hills.

Earth trickled by the gap in the bank to the broken roots below.
Voles were at work, clearing their tunnels, scraping new shafts and
galleries, biting the rootlets which hindered them. An otter curled in
the dry upper hollow of the fallen oak heard them, and uncurling, shook
herself on four short legs. Through a woodpecker's hole above her she
saw the star-cluster of the Hunting Dogs as faint points of light. She
was hungry. Since noon the otter had lain there, sometimes twitching in
sleep.

The white owl alighted on the upright branch of the tree, and the
otter heard the scratch of its talons as they gripped the bark. She
looked from the opening, and the brush of her whiskers on the wood was
heard by the bird, whose ear-holes, hidden by feathers, were as large
as those of a cat. The owl was hearkening, however, for the prick of
the claws of mice on leaves, and when it heard these tiny noises, it
stared until it saw movement, and with a skirling screech that made the
mouse crouch in a fixity of terror sailed to the ground and clutched it
in a foot. The otter gave but a glance to the bird; she was using all
her senses to find enemies.

She stood rigid. The hair on her back was raised. Her long tail was
held straight. Only her nose moved, as it worked at the scents brought
by the mist from the wood. Mingled with the flower odours, which were
unpleasant to her, was the taint that had given her a sudden shock;
causing her heart to beat quickly, for power of running and fighting if
cornered: the taint most dreaded by the otters who wandered and hunted
and played in the country of the Two Rivers--the scent of Deadlock,
the great pied hound with the belving tongue, leader of the pack whose
kills were notched on many hunting poles.

The otter had been hunted that morning. Deadlock had chopped at her
pate, and his teeth had grooved a mark in her fur, as she ran over a
stony shallow. The pack had been whipped off when the Master had seen
that she was heavy with young, and she had swum away down the river,
and hidden in the hollow of the water-lapped trunk.

The mist moved down with the river; her heart slowed; she forgot
quickly. She put her head and shoulders under water, holding her
breath, and steadying herself by pressing her tail, which was thick and
strong and tapered from where her backbone ended, against the rough
bark. She was listening and watching for fish. Not even the voles
peeping from their holes again heard the otter as she slid into the
water.

Her dark form came within the inverted cone of water-light wherein
movement above was visible to a trout waving fins and tail behind a
sunken bough. While the otter was swimming down to the rocky bed, she
saw the glint of scales as the fish sped in zigzag course to its cave.
The otter was six feet under the surface, and at this depth her eyes,
set level with the short fur of the head, could detect any movement
above her in the water lit by star-rays. She could see about four times
her own length in front, but beyond all was obscure, for the surface
reflected the dark bed of the river. Swimming above the weeds of the
pool, she followed the way of the trout, searching every big boulder.
She was way-wise in the salmon pool. In underwater pursuit her acute
sense of smell was useless, for she could not breathe.

She peered around the rocks, and in every cave in the bank. She swam
without haste, in a slow and easy motion, with kicks of her thick
webbed hindfeet, and strokes of her tail which she used as a rudder
to swing herself up or down or sideways. She found the fish under an
ash-tree root, and as it tried to dart away over her head, she threw
herself sideways and backwards and seized it in her teeth. By a bay in
the bank, broken and beaten by the hooves of cattle going to drink,
she ate her prey, holding it in her forepaws and cranching with her
head on one side. She ate to the tail, which was left on a wad of
drying mud cast from a hoof; and she was drinking a draught of water
when a whistling cry came from under Canal Bridge. It had a thin,
hard, musical quality, and carried far down the river. She answered
gladly, for it was the call of the dog-otter with whom she had mated
nearly nine weeks before. He had followed her down from the weir by
the scent lying in her seals, or footprints, left on many scours, and
on the otterpath across the meadowland of the river's bend. He swam in
the deep water, hidden except for his nose, which pushed a ream on the
surface placid in the windless night.

As she watched, the ream became a swirl. The otter on land heard the
instant hiss of breath in the nostrils before they sank. Immediately
she slipped into the river with the least ripple tracing where she had
entered. The dog-otter had sniffed the scent of a fish.

Bubbles began to rise in the pool, making two chains with
silver-pointed links, which moved steadily upstream. Twenty yards
above the swirl, which lingered as the sway of constellations between
black branches, a flat wide head fierce with whiskers looked up and
went under again, the top of a back following in the down-going curve
so smooth that the bubbles rising after it were just rocked. Time of
breathing-in was less than half a second.

The bubbles, eking out of nostrils, ran over pate and neck and shook
off between the shoulders, to rise in clusters the size of hawthorn
peggles; the dog-otter was swimming with his forelegs tucked against
his chest. Near the bridge the bubbles rose large as oak-apples; he
was kicking four webs together, having sighted the fish. The bubbles
ended in another swirl by a weed-fringed sterling, and a delicate swift
water-arrow shot away between the two piers of the middle arch--the
peal, or sea-trout, had gone down, passing three inches off the snapt
jaws. The river became silent again, save where it murmured by root
and rock. Old Nog the heron alighted by a drain behind the sea-wall of
the marsh two miles below Halfpenny Bridge, whither he had straightly
flown. The white owl had just caught by an old straw rick its second
mouse, which, like the first, caught five minutes before, was swallowed
whole.

Where water clawed the stones at the tail of the pool, the peal leapt
to save itself from the bigger enemy ever trudging and peering behind
it. It fell on the shillets, on its side, and flapped, once, then lay
still, moving only its gills. Then a dog-otter was standing by it,
holding up his nose to sniff the air when a thin, wavy, snarling cry
rose out of the river. It was the bitch's yinny-yikker, or threat. She
ran upon the fish, pulled it away from the dog, who was not hungry, and
started to eat it.

While she was chawing the bones and flesh of the head the dog played
with a stone, and only when she had turned away from the broken fish
did he approach and lick her face in greeting. Her narrow lower jaw
dropped in a wide yawn which showed the long canine teeth, curved
backwards for holding fish, and kept white by the strength of bites.
The yawn marked the end of a mood of anxiety. The dog had caught and
eaten a peal on his journey, and was ready for sport and play, but
the bitch did not follow him into the river. She felt the stir of her
young, snarled at the dog in sudden fear, and turned away from the
water.

She ran over the bullocks' drinking place and passed through willows
to the meadow, seeking old dry grasses and mosses under the hawthorns
growing by the mill-leat, and gathering them in her mouth with wool
pulled from the over-arching blackberry brambles whose prickles had
caught in the fleeces of sheep. She returned to the river bank and swam
with her webbed hind-feet to the oak tree, climbed to the barky lip of
the holt, and crawled within. Two yards inside she strewed her burden
on the wood-dust, and departed by water for the dry, sand-coloured
reeds of the old summer's growth which she bit off, frequently pausing
to listen. After several journeys she sought trout by cruising under
water along the bank, and loach which she found by stirring up the sand
and stones of the shallow whereon they lurked. The whistles of the dog
were sometimes answered, but so anxious was she to finish making the
couch in the hollow tree that she left off feeding while still hungry,
and ran over the water-meadow to an inland pond for the floss of
reed-maces which grew there. On the way she surprised a young rabbit,
killing it with two bites behind the ear, and tearing the skin in her
haste to feed. Later in the night a badger found the head and feet and
skin as he lumbered after slugs and worms, and chewed them up.

The moon rose up two hours before the dawn, and the shaken light on the
waters gladdened her, for she was young, and whistling to her mate,
she swam to the high arched bridge up-river and hid among the sticks
and branches posited by the flood on the bow of the stone cutwater.
Here he found her, and as he scrambled up she slipped into the river
and swam under the arch to the lower end of the cutwater, meeting him
nose-to-nose in a maze of bubbles, and swimming back under the arch.
They played for half an hour, turning on their backs with sideway
sweeps of rudders, and never touching, although their noses at each
swirling encounter were but a few inches apart. It was an old game they
played, and it gave them delight and made them hungry, so they went
hunting for frogs and eels in a ditch which drained the water-meadow.

Here they disturbed Old Nog, who was overlooking one of his many
fishing places along the valley. _Krark!_ He flapped away before them,
his long, thin, green toes scratching the water. The otters hunted
the ditch until the moon paled of its gleam, when they went back to
the river. They played for awhile, but jackdaws were beginning to
talk in soft, deep, raven-like croaks in the wood, as they wakened and
stretched wings and sought fleas. A lark was singing. The dog turned
east, and ran along the otter-path used by otters long before the weir
was made for the grist-mill below Leaning Willow Island. His holt was
in the weir-pool. The bitch drifted lazily with spread limbs, over
shallow and through pit, to the rippled water by the hollow tree, into
which she crept. Cocks crew in the distant village as she was licking
herself, and when she was clean she turned in the couch and made a snug
sleeping place, and resting chin on rudder, was asleep.

The rising sun silvered the mist lying low and dense on the meadow,
where cattle stood on unseen legs. Over the mist the white owl was
flying, on broad soft wings. It wafted itself along, light as the mist;
the sun showed the snowy feathers on breast and under-wings, and lit
the yellow-gold and grey of its back. It sailed under the middle arch
of the bridge, and pulled itself by its talons into one of the spaces
left in the stonework by masons. Throughout the daylight it stood among
the bones and skulls of mice, often blinking, and sometimes yawning.
At dimmity it flew down the right bank of the river and perched on the
same branch of the fallen oak and skirred to its mate, who roosted by
day in a barn near the village.

It flew away; it fluttered down upon many mice in the fields; but the
otter did not leave the holt. The instincts which had served her life
so far were consumed in a strange and remote feeling that smouldered
in her eyes. She lay on her side, in pain, and a little scared. The
song of the river, hastening around Leaning Willow Island, stole into
the holt and soothed her; the whistles of her mate above the bridge
were a comfort.

When the moon gleamed out of the clouds in the east, pale and wasted
as a bird in snow, the occasional whistles of the dog ceased. She did
not care, for now she needed no comfort. She listened for another cry,
feeble and mewing, and whenever she heard it, she rounded her neck to
caress with a gentle tongue a head smaller than one of her own paws.
All the next day and night, and the day after, she lay curled for the
warming of three blind cubs; and while the red of sunset was still
over the hill, she slid into the water and roved along the left bank,
looking in front and above her, now left, now right, now left again.
A glint in the darkness! Her back looped as the hind legs were drawn
under for the full thrust of webs, and bubbles wriggled off her back
larger than oak-apples; she was only a little slower than when she had
last chased a trout. Her rudder, about two-thirds as long as her body
and two inches thick at the base, gave her such a power of swiftness in
turning that she snatched the fish two feet above as it flashed over
her head.

She ate it ravenously, half standing in shallow water, yinnying at
shadows as she chawed and swallowed. After four hasty laps she went
under again. She caught an eel, ate the lower part of it and returned
to the holt. But she was still hungry and left them a second time,
running up the bank to stand upright with the breeze drawing across her
nostrils. Blackbirds in the wood were shrilling at tawny owls which
had not yet hooted. The otter dropped on her forepads and ran to water
again. The weight of her rudder dragging on a sandy scour enabled her
to immerge noiselessly while running.

The eldest and biggest of the litter was a dog-cub, and when he drew
his first breath he was less than five inches long from his nose to
where his wee tail joined his backbone. His fur was soft and grey as
the buds of the willow before they open at Eastertide. He was called
Tarka, which was the name given to otters many years ago by men
dwelling in hut-circles on the moor. It means Little Water Wanderer,
or, Wandering as Water.

With his two sisters he mewed when hungry, seeking the warmth of his
mother, who uncurled and held up a paw whenever tiny pads would stray
in her fur, and tiny noses snuffle against her. She was careful that
they should be clean, and many times in the nights and days of their
blind helplessness she rolled on her back, ceasing her kind of purr
to twist her head and lick them. And sometimes her short ears would
stiffen as she started up, her eyes fierce with a tawny glow and the
coarse hair of her neck bristling, having heard some danger sound. By
day the dog was far away, sleeping in a holt by the weir-pool which had
its rocky entrance underwater, but in the darkness his whistle would
move the fierceness from her eyes, and she would lie down to sigh
happily as her young struggled to draw life from her.

This was her first litter, and she was overjoyed when Tarka's lids
ungummed, and his eyes peeped upon her, blue and wondering. He was then
eleven days old. Before the coming of her cubs, her world had been a
wilderness, but now her world was in the eyes of her firstborn. After a
day of sight-seeing he began to play, tapping her nose with a paw and
biting her whiskers. He kicked against the other cubs, growing lustily,
and his eyes darkened, and he tried harder than ever to bite his
mother's whiskers, which tickled him when he was being held between her
paws and washed. Once, when he was milk-happy and had snarled his first
snarl without frightening her into stopping the licking of his belly,
he was so furious that he tried to bite off her head. She opened her
mouth and panted, which is the way otters laugh among themselves, while
he kicked and struggled, and she pretended to bite through his neck.
Tarka was not afraid, and clawed her whiskers and struggled to be free.
His mother released him very gently: on wobbly legs he returned to the
assault of her head, but he snarled so much that he was sick; and when
she had tidied him he fell asleep under her throat.

When his eyes had been opened a fortnight, Tarka knew so much that he
could crawl as far as a yard from her, and stay away although in her
anxiety she mewed to him to return. She was afraid of the daylight by
the opening of the holt, but Tarka had no fear. He liked to stare at
the waterflies dancing their sun-dance over the ripples. One morning as
he was blinking away the brightness a bird about the size of a sparrow
alighted on a twig over the hole. A sparrow in size, but not in colour!
It may have been that the Quill Spirit had painted the bird with
colours stolen from rock and leaf and sky and fern, and enriched them
by its fervour, for the bird's feet were pinker than the rock-veins in
the cleaves of Dartmoor, his wings were greener than opening buds of
hawthorn, his neck and head were bluer than the autumn noonday sky, his
breast was browner than bracken. He had a black beak nearly as long as
his body. He was Halcyon the kingfisher. His feathers were now at their
brightest, for his mate had just laid her seven glossy white eggs at
the end of a tunnel in the bank.

Halcyon peered with a bright brown eye at Tarka, who wanted the bird
to play with. A wind ruffled one of the emerald feathers, and Halcyon
crouched to peer into the water. Tarka mewed to him to come and be
played with, and at the sound the bird gave a sudden piercing whistle
and flew upriver, leaving Tarka creasing his nose as he blinked at the
perching place, unable to understand why it was not there.

He went back to his mother and played the biting-game with her, after
which he slept. When he awoke again, he saw one of his sisters playing
with something and immediately wanted it. The cub was patting it with
one paw, holding her head sideways; but as it did not run, she patted
it with the other paw, while holding her head to that side. Tarka was
slowly crawling towards it, meaning to take it for himself, when he
noticed that it was looking at him. The look frightened him and he
tissed at it. The other cub jumped back and tissed as well, and the
noise awakened the youngest cub, who spat at her mother. The mother
licked its face, yawned, and closed her eyes.

Again Tarka crawled towards the thing looking at him. He sniffed at it
and crept away. He crept back to it, but the other cub tissed and so he
returned to his mother. When next he went towards it, the look in its
eyes had changed, and he boldly touched it with his nose and shifted it
with a paw. It looked at him no longer, for it was only the skull of
a field-vole, and light coming down the woodpecker's hole from above
had put shadows into its empty eyes. Tarka moved it between his paws;
some of its teeth dropped out and rattled inside the hollow. The sound
pleased him. He played with the skull until he heard one of his sisters
mewing in hunger, when he hurried back to his mother.

One evening, while the cubs were alone, Tarka was playing with his
rattle when he saw a live vole, that had come into the holt through an
opening by the roots. As the way was large enough for a rat to pass, he
crept easily along the tunnel, up which the vole had fled in fright as
soon as it smelled him. The tunnel ended at the broken roots, to which
part of the earth that had nourished them still clung. Little green
leaves were growing out of this earth, for the oak's disaster had been
as a blessing to many seeds of charlock which had been lying buried in
the cold earth long before the acorn had sprouted.

Voles, which are the red mice of the fields, were squeaking among the
roots as they hurried to their holes; for the explorer ran among them,
crying the alarm that a great weasel was coming. Tarka did not know
that his scent had filled them with terror; indeed, he did not know
what a vole was. He had seen movement and gone to it, for he was always
ready to play, and play was movement. The squeaks ceased.

All was quiet and he heard, for the first time, the jets and rills on
the stones which made the ancient song of the river. He wanted to get
nearer to the sounds and crawled along a root. When he was half-way
along it, he saw that there was nothing on either side of him. He was
alone on the root. He tried to turn back, but the claws of one hindfoot
slipped and there he clung, curved across the wood, unable to go up or
down. He mewed to his mother, but she did not come. His cries grew more
and more plaintive as he became colder.

About five minutes afterwards a ream passed under the stone bridge and
moved into deeper and quieter water where its raised lines were carried
to the banks before being smoothed away by the flow. The angular wave
pushed steadily down the river. The bitch was returning. She had caught
and eaten six small trout and two eels during the uneasy half-hour she
had been away. When nearly opposite the holt she turned across the
current, and had almost reached it when she flung head and shoulders
out of the water. While rising she was staring, sniffing the air, and
listening; and before all the drops running off her whiskers had
splashed, her head was underwater and her body doubling with the effort
of thrusting four webs together. Then more drops splashed by the holt.
A pebble rolled down the bank.

The bitch had heard Tarka's cries, and fear had shocked her into the
swiftest movements. She was in the root-pit beside Tarka while the
stars were still shaking in the undulation of the old ream. He trembled
with cold. A score of hearts under browny-red coats beat faster at the
otter's chiding yikker as she picked up her cub by the neck and carried
him to the shore. She swam with her head held high and carefully, lest
the water should touch him. Afterwards, lying on the warm couch, she
forgot her fright and closed her eyes in enjoyment of her young.

The next night Tarka crept along the root again, and fell in the same
way. He was crawling around, when a strange-smelling animal leaned over
him, wetting him with drops from its jowl. He tissed at it and tissed
again when he heard the yinny-yikker of his mother and the snap of her
teeth as the animal was driven away. Then something bit the back of his
neck and lifted him up. With the cub dangling from her mouth, the bitch
threatened the dog, who had followed her in curiosity to the holt. The
dog tried to look into the tree on the following night, but the bitch
dragged him down by the rudder, as though she would drown him. The dog
thought this was fun, and ragrowstered with her under and on the water
all the way to Leaning Willow Island, where she left him, remembering
Tarka.




CHAPTER TWO


In mid-May the buds of the fallen oak began to open hopefully and to
show their ruddy leaves. Seven small kingfishers perched on an alder
branch outside the entrance of their tunnel, while the wind stirred the
fledgling down between their feathers, and they waited for loach or
beetle or shrimp or elver or troutling. At sunset seven beaks were laid
on shoulders, sometimes to lift at a whistle shriller and louder than
the whistle of their parents; but the night was to other hunters.

While the moon was full and bright the otters went to hunt the fish
lying in the Tunnel Pool below Halfpenny Bridge--bass, grey mullet,
and flukes, or flatfish. The cubs were two months old and they had
learned to squeeze through the inner opening of the holt and run along
the root, in order to play on the grassy bank. One night as they were
playing rough-and-tumble round the base of an ash tree, they heard
their mother's whistle. This cry was not as piercing as the dog's
call to his mate, but like wet fingers drawn down a pane of glass.
Immediately Tarka stopped biting the tail of his younger sister, and
the third cub ceased to gnaw his neck. As fast as they could they ran
across the root and into the holt. The bitch was waiting for them,
with a trout in her mouth. Tarka sniffed at it as she was breaking it
up, then turned away, for he did not like the smell of it. The cubs
struggled for their own food, so the bitch lay down and fed them with
her milk until she grew tired of them. Shaking them off, she went away
with the dog, who had swum upriver with her.

When next she returned, she brought two skinned frogs, which she had
caught in the reed-grown, marshy bed of the old canal. She dropped
them in the holt and slid back into the river, heedless of the cubs'
cries. Tarka licked a frog and liked the taste of it; he bared his milk
teeth at his sisters, but he did not eat it. They rolled and snarled
and played until their mother's return, when they ran to her. She had
brought an eel, which she bit into pieces, beginning near the tail, but
leaving the head above the paired fins. Tarka swallowed little pieces
of the fish and licked his small sister's head afterwards, because it
tasted nice. Then he licked his own paws. He was cleaning himself for
the first time.

The new food changed them almost at once. They grew swift and fierce.
Their frolics on the bank often ceased at the cry of a night-bird, or
the distant bark of a cattle dog in the village. They started whenever
their mother started. They began to fear. Sometimes at sunset, when
their mother left the holt, they ran on the bank and mewed to her as
she hunted upstream. She would leave the water and chase them back
again to the holt. Her smooth movements near them on land were often
broken; she would stand still and uncertain, or run on, jerky with
fear. Many times she stood upright and listened, her nose towards
the village. People occasionally walked over Canal Bridge, which now
carried a drive to a house near the weir; and whenever she heard voices
she ceased to hunt, and swam down the river to be near the cubs. Human
voices frightened her; but the thunderous noises of trains in the
valley and the long, whisking lights of motor-cars on the road beyond
the railway were ignored because she was used to them, and knew them to
be harmless.

The buds of the ash, sullen for so long in their coverings shaped
like the black hooves of cattle, broke into browny-green sprays. The
cuckoo sang all night. Reed-buntings chattered among the rising green,
water-holding stems of balsam; soon Antares would burn at night like an
ember in the low southern sky.

One warm evening when the river was low, the mother swam down to
the holt and called the cubs into the water, and although they were
ravening, she did not climb up, but waited for them with a fish below
the tree. They whimpered and peered, moving their heads sideways and
telling her that below was fearful. She lay on her back in the water
and let the fish go, in order to catch it, and rise with it gleaming
again. The two youngest cubs ran back over the damp, trodden couch
to get through the tunnel, but they were too fat to squeeze through.
Perhaps Tarka would have gone with them, if he had not wanted the fish
so much. His eyes were on it, he smelled it, his mouth filled with
eat-water. He mewed, he yikkered, he tissed, but there was no fish. The
otter swam on her back and called him into the water.

Tarka watched her. He wanted the fish but he dared not let go with
his feet. The fish came no nearer, so he dropped down into the black,
star-shivery water. He was clutched in a cold and terrible embrace, so
that he could neither see nor breathe, and although he tried to walk,
it smothered him, choked him, roared in his ears, and stifled every
mew for help until his mother swam under him. Pressing pads and tail
against her back, Tarka was carried to the stony margin of an islet,
where the closed flowers of the water-crowsfoot were floating among
their leaves. He spluttered and sneezed and shook water out of his
eyes, and saw the stars above him, and felt his mother's tongue on his
head.

When he had eaten the fish, Tarka began to enjoy the strangeness.
He was playing with the fishtail when he heard the whistle so often
listened to from the holt. When he saw the animal with the wide flat
head and great bristling whiskers that had loomed over his head once
before, Tarka tissed and snarled at it and ran for his mother. He
snapped at the nose sniffing at him. The dog turned on his back and
tried to touch Tarka with his paws, in play. Tarka watched him and
wanted to roll as well, but he was awed by the stranger's size.

An hour later, the three cubs had eaten their fish happily on the
stones. The bitch had grown tired of coaxing the other cubs to enter
the water and had dragged them by their scruffs out of the holt and
dropped them into the river.

The first otter to go into deep water had felt the same fear that Tarka
felt that night; for his ancestors, thousands of years ago, had been
hunters in woods and along the banks of rivers, running the scent of
blooded creatures on the earth, like all the members of the weasel race
to which they belonged. This race had several tribes in the country of
the Two Rivers. Biggest were the brocks, a tribe of badgers who lived
in holts scratched among roots of trees and bushes, and rarely went to
water except to drink. They were related to the fitches or stoats, who
chased rabbits and jumped upon birds on the earth; and to the vairs or
weasels, who sucked the blood of mice and dragged fledglings from the
nest; and to the grey fitches or polecats, so rare in the forests; and
to the pine-martens, a tribe so harried by man that one only remained,
and he had found sanctuary in a wood where a gin was never tilled and
a gun was never fired, where the red deer was never roused and the fox
never chased. He was old; his canine teeth worn down. Otters knew the
ponds in this wood and they played in them by day, while herons stalked
in the shallows and nothing feared the old lady who sometimes sat on
the bank, watching the wild creatures which she thought of as the small
and persecuted kinsfolk of man.

Long ago, when moose roared in the forest at the mouth of the Two
Rivers, otters had followed eels migrating in autumn from ponds and
swamps to the sea. They had followed them into shallow water; and
one fierce old dog had run through the water so often that he swam,
and later, in his great hunger, had put under his head to seize them
so often that he dived. Other otters had imitated him. There was a
web of skin between the toes, as in the feet of wolves and dogs, and
generations of swimming otters had caused the spread of the toes to
increase and the web of skin to widen between them. Claws grew shorter.
Tails used as rudders became longer, thicker, and powerful with
muscles. Otters became hunters under water.

The moose are gone, and their bones lie under the sand in the soft coal
which was the forest by the estuary, thousands of years ago. Yet otters
have not been hunters in water long enough for the habit to become an
instinct. And so the original water-fear was born with Tarka, whose
mind had to overlay a weak instinct with habit, just as his ancestor
had done when he was hungry.

When he went into the water the next night and tried to walk towards
his mother, he floated. He was so pleased that he set out across
the river by himself, finding that he could turn easily towards his
mother by swinging his hindquarters and rudder. He turned and turned
many times in his happiness; east towards Willow Island and the
water-song, west towards the kingfishers' nest, and Peal Rock below
Canal Bridge, and the otter-path crossing the big bend. North again and
then south-west, where the gales came from, up and down, backwards and
forwards, sometimes swallowing water, at other times sniffling it up
his nose, sneezing, spitting, coughing, but always swimming. He learned
to hold his nose above the ream, or ripple, pushed in front of it.

While swimming in this happy way, he noticed the moon. It danced on the
water just before his nose. Often he had seen the moon, just outside
the hollow tree, and had tried to touch it with a paw. Now he tried to
bite it, but it swam away from him. He chased it. It wriggled like a
silver fish and he followed to the sedges on the far bank of the river,
but it no longer wriggled. It was waiting to play with him. Across the
river Tarka could hear the mewing of his sisters, but he set off after
the moon over the meadow. He ran among buttercups and cuckoo-flowers
and grasses bending with bright points. Farther and farther from the
river he ran, the moonlight gleaming on his coat. Really it was brown
like the dust in an October puff-ball, but the water sleeked the hair.

As he stopped to listen to the bleat of lambs, a moth whurred by his
head and tickled him. While he was scratching, a bird flying with
irregular wing-beats and sudden hawk-like glidings took the moth in
its wide gape and flew out of his sight. Tarka forgot the moon-play.
He crouched in the grasses, which rose above his head like the trees
of a forest, some with tops like his rudder, others like his whiskers,
and all whispering as they swayed. The nightjar returned, clapping its
wings over its head with the noise of a dry stick cracking. Tarka was
glad to hear his mother calling him. He mewed. He listened and her
whistle was nearer, so he ran away in the wet grasses. The cub did not
know how alarmed his mother was nor did he know that less than fifty
flaps away a bird with great eyes and wings spanning a yard was flying
upon him. The nightjar had seen the bird, too, and had clapped its
wings as a danger signal to its mate whose two eggs were laid among
ferns in the wood.

The nightjar twirled and planed away; Tarka scampered on. The great
bird, who had raised two tufts of feathers on its head, dropped with
taloned feet spread for a clutch. The otter saw it drop and ran
forwards so swiftly that the sound of her going through the grasses was
like the first wind which uncoils as it runs before the southwesterly
gale. The bird, which was a short-eared owl, thought that Tarka was a
small rabbit, and fanned above him while it considered whether or not
he was small enough to be attacked. It did not hesitate longer than the
time of six flaps, but stopped, while screaking to terrify and subdue
its prey. But Tarka came of a family fiercer and quicker in movement
than the owl. Tissing with rage, he jumped and bit his assailant as a
foot grasped his back and four talons pierced his skin. The other foot
of the bird grasped grasses and it had turned with clacking beak to
peck the base of the cub's skull when the paw-stroke of the bitch tore
half the feathers from its breast. She stood on it, bit once, twice,
thrice, in a second of time, and so the owl died.

Tarka was nipped in the neck, shaken, picked up, bumped all the way
back to the bank, scraped over the stones, and dropped into the water.
Obediently he followed his mother across the river, to where the dog
was lying on his back and gravely watching two cubs playing with the
tip of his rudder.

Fish were brought alive to the cubs when they had been swimming about
a fortnight, and dropped in the shallowest water. And when they were
nearly three months old their mother took them downstream, past Leaning
Willow Island, and across the bend, to where the banks were glidden
into mud smoothed by the sea. The tide had lapsed from the mud, leaving
fresh water to tear the rocky bed below.

Tarka galloped through the tall green reeds to the river, stopping by
a gut to sniff at the tracks of a curlew, which had been feeding there
during the ebb-tide. Near the water he found another track, of five
toes well spread, and the prick of five claws. The dog had walked
there. Just above Halfpenny Bridge they saw him, half out of the water,
and chewing a fish which he did not trouble to hold in his paws. He
craunched it from the head downwards, gulping his bites quickly, and as
soon as the tail was swallowed, he turned and went under water for more.

The bitch took her cubs to a pool below the bridge and walked with
them across a shallow tail of water. She stared at the stones, brown
and slippery with seaweed, and the cubs stared also. They watched the
glimmers in the claws of water, sometimes trying to bite them. While
they were watching the mother ran along the bank to the top of the pool
and slid into the water. More often than usual her head looked up as
she swam from bank to bank, for she was not hunting, but driving the
fish down to the cubs. Tarka became excited and, seeing a fish, he swam
after it and went underwater to get it. In order to travel faster, he
struck out with all four webs together, and lo! Tarka was swimming like
an otter near a fish. It was the biggest fish he had seen, and although
he kicked after it at the rate of nearly two hundred kicks a minute, he
lost it after a yard. He yikkered in his anger, and oh! Tarka was no
longer swimming like an otter, but gasping and coughing on the surface,
a poor little sick-feeling cub mewing for his mother.

He felt better when he had eaten a mullet caught by his mother. The
fish had come up with the tide and remained in the still pool. Late
in the night Tarka caught a pollywiggle, or tadpole, in a watery
hoof-hole and thought himself a real hunter as he played with it,
passing it from paw to paw and rolling on his back in the mud. He was
quite selfish over his prey when his mother went to see what he was
doing, and cried, _Iss-iss-ic-yang!_ an old weasel threat, which, being
interpreted, means, Go away, or I will drink your blood!

Old Nog the heron, beating his great loose wings over Leaning Willow
Island as the sun was making yellow the top of the tall tree, saw five
brown heads in the salmon pool. Three small heads and a larger head
turned to the left by the fallen tree, and the largest head went on
upriver alone. The cubs were tired and did not like being washed when
they were in the holt. Afterwards Tarka pushed his sister from his
mother's neck, the most comfortable place in the holt, and immediately
fell asleep. Sometimes his hind-legs kicked, gently. He was trying to
catch a shining fish that wriggled just before his nose, when he was
abruptly flung awake. He yawned, but his mother, tissing through her
teeth, frightened him into silence. The day was bright outside the hole.

A kingfisher sped down the river, crying a short, shrill _peet!_ as it
passed the holt. The otter got on her forelegs and stared towards the
opening. Soon after the kingfisher had gone, a turtle dove alighted on
the ash tree above the holt and looked about her; she had just flown
off her two eggs, nearly dropping through a loose raft-like nest in a
hawthorn by the weir. The bird held out a wing and began to straighten
the filaments of a flight-quill which had struck a twig during her
sudden flight out of the bush-top. She drew the feather through her
beak thrice, shook her wings, listened, and went on preening.

Tarka closed his eyes again, breathed deeply and settled to sleep
on the youngest cub's neck. He looked up when his mother ran to the
opening. The otter was listening to a sound like the high, thin twang
of a mosquito. Hair bristled on her neck. From far away there came a
deep rolling sound, and a screaming cheer. The otter instantly returned
to her cubs and stood over them in a protective attitude, for she knew
that hounds were hunting the water. Tarka crouched down, listening to
the cries. They became more distinct. Always a deeper, gruffer note
was heard among them. The sounds, almost continuous, became louder
and louder. Nearer came another sound--the wings of the dove striking
against twigs as it flew away.

A minute later the pair of cole-tits that had a nest in a hole of the
ash tree began to make their small, wheezy notes of alarm. The white
owl had flown from the bridge and was perched against the ivy of the
trunk, turning its head from side to side and blinking. One cole-tit,
about as long as a man's finger, flittered with rage on the twigs a
few inches from the gold-grey head. The owl blinked slowly; the baying
swelled under the bridge; it swung its head round without moving its
body and stared straight behind it. _Chizzy-chizzy-chizzy-te!_ wheezed
the cole-tit as the owl floated away. Tarka was used to this sound, for
usually it greeted him whenever he looked out of the holt in daylight.

_Chizzy-chizzy-chizzy-te!_ the bird wheezed again, and then Tarka saw
the big head of the dog-otter by the opening, and his wet paws on the
bark. The bitch tissed at him, her teeth snapped at his head, and the
dog was gone.

The cries were now very loud. Tarka heard thuds in the wood all around
him. The cubs crouched in the darkest corner. Nearer came the shouts
of men, until the thuds of running feet ceased on the bank. The water
began to wash against and lap the half-drowned trunk, claws scraped
the wood, the opening grew dark and the tongue he had heard above the
others boomed in the hollow. The otter crouched back, larger than
usual, for her body was rigid and all the hair of her back stood
straight. Swish, swish swept her rudder. She recognized another sound
and tissed every time it cried the names of hounds, in a voice thin and
high as though it were trying to become as the horn which so often took
its rightful breath. The voice ceased. The horn sang its plain note.
Whips cracked.

By their big feet hounds pulled themselves out of the water, except
the one who threw his deep tongue at the holt opening. He was all
black and white, with great flews, and the biggest stallion-hound in
the pack. He was black from nose to neck, except for the pallid nicks
of old quarrelscars on his muzzle and head. No hound quarrelled with
him now, for Deadlock was master of all. In his veins ran the blood
of the Talbots, and once his bloodhound ancestors had eaten man. He
had mastiff in him. His dam and sire had pulled down many a deer at
bay in the waters of the moor, and died fireside deaths after faithful
service to red coats. A pink weal ran down his belly, for in his second
stag-hunting season the great pied hound had been ripped open by the
brow-point of a stag; and his pace had gone from him afterwards. The
otter-hunters bought him for a guinea, liking his long legs, and now
Deadlock was the truest marking hound in the country of the Two Rivers.

He held by his paws, and his teeth tore at the sodden tinder-wood. He
could thrust in only his head. While he was kicking the water for a
foothold, the otter ran forward and bit him through the ear, piercing
the ear-mark where the blue initial letters of his original pack were
tattooed. Deadlock yarred through his bared teeth. Three small mouths
at the other end of the holt opened and tissed in immense fright.

Then Tarka heard a cry which he was to hear often in his wanderings; a
cry which to many otters of the Two Rivers had meant that the longest
swimming, the fastest land-looping, the quietest slipping from drain or
holt were unavailing.

_Tally Ho!_

The cry came from down the river, just above Leaning Willow Island,
from the throat of an old man in a blue coat and white breeches, who
had been leaning his bearded chin on hands clasping a ground-ash pole
nearly as long and as old as himself. From his look-out place he had
seen something moving down like brown thongweed just under the clear
and shallow water. Off came the hat, grey as lichen, to be held aloft
while he cried again,

_Tally Ho!_

The horn of the huntsman sang short and urgent notes; the air by the
holt was scored by the names of hounds as he ran with them to where,
amidst purple-streaked stems of hemlock, the old man was standing on
the shillets.

Soon afterwards the horn sounded again near the holt and the baying of
hounds grew louder. Footfalls banged the wood above Tarka's head, as a
man climbed along the trunk. The water began to lap: hound-taint from a
high-yelping throat came into the holt: the bitch grew larger along her
back when, above her head, a man's voice cried snarlingly, _Go'rn leave
it, Captain! Go'rn leave it!_ A thong swished, a lash cracked. _Go'rn
leave it, Captain!_

The high yelping lessened with the taint of breath. The cries went up
the river. The rudder of the bitch twitched. The hair on her back fell
slanting; but it rose when something scratched above. Her nose pointed,
she breathed through her mouth. She moved away uneasily. Tarka sneezed.
Tobacco smoke. A man was sitting in the branches over them.

After half an hour the cries came down to the holt again. They passed,
and then Tarka heard a new and terrible noise--the noise as of mammoth
iron-toed centipedes crossing on the stones, or shillets, at the tail
of the pool.

_Tally Ho! Look out, he's coming down!_

Iron toes scraped the shillets faster. Here, across the shallow, a
dozen men and women stood almost leg-to-leg in the water, stirring the
stream with their iron-shod poles to stop the dog-otter passing down to
the next pool.

Tarka and the cubs breathed fast again. Deadlock's great bellow swam
nearer, with the high yelping of Captain. Many wavelets slapped against
the tree. A dozen hounds were giving tongue between Canal Bridge and
the stickle above Leaning Willow Island. A shaggy face looked into
the holt and a voice cried just over Tarka's head, _Go'rn leave it,
Dewdrop! Go'rn leave it!_ Boots knocked on the trunk. _Is-isss-iss!_
_Go'rn leave it!_ And Dewdrop left it, bitten in the nose.

Unable to break the stickle, the dog-otter went back under the bridge.
Baying became fainter. The notes of the cole-tits in the ash tree were
heard again.

In the quiet hollow the otter unstiffened and scratched for ticks as
though the hunt had never come there. Hounds and men were above the
bridge, where another stickle was standing. The water flowed with
small murmurs. She heard the rustling clicks of dragonflies' wings
over the sun-plashy ripples. Silence, the tranquil _chee-chee_ of a
cole-tit seeking a grub in an oak-apple, and the sunbeam through the
woodpecker hole roving over the damp wood dust on the floor. The otter
lay down, she dozed, she jumped up when sudden cries of _Tally Ho!_
and a confused clamour arose beyond the bridge. Now all the sounds of
the past hours were increasing together, of tongues, and horns, and
cheers; and very soon they were overborne by a deep new noise like
the rumbling of the mill when the water-wheel was turning. Then with
the deep rumbling came the prolonged thin rattle of the horn, and the
triumphant whooping of whips and huntsman. The sounds slowed, and
ceased, except for the lone baying of a hound; they broke out again,
and slowed away into silence; but long afterwards the strange blowing
noises made by their mother frightened the huddled cubs.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sometimes the slits of the owl's lids opened, and dark eyes would watch
a drop of water falling from one of the thin horns of lime hanging from
crevices between stones of the arch. Yellow ripple-lights no longer
passed across the stonework of Canal Bridge. The sun made shadows on
the meadow slightly longer than the trees were tall. For more than an
hour the water had been peaceful. A blackbird sang in the sycamore
growing by the bridge. The otter looked out of the holt and listened.
She feared sunlight on the field less than the taint of hounds still
coming down on the water, and, calling her cubs, she slid into the
river and ran out under the bank, and to the grass. _Iss-iss-ss!_ The
ground in patches was damp with water run off hounds' flews, flanks,
and sterns. Only a carrion crow saw them hastening across the meadow
to the leat, and its croaks followed them into the wood, where bees
were burring round purple spires of foxgloves, and chiffchaffs flitted
through honeysuckle bines. Otter and cubs passed low and swift among
the green seed-heads of the bluebells; and uphill over blackening
leaves, until they saw the river again below them, where the sunpoints
glittered, and a young kingfisher drew a blue line in the shade of oak
trees.




CHAPTER THREE


The shock-headed flowers of the yellow goat's beard, or
John-go-to-bed-at-noon, had been closed six hours when a grey wagtail
skipped airily over the sky-gleams of the brook, flitting from stone to
stone whereon it perched with dancing tail and feet. In the light of
the sun more gold than at noon the drakeflies were straying low over
the clear water, and the bird fluttered above its perch on a mossy
stone, and took one. The water reflected the colour of its breast,
paler than king-cups. It did not fly, it skipped through the air,
calling blithely _chissik chiss-ik_, until it came to the verge of a
pool by a riven sycamore. On a sandy scour it ran, leaving tracks
of fragile feet and dipping as it took in its beak the flies which
were crawling there. It skipped to the ripple line and sipped a drop,
holding up its head to drink. Two sips had been taken when it flew up
in alarm, and from a branch of the sycamore peered below.

The brook swirled fast by the farther bank; under the sycamore it moved
dark and deep. From the water a nose had appeared and the sight of it
had alarmed the wagtail. Two dark eyes and a small brown head fierce
with whiskers rose up and looked around. Seeing no enemy, the otter
swam to the shore and walked out on the sand, her rudder dripping wet
behind her. She stopped, sniffing and listening, before running forward
and examining all entrances under the bared roots of the sycamore
tree in the steep bank. The otter knew the holt, for she had slept
there during her own cubhood, when her mother had left the river and
followed the brook to get to the White Clay Pits.

The wagtail was still watching when the otter came out of the holt
again. It flew away as she whistled. Two heads moved across the pool
and a third behind, slightly larger, for Tarka followed his sisters.
The cubs crawled into the holt, leaving seals, or marks of five toes
and running pad, in the sand with the prints of the wagtail.

The sycamore was riven and burnt by lightning, yet sap still gave it
a few leaves for summer. Its old trunk was beloved by two mouse-like
birds which crept up the whitest tinder and held themselves by their
spread tails as they looked in the cracks for woodlice and spiders.
Every spring this pair of treecreepers made a nest between the trunk
and the loose bark, of twigs, tinderwood, dry grasses, and feathers.
Here burred the bumblebees to their homes in the crannies, and when
the first frosts stiffened the grasses they tucked their heads under
their forelegs and slept, if they did not die, until the primroses came
again. Here, when the trees were nearly bare, waddled Iggiwick, the
grunting vuz-peg, or hedgehog, with a coat of the tree's dry leaves,
black-patched with autumn's falling-mark, and on the earth he curled
and closed meek eyes and dozed into a long rest. The tree was the
friend of all, and it had one human friend, who as a child had seen
it first when trailing in summer after her father hunting the otters
of the brook. She had imagined that the old charred sycamore was a
giant with many legs, who had been burnt in a fire and had rushed to
the bank to cool himself, and that its roots, bared by floods, were
thin legs bent at wooden knees and fixed in the water. The brook was
determined to drown the giant, who was burrowing his toes for a hold.
The maid grew tall and beautiful, but still the old giant sat cooling
his thirteen legs, and every June, when she passed by with her father,
following the otter hounds, he wore a fresh green wig.

Many otters had slept in the cave behind the roots; some had died
there, and the floods of the brook had taken their bones away.

Mother and cubs curled up together against the dry earth of the holt's
end, five feet away from the water. The cubs fell into a deep sleep,
torn with dreams wherein an immense black face showed its long fangs.
Tarka slept with his small paws on the neck of his mother, and her paw
held him there. They snuggled warm in the holt, but the bitch did not
sleep.

At dimmity, when day and night hunters see each other between the two
lights, she heard the blackbirds scolding the wood owls; and when the
blackbirds were silent, roosting in thorn or ivy with puffed feathers,
she heard a badger drinking and grunting as he swallowed. The owls'
bubbling quaver settled into the regular hunting calls; then the
otter yawned and slept. She awoke when the wood owl had made a score
of journeys with mice to its nestlings in the old eyrie of a trapped
buzzard, when the badger had walked many miles from its earth in the
oakwood. She was hungry. Leaving her cubs asleep, she crept out of the
holt. At the water edge she listened nearly a minute. Then she turned
and climbed the bank, running into the meadow where cows snuffled at
her as she stood on her hind legs. Hearing no danger sound, she went
down to the river, entered quietly and swam across to the shallows.
She walked through a matted and floating growth of water-crowsfoot,
and came to summer plants growing out of stones--figwort, angelica,
water-hemlock. Returning through the jungle with a crackling of sappy
hollow stems and the breaking of rank florets and umbes, she walked
among nettles which stung her nose and made her sneeze. Thence she
passed under branches of blackthorn, which combed her back as she ran
into the marshy field. As in the meadow, she explored as far as the
centre, rising to her full height to listen. She heard the munching of
cattle, and the harsh _crake crake_ of a landrail throwing its voice
about the uncropped bunches of marsh grasses and the bitten clumps of
flowering rush. Then swiftly back to the brook by another way, through
tall balsam stalks to the water, where she climbed on a boulder and lay
across it, her head near the stream. She clung by her rudder to the
reverse side of the stone, and whistled for the cubs.

Tarka had been peering from the holt, and at the first whistle he moved
forward into the water, making hardly a ripple. He swam across the pool
with his forelegs tucked under him, kicking with the hindlegs only.
The toes were spread at the thrust, so that two webs drove him forward
with one kick. Behind him swam the cubs, the arrowy ripples pushed from
their noses breaking against each other. They followed Tarka across the
floating crowsfoot flowers and reached their mother who lay so still.
They spoke to her, nuzzling her with their heads and mewing their
hunger. When she would not speak to them they bit her rudder, they
cajoled and wheedled, they made angry tissing noises, but she did not
move. They left her; and suddenly she sprang up with an otter-laugh,
which was not so much a sound as the expression of lips curled back
from teeth, and the rolling of the head. She was boisterous with joy
after the day's fright, and had been shamming death in fun. Calling the
cubs to follow her, she sank into the water and swam upstream.

The cubs knew that she was looking for fish, and they followed her by
scent in the line of bubbles that was breaking along on the surface.
She looked up with a fish in her mouth and they raced for it, yikkering
threats to each other. The otter led them out of the pool and to a
shallow; she dropped the fish, a trout of three ounces, and went to
the gravelly bank where the water was deeper. Tarka picked up the live
trout and took it on a mossy boulder, where he ate it in less than a
minute.

The otter caught small fish so quickly in the narrow water that Tarka
was soon gorged; and the other cubs in their quick hunger were able
to snatch a fish from him while he was rolling on his back in order
to have the pleasure of clawing it over his head. The bitch cubs were
smaller than Tarka, but quicker in movement. Sometimes they swam along
the bank under water, looking left and right; but their mother had
scared the fish before them and they rarely saw the gleam which was a
fish curving back over her head. Often they snapped at stones or roots,
mistaking them for trout.

At the end of the night, Burnt Sycamore Holt lay a mile and a half
behind them. It was time to hide when buzzards were seen soaring above
the oak and larch woods. The bitch led them out of the water, through
willows and ash trees and brambles, and across a narrow-gauge railway
track to a fir plantation. Two years before her mother had taken her to
a large rabbit bury near the edge of the quarry, and now she led her
own cubs there. A scent strange to Tarka was on the dry soil before the
tunnel, but his mother did not heed it. She ran down the tunnel and
immediately a fox crept out of it by another way, not wanting to meet a
bitch otter with cubs underground, or indeed anywhere.

While the otters were cleaning themselves, the fox was sitting down
outside the hole, sometimes yawning; he had within him a fill of mice,
beetles, and young rabbits. He was drowsy. He remembered his scratching
post, the stump of a sapling larch, and walked there, to rub his flanks
against it. Reddish hairs lay around it on the ground; one side was
polished. When he had scratched enough he walked to a grey stone wall
behind a cattle shippen and climbed upon it, waiting for the sun.

The disused rabbit bury was dry and echoed the greater noises of
day--the screeching of whistles as light engines, drawing trucks of
white clay from the pits on the moor where the brook took its source,
slowly approached the crossing of the lane below; the voice, up the
valley, of a man chaunting _coo-coo-coo-coo-coo_, and the barks of a
dog running round a field while cows swung in a file along a narrow,
trodden way, to the milking shed; the buzz, like a blowfly in a
spider's web, of a motor-car passing slowly over the little bridge and
the rails beyond; the wheeooing of buzzards and the croaking of crows
above the larch wood. These noises did not disturb the otters.

At dimmit light they went down to the brook again, meeting the fox, who
was quietly lapping to quench his thirst made by swallowing the fur of
so many mice. He looked at the otter; the otter looked at him. The fox
went on lapping until the water was spoiled by their musky scent, when
he went up the hill to sniff in his earth. For ten minutes he sniffed
and pondered, until his curiosity was satisfied, and then he started
his nightly prowl--after a little scratching against his post.

The otter took her cubs up the brook and over a field. Away from water
her movements were uneasy. Often she stopped in her low running to
stare with raised head and working nostrils. A galvanized iron chicken
coop in a field caused her to make a wide loop--the scent of man was
there. A pair of boots left by a tramp in a hedge made Tarka tiss with
fear, turn about, and run away. The cubs were now as active and alert
as their mother.

At last they reached the ditch remembered by the otter. She leaned down
to the brown-scummed water, clinging to the bank by her rudder. Bull
frogs had been croaking a moment before she arrived there, but now they
were silent and burrowing in the mud. With paw and nose she sought
under the weed, nipping them and dropping them on the grass. The cubs
seized them and turned away, yikkering; and when she had caught all she
could find, the otter ran back to the cubs and began to flay the frogs,
for the skins were tough.

They left some of the frogs uneaten, for there were eels in the ditch.
Iggiwcik, the vuz-peg--his coat was like furze and his face like a
pig's--found the remains, and was gleefully chewing when a badger
grunted near. With a squeak of terror the vuz-peg rolled himself in a
ball, but the badger bit through the spines as though they were marram
grasses. Iggiwick squealed, like marram grass in flame. Later in the
night nothing was left except the trotters, teeth, and spiny coat of
poor Iggiwick.

They were too far off to hear the dying squeals of the vuz-peg, for
during the half-hour before the badger caught him they had travelled a
mile up the brook. The otter swam in front, the cubs scrambling behind
her. Often a fish would dodge back by her whiskers, missing the snap of
teeth by the space of a fin, and the cubs would bump into one another
in their eagerness to get it. When this happened, the otter would turn
again to her prowling from bank to bank, and leave the fish to be
caught by them.

The brook became smaller and narrower, and at the end of the night it
was less than a yard across. The next evening they left the rushes in
the wet ground where they had been sleeping, and crossing a road, came
to a boggy tract where curlew and snipe lived. Tarka ran over the line
of a hare, and followed it in curiosity until his mother called him
back. Mosses made the way soft and held many scents--of marsh orchid,
stinking iris, bog pimpernel; of wild duck, stoat, short-eared owl,
magpie, and, once the rank-smelling flight-quill of a raven.

They reached a thread of water and followed it downward until it was
joined by another thread. The two made a stream, which hastened under
whitish banks of clay. The otter sought for fish, but finding none,
climbed out of the channel by a slanting otter-path and crossed the
railway track near a tall, dark chimney that rose out of buildings.
It was a brick factory. An otter had travelled before them, and in a
hollow behind birch trees about a quarter of a mile on they heard a
whistle; and running towards the call, they came to a deep reed-fringed
pond, on the clay side of which a grown dog-otter was playing with the
wings of a drake. Tarka kept behind his mother, being frightened of
the stranger. He had a split ear, done in a fight two years before.
Mother and cubs went into the pond, leaving him rolling on the bank and
tossing the wings with his paws.

The pond was an old pit from which white clay had been dug. The
water was deeper than any the cubs had swum in. Round the edge grew
reed-maces; it was early June and the golden fountains of pollen were
spilling on the green heads, which would be brown in autumn. Ten
ducklings were hiding in the reeds, while their mother circled in the
starry sky, telling them, with soft cries of _quaz-qua-a-a-az-quaz_,
not to move. She had flown up when the dog-otter had caught and eaten
the drake, swimming up underneath it. At the time of capture the drake
had been trying to swallow a frog, by quapping with its bill, which
held one of the legs. When the otter's teeth had gripped the drake,
the frog had escaped; but it commenced to swell on the water and so
it could not swim down to the pit's floor. Tarka saw it above him as
he pushed about eagerly under water: the frog showed darkly in the dim
surface mirror which reflected the grey sludge of the pond's bed. Tarka
caught it, and ate it under a thorn bush planted by a thrush beside the
pond.

Mother and cubs roved about in the water for a while, and the dog
joined them. The frogs and eels, having seen them, were hiding, and
so the bitch climbed out through grey-lichened white-thorn bushes and
ran among rush-clumps to the next pit. They hunted through four ponds
before they had caught enough to be ready for romping. The fourth pond
was larger than the others, and so deep that Tarka had not breath
enough to follow the grown otters down in the gloomy water, although he
tried many times. He knew they were playing, and mewed to them to come
up. Sometimes a string of luminous bubbles shook up and passed him, but
that was all he saw of the fun; he could see above him, but all was
obscure beneath, although he could sometimes hear them.

The old dog-otter was happy, because he had another otter to play with
him. His wander years were past; he had killed salmon in the Severn,
eaten pollack on the rocks of Portland Bill, and lampreys in the Exe.
Now he dwelled among the reeds and rushes of the White Clay Pits, and
whenever otters journeyed to the ponds, which formed an irregular chain
in a wide flat valley drained by the stream, the old dog, who was
rather deaf, would join them; and in the deep pond, he would lure one
or another down to a rusted, weed-grown engine that had lain for years
half-buried in the clayey ooze. A great joy it was to him to hide in
the funnel, and to swim out upon the otter seeking him. Again and again
after taking in air he would swim down to his engine, but if any otter
except himself tried to hide in the funnel, he would bite it furiously
with the few worn teeth that remained in his jaws.

For three years he had lived on the frogs and eels and wildfowl of
the ponds. The clay-diggers often saw him as they went home in the
trucks--they called him Marland Jimmy.

The pollen-holding anthers of the reed-maces withered and dropped into
the water, but still the bitch and cubs stayed in the land of ponds.
Here Tarka tasted his first pheasant, caught by the bitch in the woods
where game was preserved. It was a cock-bird, and had only one wing,
the other having dropped off in the winter, after a shot-gun wound. The
bird was a swift runner, and nearly pecked out the eye of the otter
before it died.

By day they slept in the reeds. From his couch of bitten and
pressed-down hollow stems, Tarka watched the dragonflies which flew
glittering over the water. On a reed beside him was fixed the brittle
greyish mask of a nymph which had crept out of the pond the day before,
having done with the years of preying on pollywiggle, minnow, and
water-flea. The sun looked upon it; it dried; it heaved at its mask,
which split down the back. Legs and head of a colourless insect crept
out with short and flaccid wings. It clung limply to the reed, while
its wings uncreased and hardened in the heat. It took the dragonish
breath of noon and changed it into gleams of scarlet; its eyes grew
lustrous with summer fire. The pond glittered. Its wings, held low near
its body, glittered in little; they spread wide and were tremulous for
flight. It was gone among the whirring dragonflies, whose bodies were
banded with yellow and black, and bright with emerald, and red, and
blue.

Cuckoos were calling, and sedge-warblers chattering among the green
pennons of the reeds. Sometimes one flew over the pond with a mild
and hawklike flight, calling _wuck-oo, wuck-wuck-oo_, and the little
agitated warblers flew after it. The hen cuckoos did not sing their
name, but made a low gobbling cry as they answered their mates. They
were noisy about the pond, as they sought warblers' nests wherein to
drop their small, thick-shelled, greyish-brown eggs. Once a cuckoo was
flying over with an egg in its beak when a sparrowhawk dashed at the
bird and the egg dropped into the water. _Splap!_ Tarka awakened, saw
the egg, dived, brought it to the couch, and ate it before the shadow
of a grass-stalk had moved its own width on the bank.




CHAPTER FOUR


Tarka was rolling on his back in the beams of the sun one morning,
when he heard the distant note of the hunting horn and soon afterwards
the tongues of hounds. The bitch listened, and when the baying became
louder, she pressed through the reeds with the cubs and took to the
bramble undergrowth beyond the north bank of the pond. A south wind
was blowing. She ran down the wind, the cubs following just behind
her. When she stopped to listen, she also licked her neck; and a human
observer might have thought that this act showed her to have no fear of
being hunted.

The heart of the otter was beating quickly; and whenever she stopped to
listen, her aroused nervous force was as a burden, only to be eased by
movement.

Now the hounds were hunting Marland Jimmy, who was swimming about
the pond and looking at them from among the reeds. When he was tired
of swimming backwards and forwards under water, he crept out through
brambles and ran across a few acres of boggy moorland to the stream. He
was fat and, for an otter, slow on his broad pads. Hounds were after
him when he was half-way across the rushy tract, where lichens and
mosses held a distinct scent of him. The old otter reached the stream
and went down with the water until he came to a drainpipe, where he had
often sheltered. Soon the tongue of Deadlock boomed up the pipe, but he
lodged there in safety. Then a terrier named Bite'm crept to within a
foot of him and yapped in his face. His hearing having dulled with the
years, the otter was not disturbed by these noises; nor was he alarmed
by the thuds of an iron bar over his head. Bite'm was called back and
another terrier yapped away at him until it, too, was recalled. Voices
of men quietened; and after a few minutes the sounds came down the
length of pipe behind him, followed by a disgusting smell. Marland
Jimmy endured the smell and more thumpings above him; and when, an
hour later, he crept out into bright light, the water passed away from
him with a coloured smear on its surface. The old otter licked the
greyish-yellow fur of his belly, and nibbled the smarting skin between
his toes, all the rest of the afternoon, but the smell of paraffin
stayed on him.

The bitch and cubs were safe, for although hounds drew down the brook,
finding and carrying their line to a wood, the hunt was stopped by a
keeper. Young pheasants were in the wood, and gins were tilled for
their enemies. Hanging from the branch of a tree in this preserve were
the corpses of many vairs and fitches, some green, others hairless and
dry, some with brown blood clotting broken paws and noses. All showed
their teeth in death, as in life. With them were bundles of claws and
beaks and feathers, which once had been dwarf owls, kestrels, magpies,
sparrowhawks, and buzzards. The hues and sheens of plumage were gone,
and their eyes' light; soon they would drop to the earth, and flowers
dream out of their dust.

The brook was a haunt of dippers, whose cries were sudden as the cries
of water-and-stones; speedy little brown birds, white-breasted, who in
flight were like drab kingfishers. A tawny owl perching against the
trunk of a larch tree also saw the otters coming up the stream, and
its eyes, soft with light as the dark blue sloe is soft with bloom,
watched them until they crept into a rocky cleft below a fall, where
royal ferns cast their great shadows and water-violets were cooled by
dripping mosses.

After sunset a swarm of cockchafers whirred and flipped about the top
of the larch, and the owl, hungry after huddling still for fifteen
hours, flapped up through the maze of cone-knotted twigs and caught
two in its feet. It ate them in the air, bending to take them, in
its beak; and when it had caught and swallowed a dozen, it let out a
quavering hoot to its mate--for the tawny owls liked to be near each
other in their hunting--and, perched on a low branch of another tree,
listened and watched for a young rabbit. After a few moments, its head
was tilted sharply downward: the otter and the cubs were going through
the wood.

At midnight the western sky was pale blue and hollow like a
mussel-shell on a seashore. The light lingered on the hill-line, where
trees were dark. Under the summer stars a hundred swifts were screaming
as they played away the night, two miles above the earth; in fine
weather they kept on the wing for many days and nights together, never
roosting. Their puny screams were heard by Tarka as he rubbed his neck
against the grassy mound of an ants' nest.

While he was enjoying the feeling, a loud chakkering noise came down
from the wood. The otters swung round. Four heads pointed towards the
trees. The bitch ceased to nibble her fur; the other cubs forgot their
play with the head of a corncrake. The noise, distinct in the dewfall,
was met by other cries as harsh and angry.

When the curious otters reached the wood, other noises were mingled
with the chakkering. Green points of light glinted in the undergrowth
about them, like moonlight in dewdrops, for many vairs were watching
a fight of the two dog-fitches on the woodland path. Running along
the bank of a ditch beside the path, the fitches had met at the mouth
of a drainpipe, out of which strayed a hunger-making smell. The pipe,
covered with grass sods, lay beside an oak-log felled for a path across
the ditch. Both ways had been made by the keeper; one for himself, and
the other for fitches and vairs, whose liking for pipes and covered
ways he knew. There were many such ways in the wood, and to make them
more attractive, the keeper had placed the flesh and entrails of dead
rabbits inside the pipes.

Each dog-fitch was trying to break the other's neck by a bite behind
the ear. They rolled and snapped and scratched with their long claws,
their black-tipped tails twitching with rage.

Every stoat and weasel which heard them ran to watch the fight on the
pathway made by the hob-nailed boots of the keeper. Tawny and dwarf
owls peered down from branches of oak trees, while from afar a fox
listened, and prowled on again. A crow awoke in an ivy-thick holly,
muttered _aa-aa!_, and laid its beak among its neck-feathers once
more. Tarka circled round the stoats with the other cubs, mewing and
yikkering with excitement; and then he smelled the rabbit flesh inside
the drainpipe. The youngest cub also smelled it. She was quicker than
Tarka, and her head and shoulders were inside one end when he ran in at
the other. He had bared his teeth to snatch the flesh when there was a
hard snap, a knock of iron on the pipe, a blow on the side of his head,
and a loud whimpering and tissing from the cub.

Immediately the bitch was by her, running round outside the pipe in her
anguish. She panted and blew as she had in the hollow tree when her
mate was being worried by hounds, she ran up the ditch and mewed to the
cub to follow, she returned and licked its rudder. The green points of
light flicked out together.

Disturbed by the clatter in the drainpipe, a pheasant crew in the
covert, and a cock defied the pheasant from its roost among hens in an
apple tree by the keeper's cottage below the wood. The bitch scraped at
the sods covering the pipe, blowing and gasping anew when a retriever
started to bark. She ran away, whistling the cubs to follow her, but
returned to the cry of the cub, who had fallen out of the pipe and was
dangling by its rudder.

The barking changed to an eager whine when a door of the cottage opened
and a man's voice spoke. Sounds came up distinctly from the combe
below. While the otter tore with her teeth at the chain, the spring,
and the closed jaws of the gin, Tarka and the other cub ran among the
oak-saplings, rustling the buff leaves of an old year and breaking the
stalks of seeded bluebells whose caps dropped round black seeds on the
earth. There were faggots of hazel wands just inside the wood, cut and
drying for a thatcher, who would split them and make spears for binding
the reed of cottage roofs. They burrowed under the faggot, driving out
a vair that had been sucking the blood of an aerymouse or pipistrelle
bat. The small weasel made a loud _kak-kak-kak_ of rage at them and
vanished with the limp aerymouse in its mouth. A loud barking was
coming from the field, with the yikkering of the otter. Tarka heard the
yelp of the retriever, but the sound that followed made him tiss, for
it was the shout of a man.

When the keeper, hurrying up the field, was within twenty yards of
the wood's edge, the otter left the chain she had been breaking her
teeth on and ran away. The retriever rushed at the cub to worry it,
but the ferocity of the unfamiliar beast made it hesitate. The otter
remained standing by her cub even when the keeper was pushing through
the undergrowth. Thinking that a fox or badger was in the gin, he
went forward to kill it with a blow of the holly staff he carried. He
was peering forward when the retriever, a young animal, ran to him
snarling! something flung itself violently against his legs--the otter
weighed fifteen pounds--and nearly bit through the leather of his boot
at the ankle. He struck at it, but hit only earth. He hurried back to
the cottage for his gun, calling the retriever to heel, lest it be
injured.

The struggles of the cub pulled the iron peg out of the ground, and
it was able to drag itself out of the ditch and slowly away among the
saplings. The bitch whistled to Tarka and the other cub, who ran out
from under the faggot and followed her. The mother ran on with them a
little way, then returned to the cub that followed so slowly with the
gin ripping brambles and clanking against stones and roots. Pheasants
in the covert crew from their roosting branches; blackbirds flew
from the hollies with wild alarms; wrens and robins complained in the
brambles. Hedgehogs rolled themselves into spiny balls, and voles
crouched by the withered mosses under the oaks.

Behind the otters came the noise of the keeper crashing through
undergrowth, and the retriever's feet pattering near them.
_Wough-wough-wough!_ to its master. Blood ran down the face of the
otter where the wounded cub had bitten her as she was trying to free
the gin which gripped its rudder. The cub threw itself up and down,
writhing and blowing, and not knowing what had happened; it snapped at
its mother's paws, at her ears, at her nose, at her neck. The otter
left it to fight the pestering retriever, her eyes yellow and gem-like.

When the keeper came up the cub was gasping with the weight of the iron
it had dragged over a hundred yards. He fired at the noise in front of
him and the noise ceased. Into the darkness of the wood he fired the
second barrel; and listened. He heard stray pellets rattling in the
distance and the dragging of the gin as the retriever tried to lift it.

At dawn the crow that slept in the ivy-grown holly saw a new corpse
hanging among the fitches and vairs which had run into one end of a
drainpipe, but never run out again. The crow said _aa-aa!_ and flying
to the gallows tree, picked out its eyes.

       *       *       *       *       *

When daylight came the otter and her cubs were far from the wood,
having arrived at new water, deep and dark and slow moving. They swam
to an islet where rose sallows and ashpoles, and swaying at the trees'
tops were rafts of twigs roughly pleached, being the nests of wild
pigeons. The male birds were awake, and cooing to their mates, when
the otter walked out of the water. Green sedges grew by the upper end
of the islet, where sticks and roots of winter floods were lodged, and
through them the otters crept. The mother trod down a place in the
middle and bit off sedges for a couch, and afterwards, hearing a watery
croak near her, she sank silently into the pool. Her head emerged by
the nest of a moor-hen which flew clumsily away from off six eggs,
brown like the curling tips of sedge and speckled with dark blotches.
These were carried back, one by one, to the cubs, who cracked them and
sucked the yolks, afterwards playing with the shells. Sometimes Tarka
whimpered and stopped play, for the bruise on his head was aching. Then
the mother licked it, and washed him all over, and he fell asleep; and
the sun had risen when she had cleaned herself and nibbled the lead
pellets out of her coat.

Time flowed with the sunlight of the still green place. The summer
drake-flies, whose wings were as the most delicate transparent leaves,
hatched from their cases on the water and danced over the shadowed
surface. Scarlet and blue and emerald dragonflies caught them with
rustle and click of bright whirring wings. It was peaceful for the
otters in the backwater, ring-rippled with the rises of fish, a waving
mirror of trees and the sky, of grey doves among green ash-sprays, of
voles nibbling sweet roots on the banks. The moorhen paddling with her
first brood croaked from under an arch of stream-side hawthorn, where
the sun-shafts slanting into the pool lit the old year's leaf-dust
drifting like smoke under water. The otter heard every wild sound as
she lay unsleeping, thinking of her lost one. The cubs breathed softly,
but sometimes their nostrils worked and their legs moved, as though
they were running.




CHAPTER FIVE


When Tarka awoke he saw a small eye quizzing him from among the
ash-sprays. He stretched up his head and sniffed, and at the movement
the eye disappeared. Ticking cries sounded from the middle of the
tangle.

Hearing them, an ackymal that had been searching the stream-side
hawthorn boughs for green caterpillars flittered to the islet and
cluttered beside the crackey. The ackymal had a mate in a stump
hole, brooding over a family of thirteen in a nest of moss and
feathers, and the crackey had a mate and a family of eight in a ball
of grasses hidden in the side of a haystack. Both nests were hundreds
of wing-flutters away, yet when the hens, both shorter than a man's
finger is long, heard the cries of their song-folk, they left their
young and hastened to join them. Their scolding was a summons to all
small birds. Blackbirds flew in from the fields and let out shrill
ringing cries which jerked their tails as they perched above the
otters. Soon many small birds were gathered in the trees of the islet,
and their mingled cries brought six larger birds, who sloped up one
behind the other. They were among birds what the Irish are among men,
always ready in a merry and audacious life to go where there is trouble
and not infrequently to be the cause of it. Raising their crests and
contracting their light blue eyes, the six jays screamed with the
noises of tearing linen.

The cubs lay still, but the otter lifted up her head. She had met jays
before, and knew that men sometimes go where the pretty crows are
nagging. For half an hour she was anxious, ready to take her cubs into
the friendly water immediately the jay cries became shorter; which
would mean the coming of the greatest enemy, man.

The birds became hungry. The crackeys and ackymals and ruddocks--Devon
names for wrens and tom-tits and robins--flew away when the otters
neither heeded nor harmed them. The jays remained; but when a
sparrowhawk dashed into the trees in search of a pigeon, they departed
and mobbed the hawk, helped by a pair of carrion crows.

Again the spirit of the green place was tranquil, with peaceful doves
cooing in the noonday's rest. All the long day the sun swung over the
islet until the hilltops were fiery. Shadows lifted from the waters
and moved up the trunks of trees. They faded in eve-light. The pool
darkened. Over the fields flew a white owl, one of hundreds which like
great blunt-headed moths were quartering the pastures and tilth of all
the lands served by the Two Rivers. It fanned above the vole-runs,
where the craneflies rose in flight from flower and bent. The reeling
song of a nightjar on a gate-post ran through the ground mist not high
enough to hide the flowers of ragged robin and the hardening seeds of
the flowering rush. The pigeons settled at the tops of the ashpoles,
and ceased their clapping and flapping of wings.

A drop of water splashed, another and another. The otter had withdrawn
her head from the river, wherein she had been harkening for stir of
fin or wave of tail. Filling her lungs with new air, she slipped into
the water and swam to the other end of the islet, where a scour had
been formed by the flood-rains of the last southwesterly wind. Here
the grown family of the moorhen was paddling. When almost under them,
the otter saw the legs and the images of legs joined to them, black
in silhouette against the less dark surface. She seized one of the
moorhens and drew it under, releasing it to bite it in her jaws, and
carried it back to her cubs, swimming with her nose, whiskers, eyes,
and part of the dead fowl out of the water. The cubs were waiting,
and seeing that she had food, they ran to her and pulled it out of her
mouth, tearing away feathers and mewing with their pads on the dead
bird. When the otter returned to the scour the moorhens were gone, so
she dived and sought fish.

Late at night she returned with the cubs to the wood, and whistled for
the lost one. She did not know it was dead; she knew only her longing
for it. Her whistles went far in the still night, as she ran with nose
to the ground, stopping to whine when her grief became acute. The cock
on the apple bough heard her and crew to the dog in the kennel, who
barked to its master. Hearing the bark, the otter took her cubs away;
and at the end of the night, when they reached the big river, the lost
cub was forgotten.

They hunted and ragrowstered for many days under the high wooded hills,
below which the river wound and coiled like a serpent. When the moon
hung like a gold fishbone in the dusk--the fourth he had seen--Tarka
could swim thirty yards under water before he needed to put out his
nose to breathe. In one of their haunts, the smaller cub caught a big
trout driven upwater by the bitch, and as she dragged the flapping
fish on the stones, Tarka seized it above the tail. She snapped at his
head, dropping her bite to do so, and he dragged it away. She bit it
through the red-spotted back, and they tugged, wrenching the fish into
pieces which they ate held in pads and munching with their heads on one
side, whereas before they had usually swallowed without chewing. At any
threat of piracy one whipped round to eat facing another direction;
very soon all the trout was gone except a scriddick, or fragment, of
the tail.

There was no more yinny-yikkering when they had fed, for then was the
time for play. When Tarka had drunk some water, he snapped playfully
at the cub's head, and inviting her by his manner to catch him, romped
through the shallow into the pool. Sometimes he swam with only his hind
legs, as his mother did when she was not close upon a fish, but when
his sister was so near to his rudder that she could touch the tip of
it, he used all four webs and swerved by a swish of his rudder which
swung him round in his own length. In one of his turns she caught
him and they rolled in the water, pretending to bite each other, and
kicking as kittens do. And so it was that Old Nog, the wisest heron of
the Two Rivers, heard the noise of bubbles breaking on the water as he
alighted by the pool side. He watched, prepared to jump-and-flap if
there were danger. He saw a swirl on the water, and the roll of two
dark sleek bodies. He waited. They rolled nearer. With neck and beak
held low--a two-pointed horn spear on a shaft hidden by long narrow
feathers--he waded into water over his knee joints. While he paused for
a plunge of the spear, which had pierced and held many a rat and eel,
the bitch's head arose a yard from him, and at her sharp cry the cubs
fell apart and swam under. The heron, with a harsh squawk of anger and
alarm, jumped into the air and beat away slowly, with legs stretched
out behind him and neck tucked between his lean shoulders. _Kaack!_
cried Old Nog, as he flew to his next fishing place.

For several nights after feeding, the cubs went down to a mill-pool to
ragrowster, always with the mother, who delighted in playing tricks
upon them. Once she whistled the food-cry, and they ran in excitement
to her, only to find a large leaf laid on a stone. It was fun, and they
chased her. The pool, placid after a dry month, was made turbid by the
fragments of leaf, stick, and stone stirred from the weedy bottom. She
let them catch her, and enjoyed the rage of her little cubs who snarled
so fierce and bit so hard, but could not hurt her. Early one morning
the south-westerly wind arose from off the Atlantic, and brought fast
low clouds over the land. A blown grey rain hid the trees on the
slopes of the valley. At night the young moon was like a luminous grub
spinning a cocoon around itself in the sky. The river pushed to the
sea with the fresh, or brown flood-water, and at nightfall their holt,
rising three feet under a waterside alder, was filled. The otters
rode down on the fresh, over the spillway of the Dark weir, where
branches were fixed amid long claws of water. They spread their legs
and floated. The noise of the great waters filled Tarka with joy. A
log rolled in front of him, and he scrambled on it, to jump off again
with happy cries. He pretended that froth was fish, and turned over on
his back, trying to clutch it. The river swilled him along, while he
whistled in happiness. A memory of big fish was moved in the otter's
mind by the smell of the fresh, and she was taking her cubs down to
river-bend above Canal Bridge, where she and her mate had killed salmon
and peal before the cubs were born.

During the journey the clouds were blown to the north-east, over the
high and cold moorland, and when the otters had drifted under Rothern
Bridge the moon was shining bright in a dark blue sky. Bubbles glinted
around Tarka's head, where the water, hurrying too fast over shoals,
tumbled back upon itself. Round a bend the river began to slow and
deepen--it was dammed half a mile below by a concrete weir built
diagonally from bank to bank. This was the head of the weir-pool. The
otters drifted on, round another bend until they came to where the
smooth and thundering fall-over of the bubble-whitened water slanted
across the river, broken near the left bank by the plunge of breakers
down the fish-pass. A mist hung over the river. An icicle stood in the
moonlight below the fish-pass, a silver spark for an eye.

Below the fish-pass the water rushed in a foamy spate. Above, it slid
black and polished. Presently out of the lower whiteness a silvery
flicker shook and vanished. The silver spark vanished and glinted
lower. Old Nog, peering below the pass, was so excited that he nearly
fell over the three long green toes of each foot, in his haste to
overlook more of the water. A second fish tried to leap the weir: with
sideways flaps of tail it struggled up the spillway, but the claws of
the water pulled it back. The moon in its first bright quarter was
smitten into a myriad shimmerings by the lower turmoil. Suddenly, it
seemed, the shimmerings were drawn together into a larger quartered
moon, which rose out of the water in a silvery curve, and fell into the
pool above, soundlessly in the immense roar of the fall.

The otters were lying in an uvver, or hollow, near the right bank, away
from the tug of the cascade plunging down the fish-pass. The water in
the uvver turned quietly. On its surface revolved a wheel of sticks,
riveted by bubbles. The otters turned with it, hanging rudders down in
the current. When the salmon leapt the weir, the bitch became rigid and
her nostrils widened; but before the burst of the splash had dropped
back, she had become supple again. The back of her sleek head gleamed
and was gone. The cubs followed her, naturally so swift that a human
observer might have wondered what cry or signal had been made by the
otter.

They swam by the bank until the pull of the water grew less, when the
mother turned into midstream and sought the salmon by working upwater
from bank to bank through the gloomy and tumultuous spate. The current
forced them to swim with the webs of four feet. Tarka swam on her left
flank and the other cub on her right. Sometimes he was flung sideways,
or spun in another whirling wheel. He was swimming out of one when the
bitch either scented the fish or saw the swift ream of its dorsal fin,
for she turned and swam with the current, leaving them behind. Tarka
turned after her, and was pursuing with all his strength when a narrow
fish, larger than any he had ever seen, swished past him. A few moments
afterwards the otter followed, but Tarka had to rise to breathe, and
when he swam down again he was alone. He knew that hunted fish usually
went upwater, so he swam against the current, swinging from side to
side as he had learned by imitating his mother.

When, after several minutes, he could find neither mother nor sister,
he climbed on the bank, where wet vegetation and sticks loading the
lower branches of nut trees showed how quickly the fresh had risen,
and was falling. Plashes of water covered the grassy depressions of
the meadow, where moorhens were feeding; and Tarka was returning from
an unsuccessful pattering after the birds when he heard his mother's
whistle. She had been swept down the fish-pass and hurled against the
concrete rim of the middle trough, where the water had pounded her
until she had been flung out on the straight rush and left, gasping
and coughing, on rocky shillets heaped against the lower bank by old
floods. She was savage in failure, and took her cubs over the plashy
meadow to a wood to find rabbits. In this wood she had never heard the
_iclack_ of a sprung gin, so she had no fear. But the rabbits told
their fear by thumping their hindlegs, and those which did not bolt
into the open ran to their buries and sat there quivering, with ears
laid over shoulders. The otters followed them to where they crouched,
inert in terror, their faces pressed into the earth where the tunnels
stopped. Twelve were dragged out squealing, and killed; three being
skinned by the bitch. While they were feeding, a harsh chattering came
from one of the holes, with two pricks of greenish light. Here stood
Stikkersee, the weasel, who was in a rage because the water-fitches
were in his wood. Stikkersee was about half as long as the otter's
rudder, but he was not afraid of her. He came within a yard of her nose
and raved so persistently at the smell of so much blood that she turned
away from the little beast's racket and went back to the river.

When the moon had come to its full round shine, Tarka was hunting his
own food in the pools and necks of the clear water running round the
bend above Canal Bridge, which rod-and-line men declare to be the best
fishing stretch of the Two Rivers. One August night, after play under
the oaken fender that took the leat away from the pool, he had left
his mother but a short while and was running along the bank, when a
raucous cry in the darkness made him halt. His paw was raised. His
nostrils twitched. The cry had come from the meadow, where tufts of
rush-grass and sedge were left uncropped by cattle. It was followed by
others--slurred and throaty notes which rose slowly into the air and
ended in a sweet and liquid cry. The curlews, which were feeding with
their young flown from the moors where they were born, were disturbed
by something, and had cried the alarm. Tarka had heard curlews crying
during many nights, but never before in such a way. He heard thuds in
the ground; and from the river the warning whistle of his mother.

Remembering what had come with the ground thuds before, when the air of
the hollow tree had shaken to the baying of hounds, Tarka ran swiftly
to water. The otter had left the river and was standing on the bank,
sniffing the night wind. A cloud like the seal of an otter drifted
across the moon. Tarka slipped into the river, but returned to his
mother, being curious. The alarm cries of the curlews had ceased, and
other notes fell from the sky. In the riverside sedges two warblers
began to speak to one another. They mixed hastily the notes of song and
alarm, with the gentle under-song voice used only to their mates when
brooding in the cradles woven to the green flags.

A low sound of a human voice came to Tarka, and a hound-like taint
which raised the hair of his neck. Immediately the mother yikkered a
threat, and with her cubs ran down the bank and hid among the sedges.
Clouds hid the shine of the moon.

On the bank, dark against the sky, appeared the figures of men, and a
long-legged lurcher dog. The men scrambled down to the river's verge.
There was a moment of quiet, when the trilling cries of the flying
curlews rose above the water-murmurs and the wind in the trees.

A scratching noise and the flickering of a small light. It went out.
Another match was struck and shielded by a hand, until it spread into a
lurid flame, overcasting with ruddy glow the dim shades of trees across
the water. The flare lit the faces of two men. One held a pitchfork
with gleaming prongs. They stood still and watchful. Then a youthful
voice ten yards higher up the river said:

"Fine li'l brown dog going through the daggers, Shiner! Wish I'd took
hold of 'n."

Neither of the men answered. They were staring intently at the water.
Slowly the torchbearer raised an arm and pointed. The spear was poised,
to quiver over the man's head, while a ream skated over the pool.

A hoarse voice whispered "Now!" and the fork was plunged into the pool.
A curved flash of fire scattered its ripple. The torch-bearer threw
down his torch and waded into the water, followed by the young man, who
had run down the bank when he had seen the jumping salmon. They were
groping for the fish, guided by the agitated spear-shaft, when the man
yelled that one of the prangs had gone through his hand. He held it
up, dripping blood, and cursing that the top of one of his fingers was
knocked off.

The man on the bank picked up the torch--oily rags tied to a stick--and
held it as far out as he could over the water without filling his
boots. The youth cried out that he had got a grip on the sow's gills
and that he couldn't hold it much longer. Before the man could get to
him, he had dropped the fish, yelling that he had been bitten in the
leg by the little brown dog.

On the moonlit bank, beside the black-and-red smoking rags, they tried
to bind their wounds; and the uninjured man was bending down to pick
up his empty sack when the lurcher dog began to growl. Its snarls
increased; it ran forward; it yelped with pain and ran back past them,
followed by two yellow, glowing eyes.

"Fine li'l brown dog you zee'd in the daggers," growled the poacher
called Shiner, who had lost a finger-joint. "Us may as well keep whoam
when they sort o' dogs be about!"




CHAPTER SIX


Yellow from ash and elm and willow, buff from oak, rusty brown from the
chestnut, scarlet from bramble--the waters bore away the first coloured
leaves of the year. Beeches preserved their tawny form in rain and
hail, but yielded more and more to the winds. Sandmartins and warblers
deserted their old haunts; kingfishers and herons remained. The reeds
sighed in the songless days, the flags curled as they withered, and
their brittle tops were broken by the rains.

Eels began to pass down to the sea. They were the females, travelling
from ponds and lakes, from dykes and ditches and drains, from the hill
streams of Dartmoor where the Two Rivers had their ancient source. The
eyes of the eels grew larger as they were swept down in the turbid
waters, as they writhed over wet grass, along cart ruts and drains.
These eels were urged seawards by a common desire--to meet the smaller
males in the estuary, where each female would attract four; and after
the meeting each female would swallow her four and begin a journey to
where the shallow bed of the ocean broke off and dropped deep to its
grave. Here among hulks rotting in seaweed, where strange fish carrying
lights moved in the heaviest darkness, the eels of the world laid their
eggs, and here they died, far under the floating weed of the Sargasso
Sea whence as transparent, flat, ribbon-shaped creatures, they had set
out for the inland waters. After journeying for three years the elvers
had reached the mouths of rivers and passed up to ponds and ditches,
where those that were not killed by man, otter, heron, gull, waterfowl,
cormorant, kingfisher, dwarf owl and pike, lived and grew until desire
and instinct moved them to seek the eels' birthplace in the grave of
the Atlantic.

The eels of the Two Rivers were devourers of the spawn and fry of
salmon and trout, and the otters were devourers of eels. Tarka stood
on the shillets of the shallow stream while they twisted and moved
past his legs. At first he ate a small portion of each capture near
the tail, but when his hunger was gone he picked them up, bit them,
and dropped them again. The more he killed the more he wanted to kill,
and he chopped them until his jaws were tired. It was slimy sport, and
afterwards he washed for nearly half an hour, quatting on a mossy rock.

While the eels were migrating the otters found their food easily,
as there was no hunting to be done. They followed the eels down the
river, eating them tail-first as far as the vent, and leaving the head
and paired fins. They played away most of the night. The mother took
her cubs to a steep sloping bank of clay which had been worn in past
winters by many otters sliding down it. Nine feet below was a pot-hole
with seven bubbles turning in the centre with a stick, and as Tarka
slid down headfirst he meant to seize the stick and play with it. When
he looked up through the water it was gone, and many other bubbles
rode there, a silver cluster about the blurred image of another otter.
Hearing the strokes of an otter's rudder he looked in the direction
of the sound, and saw a strange cub, with the stick in its mouth,
travelling under the foamy current. Tarka followed the dim form until
he reached a barrier made by an uprooted pollard willow and broken
branches lodged in the stream. He climbed on the trunk, shaking water
from his ears and eyes, and ran back with jubilant whistles to the
slide. There he saw the cub, the stick still in its mouth, standing
with a grown otter. Tarka yikkered, and ran back to the water. The
grown otter mewed to him, ran after him, licked his face, and purred
in his ear. He tissed at her, and whistled to his mother, who came to
him, but did not drive the stranger or the cub away.

The stranger had been the mother of many litters long before Tarka's
mother had been born. Her fur was grizzled on pate and shoulders, and
her muzzle was grey. Her canine teeth were long and yellow, and she had
lost three of her incisors. She knew every river and stream that flowed
north into the Severn Sea. She had roamed the high cold moors of three
counties, and had been hunted by four packs of otter hounds. Her name
was Greymuzzle.

She played with the otters at the slide, and remained with them when
the low clouds became rosy in the east. That day all five hovered on
Leaning Willow Island, and she curled beside Tarka, and washed his
fur, treating him as though he were her own cub. Then she washed the
other cub, who had a white-tipped rudder. Greymuzzle had met White-tip
wandering alone three weeks before, and had remained with her ever
since. There was friendship and sympathy between the two grown otters,
for they never yikkered or tissed at each other. Indeed, although
Tarka's mother did not remember Greymuzzle, the old otter had played
with her and her cub brothers all one night in one of the duckponds
near the estuary.

The rain was blown in grey drifts down the valley, and the river
flooded the martin holes that riddled the sandy banks. Trees and
branches and dead animals bumped towards the sea. So heavy the
autumnal fresh that the otters could not see to hunt in the river. They
travelled up the valley on land, feeding on little voles turned out of
their drowned homes, and on rabbits which they caught in a warren in
a wood where the corpses of herons, kingfishers, red-throated divers,
cormorants and shags were nailed to an oak tree. Some had been shot,
others trapped, the cormorants and shags were beheaded, for the Two
Rivers' Board of Conservators paid one shilling for every head. The
wings of the kingfishers were cut off their tiny bodies, for some women
in towns were willing to pay money for the bright feathers, which
they wore as ornaments on their hats. After another gale the nests of
old summer began to show in the woods above the winding river. Very
beautiful were the wild cherry trees at the fall of their vermilion
leaves. The gales of the October equinox stripped them off the branches
and whirled them away. The otters went down again on another fresh,
sometimes leaving the water to cross bends of marshy ground and fields,
following trackless paths which otters had run along before fields were
ploughed; before wild men hunted them for their skins with spears of
fire-hardened wood. These paths were older than the fields, for the
fields were once the river's wider bed, in the mud of which the heavy
rudders had whilom dragged. They floated under Halfpenny Bridge, and
lay by day in the reeds of the old canal bed. A dog disturbed them, and
the next night they travelled inland, and sought a resting place in the
hillside earth of badgers. The white-arrowed faces of the Brocks only
peered and sniffed at them. A few dawns previously a fox had crept into
the same earth among the hillside pines, but the badgers had turned him
out, as he stank, and his habits were displeasing to their tidy ways.
Had the fox crept there during the day, and his wheezing told them that
he was being hunted by hounds, he would not have been bitten and driven
out, but given shelter, for man was their common enemy.

The Brocks allowed the otters to sleep in one of their ovens--as
countrymen call the chambers connecting the tunnels, for they were
the size and shape of the cloam ovens wherein some Devon farmwives
still baked bread. The otters were clean, and washed themselves before
sleeping, and so the badgers were agreeable. At fall of night they left
the earth together, Tarka keeping close to his mother, for the size
and appearance of the old boar who had been snoring during the day on
his bed of bitten grass and moss in the next oven made him uneasy.
The badgers waddled down their paths trodden through the spindleberry
shrubs and blackthorns, but the otters made their own way among the
brambles to the sloping top of the hill. They ran along a row of
sheep-nibbled rape to the skyline, crossed a road, and pushed through
the hedge-banks of many small fields. Travelling down a pasture, and
through a wood of oak and holly, they came to a pill, or creek, whose
banks were fissured by guts and broken by tidal waters. White-tip
suddenly galloped away over the mud, for she recognized the Lancarse
pill which carried the stream coming down the valley from the Twin-Ash
Holt, where she had been born. It was low tide, and the water ran below
glidders, or steep muddy slopes. They spread their legs and the water
took them under a road-bridge to the river, which ran through a wide
and shallow pool crossed by black round iron pillars of the Railway
Bridge--the Pool of the Six Herons. Whenever Tarka crawled out to catch
one of the little birds feeding by the water-line, his feet sank into
mud and his belly dragged. Alarmed by the otters the birds arose with
cries which seemed to awake echoes far down the river. These were the
cries of ring plover and golden plover, of curlew, whimbrel, snipe, and
red-shank, and all the way down into a dim starlit distance the cries
were borne and repeated.

The brown water rocked them down, and as they were drifting in a wide
curve Tarka saw something which filled him with fear. The constellation
of the Plough, which had been before them, was now on their left, with
its starry share touching the tops of the trees far away. The stars
were friendly, being of the night and the water, but these strange
lights were many times the size of the morning star. They stretched in
a twinkling line across the river, throwing a haze above them, like the
dawn which the otters of the Two Rivers know as a warning.

Neither of the older otters was afraid, so Tarka swam without diving.
The lights made the three cubs uneasy. As they drifted nearer, rumbling
sounds came on the night breeze which had arisen two hours since with
the flowing of the tide over the estuary bar.

Soon the sweep of the fresh lessened, for the tide was pressing against
the river. A wavelet lifted Tarka and passed behind him, another
curled like a long razor-fish shell and broke over him. He shook the
water from his whiskers, and licked his lips, liking the strange
taste. He lapped and drank. The forerunning press of the young tide
lifted him up and down, and chopped with playful foam at his pate. On
every ribbed shoal and mudbank the wavelets were lapping the stones
and rocks, lapsing with faint trickling sounds, and leaving domes of
froth which trembled and broke in the wind. As the otters swam down
with stronger strokes the mudbanks changed to sandy shoals, and air
bubbles out of ragworms' holes shook up in the shallow water through
which they paddled. Long dark shapes rode on the water, swinging round
slowly in the tide, and the wavelets went flip flup against them. Tarka
was afraid of the salmon boats, but the old otters ignored them. The
lamplights on the bridge were now very large and bright, and had ceased
to twinkle. They passed more boats at their moorings. The rumbling
noises of traffic on the bridge were loud, and figures were seen. In
front, twenty-four arches, of different shapes and sizes, bore the long
bridge. Greymuzzle dived, and the four followed her.

She had caught the scent of men and dogs blowing from the bridge, two
hundred yards in front. Under water Tarka swam until he could swim no
more, and rising quietly to vent, he turned his head to see if any
danger were near, and swam on. He rose to breathe nine times before
reaching the bridge, and the eighth rising brought him under one of the
arches. He swam hard against the tide pouring between two piers.

This was the first time Tarka passed under the ancient Long Bridge,
which the monks built across their ford two centuries before the
galleons were laid down in the shipyards below to fight the Spanish
Armada. When the otters had passed under the bridge they had to swim
hard, keeping near the right bank of the river to avoid the main flow
of the tide. Flukes were caught in the estuary that night by the otters
diving to deep water; they were not easy to find, for the dabs and
plaice lay flat on the sand when they saw the dark shapes above them,
and their sandy-speckled backs hid them. The otters raked the bottom
with their paws, driving up the fish which they seized and took on the
bank to eat.

In the nights that followed Tarka learned to eat crabs, cracking them
with his teeth. With the other otters he sought the shellfish among the
rocks below the stone quay of a fishing village at the meeting place
of the Two Rivers, where often at night they were disturbed by the
pailfuls of rubbish flung over by the natives. Once a pailful of hot
ashes came down, burning both Tarka and White-tip.

By day the otters slept in the reeds of a duck-pond which they reached
by drifting with the tide up the other horn of the estuary, and turning
into the Branton pill, where ketches and gravel barges were moored.
At dawn they left the salt water and ran over the eastern sea-wall
to the duckpond shaped like a ram's horns. In the brackish waters of
the duckpond the otters took mullet which had been washed in when the
sea-wall had broken years before, and rainbow trout put there by the
owner. Old Nog fished these waters, and at night many kinds of wildfowl
flapped and quacked besides the reeds; mallard, wigeon, teal, coot,
dabchick, and strays of the duck family--shoveller, pochard, and golden
eye.

On the fourth night of the otters' arrival at the Ram's-horn duckpond
the swallows which settled among the reed-maces at sunset did not
sleep. They twittered among themselves when the first stars gleamed
in the water, for they had received a sign to leave the green meadows
they loved so well. They talked in their under-song voices--which men
seldom hear, they are so soft and sweet--while clinging to the unburst
heads of the reed-maces. They talked of white-and-grey seas, of winds
that fling away the stroke of wings, of great thunder-shocks in the
sunwhitened clouds under, of wild rains and hunger and fatigue to come
before they saw again the sparkles in the foam of the African strand.
But none talked of the friends who would fall in the sea, or be slain
in France and Spain and Italy, or break their necks against the glass
of lighthouses, for the forktailed birds of summer had no thoughts of
these things, or of death. They were joyous and pure in spirit, and
alien to the ways of man.

During the day Tarka had been watching them, being curious. He had
watched them sweeping above him with a windy rush of wings that
darkened the sky, and had listened to their sharp cries as they dipped
and splashed in the wind-ruffled water. As he was stretching himself
before leaving his couch at sunset they flew like a great sigh up to
the stars. _Krark! Krark! Krark!_ cried Old Nog, standing grave and
still in the shallow water at the pond's edge. It was the last English
voice many of them would hear, the blue winged ones of summer, who had
begun the weary migration from the land of thatched homesteads and
old cob linhays. Some days after the swallows had gone, Tarka heard a
strange flute-like whistle while playing in the Ram's-horn duckpond.
The five otters ceased their play and listened. The whistle came again,
and Tarka's mother answered. The answering whistle was keen and loud.
The bitch swam towards it, followed by Greymuzzle and White-tip. The
whistle made Tarka cry in rage, _Ic-yang_, and when a dog-cub has cried
thus he is no more a cub, but a dog-otter.

The night before, the otters had fished in the estuary by the sea-weedy
hurdles and posts of a silted-up salmon weir, where in former times
salmon were left penned by the tide. They had returned to the duckpond
across fields and dykes, along an otter route, and on their trail an
old dog-otter had followed.

Now he had trailed them to the duckpond, a big, flat-headed,
full-thighed dog with great whiskers, more than double the weight of
Tarka. He frightened the crier of _Ic-yang_, who crouched tissing
with his sister when the stranger sniffed at her nose and then licked
it. This action caused Tarka's mother to behave in a curious manner.
Turning fiercely on the cub, she rolled her over, bit her, and chased
her under water. Many bubbles were blown up. Tarka dived to see why
this strange thing had happened, but the dog turned in a swirl of water
to snap at his head. Tarka was so scared that he swam to the bank and
crawled out among the dry thistles.

Here, while the water ran from his fur, he whistled to his mother.
He saw her swimming with her head out of water, with the strange dog
behind pretending to bite her. She was heedless of her cubs' cries, and
dived with the dog in play. For hours Tarka ran on the grassy bank of
the duckpond, following his mother as she played in the water. Once the
dog rose to the surface with a mullet in his mouth, which he did not
trouble to kill before leaving it to float on its side. Tarka whistled
again and again, and at last the big dog left the water and chased the
small dog for whistling to his mate.

Tarka ran away. He crossed over the sea-wall, and worked up the stony
bed of the pill, catching the flukes and green crabs which were feeding
at the mouth of an open sewer. He met White-tip and Greymuzzle, and
together they returned to the duckpond when the wildfowl flighted
over. He was swimming round one bend of the ram's horn when the big
dog heard the strokes of his hindlegs and swam after him again. Tarka
dived and twisted, and although he was bitten twice in the neck and
once through the paw, he was not caught. His mother's training had made
him swift and strong. He quitted the water and was pursued through
grassy tufts and thistles and bunches of frayed flags to the sea-wall,
where the big dog turned and whistled to his mate. Hearing another
whistle--it was really an echo of his own--he galloped in rage back
to the duckpond. Then Tarka whistled, and the dog returned to kill
him. Tarka went up and over the sea-wall at his greatest speed, across
the mud and stones of the pill and to the western sea-wall, where he
stopped. He cried _Ic-yang!_ several times, but if the dog had returned
in answer to the challenge, it is doubtful whether Tarka would have
waited to drink the blood of his enemy.

Already his mother had forgotten, and perhaps would never again
remember, that she had loved a cub called Tarka.




CHAPTER SEVEN


He was alone, a young male of a ferocious and persecuted tribe whose
only friends, except the Spirit that made it, were its enemies--the
otter hunters. His cubhood was ended, and now indeed did his name fit
his life, for he was a wanderer, and homeless, with nearly every man
and dog against him.

Tarka fished the pools and guts of the Branton pill, eating what he
caught among the feathery and aromatic leaves of the sea-wormwood
plants which grew in the mudded cracks of the sloping stone wall with
the sea-beet, the scentless sea-lavender, and the glasswort. One night
a restlessness came over him, and he rode on the flood-tide to the head
of the pill, which was not much wider than the gravel barges made fast
to rusty anchors half-hidden in the grass, and to bollards of rotting
wood. The only living thing that saw him arrive at the pill-head was
a rat which was swarming down one of the mooring ropes, and when it
smelled otter it let out a squeak and rapidly climbed over the sprig
of furze tied to the rope to stop rats, and ran back into the ship.
Tarka padded out of the mud, and along the footpath on the top of the
sea-wall, often pausing with raised head and twitching nostrils, until
he came to where the stream, passing through a culvert under the road,
fell into a concrete basin and rushed thence down a stony slope into
the pill. Entering the water above the fish-pass, he swam under the
culvert, following the stream round bends and past a farmyard, through
another culvert under a cart road, and on till he came to a stone
bridge near a railway station. A horse and butt, or narrow farm cart,
was crossing the bridge, and he spread himself out beside a stone, so
that three inches of water covered his head and back and rudder. When
the butt had gone, he saw a hole, and crept up it. It was the mouth of
an earthenware drain, broken at the joint. He found a dry place within.
When it was quiet again, he went under the bridge and fished up the
stream, returning at dawn to the drain.

He was awakened by the noise of pounding hooves; but the noises grew
remote and he curled up again, using his thick rudder as a pillow on
which to rest his throat. Throughout the day the noises of hooves
recurred, for below the bridge was a ford where farm horses were taken
to water. Twice he crept down the drain, but each time there was a
bright light at the break in the pipe, and so he went back. At dusk
he slipped out and went upstream again. Just above the bridge was a
chestnut tree, and under it a shed, where ducks were softly quacking.
He climbed on the bank, standing with his feet in sprays of ivy, his
nose upheld, his head peering. The scents of the ducks were thick and
luring as vivid colour is to a child. Juices flowed into his mouth,
his heart beat fast. He moved forward, he thought of warm flesh, and
his eyes glowed amber with the rays of a lamp in the farmhouse kitchen
across the yard. The chestnut tree rustled its last few rusty leaves
above him. Then across the vivid smear of duck scent strayed the taint
of man; an ivy leaf trembled, a spider's web was broken, the river
murmured, and the twin amber dots were gone.

Beside the stream was a public footpath and an illuminated building
wherein wheels spun and polished connecting-rods moved to regular
pulses which thudded in the air like the feet of men running on a bank.
Tarka dived. He could not swim far, for by the electric power station
the river slid over a fall. He swam to the right bank, but it was a
steep wall of concrete. Again he dived, swimming upstream and crawling
out on the bank. For many minutes he was afraid to cross the railway
line, but at last he ran swiftly over the double track, and onwards
until he reached the stream flowing deep under a foot-bridge.

He had been travelling for an hour, searching the uvvers of the banks
for fish as he had learned in cubhood, when on a sandy scour he
found the pleasing scent of otter. He whistled and hurried upstream,
following the scent lying wherever the seals had been pressed. Soon he
heard a whistle, and a feeling of joy warmed his being.

A small otter was waiting for him, sitting on a boulder, licking her
coat with her tongue, the white tip of her rudder in the water. As
Tarka approached, she looked at him, but she did not move from the
boulder, nor did she cease to lick her neck when he placed his forepads
on the stone and looked up into her face. He mewed to her and crawled
out of the water to stand on hindlegs beside her and touch her nose. He
licked her face, while his joy grew to a powerful feeling, so that when
she continued to disregard him, he whimpered and struck her with one
of his pads. White-tip yikkered and bit him in the neck. Then she slid
into the water, and with a playful sweep of her rudder swam away from
him.

He followed and caught her, and they rolled in play; and to Tarka
returned a feeling he had not felt since the early days in the hollow
tree, when he was hungry and cold and needing his mother. He mewed like
a cub to White-tip, but she ran away. He followed her into a meadow.
It was strange play, it was miserable play, it was not play at all,
for Tarka was an animal dispirited. He pressed her, but she yikkered at
him, and snapped at his neck whenever he tried to lick her face, until
his mewing ceased altogether and he rolled her over, standing on her as
though she were a salmon just lugged to land. With a yinny of anger she
threw him off, and faced him with swishing rudder, tissing through her
teeth.

Afterwards she ignored him, and returned to the river as though she
were alone, to search under stones for mullyheads, or loach. He
searched near her. He caught a black and yellow eel-like fish, whose
round sucker-mouth was fastened to the side of a trout, but she would
not take it. It was a lamprey. He dropped it before her again and
again, pretending to have caught it anew each time. She swung away from
his offering as though she had caught the lamprey and Tarka would seize
it from her. The sickly trout, which had been dying for days with the
lamprey fastened to it, floated down the stream; it had been a cannibal
trout and had eaten more than fifty times its own weight of smaller
trout. Tar from the road, after rain, had poisoned it. A rat ate the
body the next day, and Old Nog speared and swallowed the rat three
nights later. The rat had lived a jolly and murderous life, and died
before it could fear.

The lamprey escaped alive, for Tarka dropped it and left White-tip
in dejection. He had gone a few yards when he turned to see if she
were following him. Her head was turned, she was watching. He was so
thrilled that his whistle--a throat sound, like the curlew's--was low
and flute-like. She answered. He was in love with White-tip, and as in
all wild birds and animals, his emotions were as intense as they were
quick. He felt neither hunger nor fatigue, and he would have fought for
her until he was weak now that she had whistled to him. They galloped
into the water-meadow, where in his growing desire he rushed at her,
rolling her over and recoiling from her snapping of teeth. She sprang
after him and they romped among the clumps of flowering rush, startling
the rabbits at feed and sending up the woodcock which had just flown
from the long low island seventeen miles off the estuary bar. White-tip
was younger than Tarka, and had been alone for three weeks before the
old, grey-muzzled otter had met and taken care of her. Her mother
had been killed by the otter-hounds, during the last meet of the
otter-hunting season, at the end of September.

Tarka and White-tip returned to the stream, where among the dry stalks
of angelica and hemlock they played hide-and-seek. But whenever his
playfulness would change into a caress, she yinny-yikkered at him. She
softened after a while, and allowed him to lick her head, once even
licking his nose before running away. She was frightened of him, and
yet was glad to be with him, for she had been lonely since she had
lost Greymuzzle, when a marshman's dog had chased them out of a clump
of rushes where they had been lying rough. Tarka caught her, and was
prancing round her on a bank of gravel when down the stream came a
dog-otter with three white ticks on his brow, a heavy, slow-moving,
coarse-haired otter who had travelled down from the moor to find just
such a mate as the one before him. Tarka cried _Ic-yang!_ and ran at
him, but the dog-otter, who weighed thirty pounds, bit him in the neck
and shoulder. Tarka ran back, tissing, swinging and swaying his head
before he ran forward and attacked. The older dog rolled him over, and
bit him several times. Tarka was so mauled that he ran away. The dog
followed him, but Tarka did not turn to fight. He was torn about the
head and neck, and bitten thrice through the tongue and narrow lower
jaw.

He stopped at the boulder where White-tip had been sitting when first
she had seen him, and listened to the whistles of his enemy. The water
sang its stone-song in the dark as it flowed its course to the sea.
He waited, but White-tip never came, so he sank into the water and
allowed himself to be carried down past bends and under stone arches
of the little bridges which carried the lanes. He floated with hardly
a paddle, listening to the song of the water and sometimes lapping to
cool his tongue. The wheels and rods of the power station turned and
gleamed behind glass windows like the wings of dragonflies; over the
fall he slid, smooth as oil. Slowly and unseen he drifted, under the
chestnut tree, under the bridge, past the quiet railway station, the
orchards, the meadows, and so to the pill-head. The current dropped
him into the basin of the fish-pass, and carried him down the slide
to salt water. With the ebb he floated by ketches and gravel barges,
while ring-plover and little stints running at the line of lapse cried
their sweet cries of comradeship. The mooring kegs bobbed and turned
in the ebb, the perches, tattered with sea-weed, leaned out of the
trickling mud of the fairway, where curlew walked, sucking up worms in
their long curved bills. Tarka rode on with the tide. It took him into
the estuary, where the real sea was fretting the sandbanks. He heard a
whistle, and answered it gladly. Greymuzzle was fishing in the estuary,
and calling to White-tip.

The old otter, patient in life after many sorrows and fears, caressed
his bitten face and neck and licked his hurts. They hunted together,
and slept during the day in a drain in one of the dykes of the marsh,
which was watered by a fresh stream from the hills lying northwards.
Night after night they hunted in the sea, and often when the tide was
low they played in the Pool opposite the fishing village that was built
around the base of a hill. The north-east wind blew cold over the pans
and sandy hillocks near the sea, but Greymuzzle knew a warm sleeping
place in a clump of round-headed club-rush, near the day-hide of a
bittern. She became dear to Tarka, and gave him fish as though he were
her cub, and in the course of time she took him for her mate.




CHAPTER EIGHT


The trees of the riverside wept their last dry tears, and the mud in
the tide-head pool made them heavy and black; and after a fresh, when
salmon came over the bar, beginning their long journey to spawn in the
gravel where the rivers ran young and bright, broken black fragments
were strewn on the banks and ridges of the wide estuary. In November
the poplars were like bedraggled gull-feathers stuck in the ground,
except for one or two or three leaves which fluttered on their tops
throughout the gales of November.

One evening, when the ebb-tide was leaning the channel buoys to the
west and the gulls were flying silent and low over the sea to the
darkening cliffs of the headland, Tarka and Greymuzzle set out on a
journey. They had followed the salmon up the river, and Greymuzzle had
returned for a purpose. The bright eye of the lighthouse, standing like
a bleached bone at the edge of the sandhills, blinked in the clear air.
The otters were carried down amidst swirls and topplings of waves in
the wake of a ketch, while the mumble of the bar grew in their ears.
Beyond the ragged horizon of grey breakers the day had gone, clouded
and dull, leaving a purplish pallor on the cold sea. The waves slid and
rose under the masted ship, pushing the white surge of the bar from her
bows. A crest rolled under her keel and she pitched into a trough. On
the left a mist arose off a bank of grey boulders, on which a destroyer
lay broken and sea-scattered. It had lain there for years, in bits
like beetle fragments in a gorse-spider's grey web-tunnel. One of the
great seas that drive the flying spume over the potwallopers' grazing
marsh had thrown it up on the Pebble Ridge. During the day Tarka
and Greymuzzle had slept under the rusty plates, curled warm on the
wave-worn boulders rolled there by the seas along Hercules Promontory.

Two hours after midnight the otters had swum five miles along the
shallow coast and had reached the cave of the headland, which
Greymuzzle had remembered when she had felt her young kick inside her.
The tide left deep pools among the rocks, which the otters searched
for blennies and gobies, and other little fish which lurked under the
seaweed. They caught prawns, which were eaten tail first, but the heads
were never swallowed. With their teeth they tore mussels off the rocks,
and holding them in their paws, they cracked them and licked out the
fish. While Greymuzzle was digging out a sand-eel, Tarka explored a
deep pool where dwelt a one-clawed lobster. It was hiding two yards
under a rock, at the end of a cleft too narrow to swim up. Four times
he tried to hook it out with his forepad, the claws of which were worn
down with sand-scratching, and in his eagerness to get at it he tore
seaweed with his teeth. The lobster had been disturbed many times in
its life, for nearly every man of the villages of Cryde and Ham had
tried to dislodge it with long sticks to which they had lashed hooks.
The lobster had lost so many claws that after nine had been wrenched
off, its brain refused to grow any more. Its chief enemy was an old
man named Muggy, who went to the pool every Sunday morning at low
spring-tide with a rabbit skin and entrails, which he threw into the
water to lure it forth from the cleft. The lobster was too cunning, and
so it lived.

The otters rested by day on a ledge in the cave under the headland.
Here dwelt Jarrk the seal, who climbed a slab below them by shuffles
and flapping jumps. Sometimes Tarka swam in the pools of the cave,
rolling on his back to bite the drops of iron-water which dripped from
the rocky roof, but only when Jarrk was away in the sea, hunting the
conger where the rocks of Bag Leap ripped foam out of the tide.

The greatest conger of Bag Leap, who was Garbargee, had never been
caught, for whenever it saw Jarrk the seal, its enemy, it hid far
down in the crab-green water, in a hole in the rocks of the deepest
pool, where lay shell-crusted cannon and gear of H. M. sloop _Weazel_
wrecked there a century before. When no seal was about, Garbargee hung
out of the hole and stared, unblinkingly, for fish, which it pursued
and swallowed. One morning as Tarka, hungry after a stormy night, was
searching in the thong-weed five fathoms under the glimmering surface,
something flashed above him, and looking up, he saw a narrow head
with a long hooked preying beak and two large webs ready to thrust in
chase of fish. This was Oylegrin the shag, whose oily greenish-black
feathers reflected light. The smooth narrow head flickered as Oylegrin
shifted his gaze, and a pollack below mistook the flicker for a smaller
surface-swimming fish. The pollack turned to rise and take it, and
the shag saw the gleam of its side at the same time as Tarka saw it.
Oylegrin tipped up and kicked rapidly downwards, faster than an otter
could swim. Its tight feathers glinted and gleamed as it pursued the
pollack. Garbargee also saw the pollack and uncurled a muscular tail
from its hold on a jut of rock. The conger was longer than a man is
tall, and thicker through the body than Tarka. It weighed ninety
pounds. It waved above the weedy timbers, and as it passed over, crabs
hid in the mouths of cannon.

Bird, animal, and fish made a chasing arrowhead whose tip was the
glinting pollack; conger the flexible shaft, otter and shag the barbs.
Oylegrin swam with long neck stretched out, hooked beak ready to grip,
while it thrust with webbed feet farther from the bubbles which ran
out of its gullet. The pollack turned near Tarka, who swung up and
followed it. Oylegrin braked and swerved with fourteen short, stiff
tail-feathers and one upturned web. The pollack turned down a sheer
rock hung with thong-weed, but, meeting Tarka, turned up again and was
caught by Oylegrin.

The chasing arrow-head buckled against the rock, in a tangle of thongs
and ribbons and bubbles shaking upwards. The giant conger had bitten
the shag through the neck. Wings flapped, a grating, muffled cry broke
out of a bottle of air. Tarka's mouth opened wide, but his teeth could
not pierce the conger's skin. The gloom darkened, for an opaqueness was
spreading where there had been movement.

Now Jarrk the seal, who had been searching round the base of the rock,
saw an otter rising to the surface, and was swinging up towards him
when he saw a conger eel wave out the opaqueness, which was Oylegrin's
blood staining the green gloom. Garbargee held the shag in its jaws.
The undersea cloud was scattered by the swirls of flippers as the seal
chased the conger. Garbargee dropped the shag, and the cleft of rock
received its grey tenant. Jarrk swung up with a bend of his smooth
body, and lay under the surface with only his head out, drinking fresh
air, and looking at Tarka six yards away. _Wuff, wuff_, said Jarrk,
playfully. _Iss iss_, cried Tarka in alarm. The pollack escaped and
soon afterwards was feeding with other fish on the crab-nibbled corpse
of the shag.

It was not often that the otters went fishing in daylight; usually
they lay in the warm noonday sun on the sand of a cove behind the Long
Rock--a spur of which was the plucking perch of Chakchek, the One-eyed,
the peregrine falcon. One morning Chakchek half-closed his wings and
cut down at Tarka, crying _aik-aik-aik!_ and swishing past his head. It
was the cream-breasted tiercel's cry of anger. He was a swift flyer,
and soon mounted to where his mate waited at her pitch in the sky above
the precipice, scanning the lower airs for rock-dove, oystercatcher,
finch, or guillemot. When they had swept away down the north side of
the headland, Kronk the raven croaked thrice, deeply, and took the air
to twirl with his mate in the windy uptrends.

Near Sandy Cove was the Cormorants' Rock, where five cormorants
squatted during most of the daylit hours, digesting their cropfuls of
fishes. Each cormorant, as it arrived with steady black flight, would
pass the rock about fifty yards, swing round and fly back into the
wind, alighting uneasily among its brethren, some of whom had the tails
of fishes sticking out of their gullets. They held out their wings and
worked their shoulders to ease the fish down into their crops. The top
of Cormorants' Rock, where they sat, was above the highest wave.

Bag Leap was a sunken reef stretching about half a mile from the point,
over which the tides raced. Here the currents brought many seals, which
had followed salmon up the Severn Sea, on their return home to Lundy
Island. With them was a grey seal, a stranger who had come down from
the north. For several days the seals fished off the Leap, while Jarrk
roared among them and joined in their favourite game of chasing the
smallest seal, who was not black and yellowish-brown like themselves,
but a rare silvery-white. They would swim round the rocks looking for
her, sometimes remaining under water for nearly a quarter of an hour.
Once when Tarka was searching for a bass in four fathoms he met Jarrk
face to face, and the shock made him blow a big bubble. He turned and
kicked up to the light, while Jarrk swum round him in a spiral. Jarrk
was always gentle, for he had never had an enemy to shock him into
fear, and when Tarka tissed and yikkered at him, the scymitar-shaped
lip-bristles of his broad muzzle twitched, his upper lip lifted off his
lower jaw, he showed his yellow teeth, and barked. _Wuff, wuff_, said
Jarrk, jovially. _Ic-yang_, yikkered Tarka. The seal snorted; then his
back, stretched and gleaming, rolled under like a barrel.

When the seals left Bag Leap for the seventeen-mile swim to their
island home, one remained with Jarrk. She was the stranger grey
seal, and often while the other seals had been romping, she had been
exploring the far dark end of the cave behind the Long Rock, where
was a beach of boulders. Greymuzzle explored the beach for the same
purpose, and sometimes otter and seal passed by each other in the
pools. On one high-tide the seal swam into the cave, and did not return
with the ebb. For three days she hid herself, and then she flapped down
the sand and splashed into the sea, very hungry.

Many times during the rise and fall of tides the bitch-otter ran into
the cave, and on the morning of the grey seal's return to the sea
she swam round the Long Rock and crawled out of the surge among the
limpet-studded rocks of Bag Hole. Three hundred and ten feet above
her, perched on the swarded lip of a sand-coloured cliff, Kronk the
raven watched her running round and over boulders. She reached the
base of the precipice, and scrambled up a slide of scree, which had
clattered down during the rains of autumn. Gulls wove and interwove in
flight below the raven, floating past their roosts in the face of the
cliff. The scree had fallen from under the Wreckers' Path, made during
centuries by the cautious feet of men and women descending after storms
to gather what the sea had thrown on the boulders of the Hole. It was
not much wider than one of the sheep-paths on the headland. Greymuzzle
ran along it, and turning a corner by a lichened boulder, disappeared
from the sight of Kronk. She had climbed here alone several times
during the previous night.

Less than a minute afterwards the raven jumped leisurely over the edge,
and opening his wings, rose on the wind, and turning, swept back over
his perching place, over snares pegged by rabbit-runs in the grass,
and to a shillet wall a hundred yards from the precipice. One of the
brass snares Kronk was watching. It had been drawn tight about the neck
of a rabbit since early morning; the rabbit had died after two hours of
jumping and wheezing. It was cold; its fleas were swarming in agitation
over its longer hairs. Kronk was waiting for a meal off the rabbit,
but he did not like to go near it until he knew for certain that the
trapper, whom he had watched setting the snare the afternoon before,
had not tilled a gin beside it specially for Kronk. The raven knew all
about the methods of trappers, and the gins and snares they tilled.
Several times Kronk had sailed with the wind over the snared rabbit;
he sailed without checking by tail or wing, lest the trapper be spying
upon him. In every other act of his life he was as cautious, having
learned many things about man in more than a hundred years of flying.

The raven was waiting for Mewliboy, the cowardly soaring buzzard hawk,
to espy the rabbit; and when Mewliboy had ripped it open with one
stroke of his hooked beak, the raven intended to call _krok-krok-krok_
rapidly, and so summon his mate to help him deal with the buzzard, if
he were not trapped. And if he had sprung a hidden gin, then it would
be safe for Kronk. So the raven reasoned.

Greymuzzle came to the end of Wreckers' Path, and climbed up springy
clumps of sea-thrift, among gull-feathers and mussel-shells and
fish-bones, and ran along another path to the top of the precipice. She
looked left and right, often pausing to sniff the air. She picked up a
feather, ran with it a few yards, and dropped it again. She cast round
over the sward, peering into rabbit-holes and pulling out dry stalks of
thrift that the wind had blown there. Kronk watched her running, swift
and low, along the narrow wandering lines pressed in the sward by the
feet of rabbits; he saw her stop by the snared rabbit, bite on to its
neck, and watched her tugging at it. _Crr-crr!_ said Kronk to himself.

He jumped off the wall, which was covered with dry lichens dissolving
the stones with acids, and circling above Greymuzzle, croaked a long,
harsh note, meant to call the gulls. He dived at Greymuzzle, repeating
the harsh cry, and very soon nearly fifty herring gulls were screaming
about her. Alarmed by the noise, she ran back the way she had come;
the gulls followed, and Kronk had the rabbit to himself. Seeing him,
the gulls returned, screaming and flying as near to him as they dared.
Kronk pecked and pulled at his ease, knowing that the gulls would give
the alarm should a man come round either the south or the north side of
the wall, which hid approach.

Greymuzzle was slipping down the scree at the end of Wreckers' Path,
carrying a brown dry tussock of sea-thrift in her mouth, when the
remote crying of gulls became loud above the cliff. _Quoc-quoc-quoac!_
many were muttering in anger. Several hundred wheeled and floated above
the otter. She heard a soughing of wings, and looking up, saw the beak
and eyes of the raven growing larger as he plunged towards her. He had
taken nine long hops away from the rabbit, and the tenth had taken him
over the precipice edge as a man, walking fast, had taken his ninth
stride round the northern wall, three hundred yards off. Kronk opened
his wings when half-way down the cliff and sailed without a wing-beat
round the Point.

Mewing and scolding, the gulls floated higher in the wind, and hearing
them, the grey seal, who had been lolling beyond the break of rollers,
swam out twenty yards and turned to watch the top of the cliff. She
knew that the tossing flight and the cries of _quoc-quoc-quoac!_ meant
the presence of man.

Greymuzzle swam round the Long Rock with the mat of roots in her mouth,
and crawled out of the sandy surge. Tarka was lying on his back,
playing with a smooth green flat pebble of glass that he had carried
from the bed of a pool. When he saw her, he turned on his pads--neither
bone nor muscle showed in action--and ran to see what she carried.
Greymuzzle lifted her burden out of his playful way, but he jostled
her, wanting to take it, and knowing nothing of her purpose. He bit off
three rootlets, and at the mouth of the cave he ran back to his glass
pebble.

The seal watched with bleary eyes the man climbing down, and his
spaniel dog sitting three-quarters of the way down the path, frightened
to follow its master farther. Tarka played with his pebble, hidden
behind the orange-lichen and towering wall of the Long Rock. In a
scattered and unled flock the gulls drifted above the cliff. Over them
Kronk the raven, most powerful and black, cleaved the air on outspread
wings; sometimes he twirled on his back, recovering immediately. He
was practising the upward or impaling lunge of beak that he had learned
from his father one hundred and thirteen years before. High above the
raven a small dark star twinkled and swept in its orbit, twinkled and
poised on its pitch. Chakchek the One-eyed, slate-blue pinioned and
cream-breasted, was aloft. _Crr-crr_, said Kronk, as sea and greensward
turned up and over and upright again. _Crr-crr-crr_, as the man
disappeared around the Long Rock, and Kronk sailed downwind to be over
him.

A thousand feet below the raven, Tarka tapped his pebble of glass,
green and dim as the light seen through the hollow waves rearing for
their fall on the sand. The noise of waves, continuous and roaring
on the rocks at low tide, was swelled by the echo beaten back by the
cliff, and Tarka saw the man climbing round the Long Rock before he
heard him. The man, jumping from boulder to boulder, did not see Tarka,
but when he reached the sand he saw the trails of two otters. One trail
led into the cave straitly, with regular five-toed prints, except where
the track swerved from the impetuous and uneven trail of a galloping
otter. Three rootlets of sea-thrift were dropped on the spurred sand.
The strait trail led on; the other turned back to the wetted grey
pebbles, where lay crab-shells, corks, fish-tails, and a piece of glass.

The man followed the strait tracks into the cave, into twilight,
clambering over ice-cold rocks, and shining a light on the pools
wherein drops glistened and struck loud in the stillness. He moved
slowly, with glances over his shoulder at the diminishing circle of
daylight. The roof of the cave was red and brown with the iron in the
rock. Sometimes his foothold wobbled on a stone that in the motion of
tides had worn a cup for itself. A hundred yards from its mouth the
cave turned to the left, shutting darkness and sea-whispers together.
The man went on, bending down to find his way by the light he carried.
The pools became shallower, without life or weed; the roof lower and
dry. A wailing cry ran along the walls. Holding the electric torch
before him, he saw four pricks of light that moved, vanished, and
appeared again, one pair above the other. The wail went past him again,
like the cry of a hungry infant. On the grey boulder at his feet the
wan light showed a black mark, as of tar on bitten fish-bones--the
spraints of an otter.

In five minutes he had walked another fifty yards into the cave. The
pale yellow eyes shifted noiselessly in front of him. The toe of his
boot kicked something that clattered on the stones, and looking down,
he saw a bone; and near it, other bones, skulls, and shrunken hides.
He picked up a jawbone, with grinder teeth, cuspless and oblique, set
along it. Many seals had died in the cavern.

Again the wailing, not far away. The boulders sloped upwards, and
pressed one against another by his feet, made a noise of _pob-pobble_
that rang solidly and echoed down the cave and up again. Before him
something white was stirring. Picking it up, he stroked the soft,
warm hair of a baby seal, putting his finger in its mouth to stop
the wailing. While he was nursing it, he heard the hollow echo of a
plunging splash, a grumbling noise like _uch, uch!_ and a slapping as
of the palms of great hands on flat rocks. Turning his torch down into
the gloom, he saw two dull red orbs, and heard the angry bleat of a
mother seal.

He carried the white calf to the inner wall of the cave and laid it
down; then hurried to the other wall, where ledges formed natural
steps. On the top ledge an otter was crouching. By the shape of the
head he knew it was a bitch-otter; an old otter, with grey and grizzled
hairs on its muzzle. He climbed as high as he dared, and saw that it
had made a couch of dry sea-weed and grasses and thrift. He peered into
the couch. The otter moved to and fro on the narrow ledge, tissing. He
could see no cubs; nor did she appear to be in whelp.

_Uch, uch!_ gasped the seal, exhausted and aching after her anguished
journey over the boulders of the cavern. She had hurried by pressing
the palms of her flippers on the ground and lifting her body forward
by short jumps, moving fast as a walking man. She reached her cub and
caressed it with her tongue, making sounds over it between sobbing
and bleating. Then she turned her back to the man, and flung sand and
pebbles at him with quick scooping strokes of her flippers. The man
took from his pocket a wooden whistle, made from an elderberry stick,
and played several soft notes upon it. The seal looked at him, enjoying
the rude music. She lay still and happy with her calf, whose head was
turned on one side as it sucked through the side of its mouth. The man
played on, moving nearer to the seal. Slowly he bent down to stroke its
head, and the seal licked his hand.




CHAPTER NINE


The otters were alarmed by the coming of the man, and that night they
left the headland, returning to the Burrows, and hunting rabbits in the
great warren of the sandhills. A cold mist lay on the plains and in the
hollows, riming the marram grasses and the withered stems of thistle
and mullein, so that in the morning mildew and fungi in strange plant
forms seemed to have grown out of the sand. On the coarser hairs of the
otters' coats the hoar remained white, but on the shorter and softer
hairs it melted into little balls of water. Everything except the
otters and birds and bullocks was white. The sedges and reeds of the
duckponds were white, so was the rigging of the ketches in the pill.
The hoof-holes of cattle were filmed with brittle ice. In the cold
windless air came distinct the quacking of ducks and the whistling of
drakes as the wildfowl flighted from the ponds and saltings to the sea,
where they slept by day.

The otters lay up near a cattle shippen, among reeds with white
feathery tops. A dull red sun, without heat or rays, moved over them,
sinking slowly down the sky. For two days and two nights the frosty
vapour lay over the Burrows, and then came an icy north wind which
poured like liquid glass from Exmoor and made all things distinct. The
wind made whips of the dwarf willows, and hissed through clumps of the
great sea-rushes. The spines of the marram grasses scratched wildly at
the rushing air, which passed over the hollows where larks and linnets
crouched from its invisible clutch. Like a spirit freed by the sun's
ruin and levelling all things before a new creation the wind drove
grains of sand against the legs and ruffled feathers of the little
birds, as though it would breathe annihilation upon them, strip their
frail bones of skin and flesh, and grind them until they became again
that which was before the earth's old travail. Vainly the sharp and
hard points of the marram grasses drew their circles on the sand: the
Icicle Spirit was coming, and no terrestrial power could exorcise it.

The north wind carried a strange thickset bird which drifted without
feather sound over the dry bracken of Ferny Hill, where Tarka and
Greymuzzle had gone for warmth. Its plumage was white, barred and
spotted with dark brown. Its fierce eyes were ringed with yellow, the
colour of the lichens on the stone shippens. Mile after mile its soft
and silent wings had carried it, from a frozen land where the Northern
Lights stared in stark perpetuity upon the ice-fields. The thick-set
bird was an Arctic Owl, and its name was Bubu, which means Terrible.
It quartered the mires and the burrows, and the gripe of its feathered
feet was death to many ducks and rabbits.

Clouds moved over land and sea with the heavy grey drifting silence of
the ice-owl's flight; night came starless, loud with the wind's rue in
the telegraph wires on the sea-wall. As Tarka and his mate were running
down to meet the flood-tide in the pill, a baying broke out in the sky;
whiskered heads lifted, fixed to harken. For a minute the otters did
not move, while the hound-like baying passed over. The long skein of
south-wending geese swung round into the wind, flying with slow flaps
and forming a chevron that glided on down-held, hollow wings beyond the
pill-mouth. Cries of golden plover, twined in the liquid bubble-link of
the curlews' chain-songs, rose up from the saltings.

The white-fronted geese, eaters of grass and clover, had come before
the blizzard howling its way from the North Star. A fine powdery snow
whirled out of the sky at night, that lay nowhere, but raced over the
mossy plains and hillocks, and in the burrows, faster than the grains
of sand. Tree, dune, shippen, and dyke--all were hid in whirling white
chaos at daylight. The next day thicker snowflakes fell, and out of the
storm dropped a bird with white wings, immensely swift in flight, whose
talon-stroke knocked off the head of a goose. It stood on the slain,
holding by the black sickle-claws of its yellow feet; its hooked beak
tore breast-bone and flesh together. Its plumage was brown-spotted like
the plumage of Bubu--the hue of snow and fog. Every feather was taut
and cut for the swiftest stoop in the thin airs of its polar ranging.
Its full brown eyes glanced proudly as any Chakchek, for it was a
Greenland falcon.

Beyond the shaped and ever-shifting heaps of sand, beyond the ragged
horizon of the purple-grey sea, the sun sunk as though it were spent in
space, a dwarf-red star quenching in its own steam of decay. The snow
fled in the wind, over the empty shells of snails and rabbit skeletons
lying bare and scattered, past the white, sand-stripped branches of
dead elderberry trees, and the dust of them aided an older dust to wear
away the living tissue of the Burrows. Night was like day, for neither
moon nor sun nor star was seen. Then the blizzard passed, and the snow
lay in its still pallor under the sky.

And the sky was to the stars again--by day six black stars and one
greater whitish star, hanging aloft the Burrows, flickering at their
pitches; six peregrines and one Greenland falcon. A dark speck falling,
the _whish_ of the grand stoop from two thousand feet heard half a mile
away; red drops on a drift of snow. By night the great stars flickered
as with falcon wings, the watchful and glittering hosts of creation.
The moon arose in its orbit, white and cold, awaiting through the ages
the swoop of a new sun, the shock of starry talons to shatter the
Icicle Spirit in a rain of fire. In the south strode Orion the Hunter,
with Sirius the Dogstar baying green fire at his heels. At midnight
Hunter and Hound were rushing bright in a glacial wind, hunting the
false star-dwarfs of burnt-out suns, who had turned back into Darkness
again.

Old Nog the heron, flying over the Ram's-horn Pond, saw Greymuzzle
among the reeds, for she was the only dark thing in the white
wilderness below. She was hiding a solitary cub by curling herself
round it, so that her chin rested on her flank. During the storm she
had not left the couch of bitten reed and floss; the heat of her body
melted the snowflakes. For two days and a night she kept the snow from
the blind cub; and when the air was clear, a black frost gripped the
waters of the ponds, bound the drifts, and hung icicles from drain and
culvert. Then Greymuzzle arose, and called to Tarka over the ice. He
answered from the northern horn of the pond.

He had kept a fishing hole in the ice, which he bit free as it froze.
Fish were hard to see, for the top of the water under the ice was a
bad reflector of light to the lower water. As it grew colder, the fish
buried themselves in the mud, and when Greymuzzle roved in the brown
dim water, she saw only her own vague image following her above. More
wildfowl flighted to the estuary, and the cries of birds when the
tide was flowing and covering the sandbanks were myriad as the gold
flickerings in the night sky. The otters crossed the swift waters to
the sandbanks where they were feeding, swimming under the waves and
rising to breathe with only their wide nostrils above. Greymuzzle swam
up under a duck and seized it, and the change of note in the quacking
was heard by the birds, who threw the alarm over the estuary. Thousands
of wings whipped jets on the water. The wildfowler creeping up in his
narrow boat pulled the trigger of his gun too late--a long red flame
sent a blast of shot swishing over the head of Greymuzzle as she dived.
She swam to the mouth of the pill with the duck in her jaws, and ate it
on an icy litter of twigs and seaweed left by the last high tide.

The next night the fishing hole was sealed, and no longer marked by
a ring of scales and bones, for the rats and crows had eaten them.
Greymuzzle was scraping at a fish frozen in the ice when the sheet
whanged and whined and creaked, then _boom!_, a crack ran across
it, and water spirted in the fissure. When it was still, Orion was
reflected there, with the red and green flashes of Sirius; but as
Greymuzzle peered the star-shine glazed, and mock-trees of the Icicle
Spirit grew on the water.

The cold sharpened. To the estuary came sanderlings in white winter
dress, who ran at the tide-line like blown sea-foam. Snow buntings
followed, and went south with them. The flatfish swam to warmer water
beyond the bar, and often when the otters dived in the estuary they
rose empty-mouthed to the surface, except perhaps for a green crab. Old
Nog the heron grew so thin that he looked like a bundle of grey flags
stripped by wind and clinging to two reeds. His inland fishing ponds
were frozen, most of the streams ran under plates of ice, and the only
food he could spear was to be found at low tide in the pools of the
Shrarshook Ridge, where gravel had been dug.

The pans and plains of the Burrows were crossed by a thousand tracks,
the prints of larks, finches, wagtails, crows, and gulls; the presses
of weasels, rabbits, and stoats; the pads of badgers and foxes; the
triple toes of herons and bitterns, like the veining of leaves. Many
of the smaller birds were so weak they could not fly, and their bodies
were eaten by rats and weasels, which were eaten by the larger owls and
hawks.

Other otters from the Two Rivers came down to the estuary, some of them
cubs of ten or twelve pounds in weight, who had kept together with
their mothers. Families of three and four and one of five--a bitch and
four cubs from the boggy moorland hill where the Two Rivers began in
the peat--came to the duckpond along the otter path from the saltings,
and finding it frozen, went down the pill and out to the coast. Tarka
met White-tip with her mate by an overturned hulk one night; she was
scratching at the webmark of a widgeon, frozen in the mud with its
scent. One look, and they had passed in the darkness.

Many of the dog-otters wandered solitary. Last of all, slow and
fatigued, after weeks of hunger, came Marland Jimmy, the old dog with
the split ear who had played the funnel-game with Tarka's mother in
the deep clay pit. He limped along the otter-path, which many pads had
pressed into ice; the cysts between his toes, inflamed by paraffin,
were raw and frostbitten. The tide was ebbing when he crawled over the
white sea-wall, and down the dark and hard mud to the water, crackling
the brittle ice-forms of the glasswort. Hearing a whistle across the
pill, Marland Jimmy walked into the water and swam. He kicked slowly,
and the current carried him aslant, amid plates of ice broken off
by the last tide. The trickles in the mud channers and salting guts
had already ceased. So black and bitter the night that not even the
whippering cries of golden plover were heard in the pill. The water
ebbed in a blank silence of fixed star-points. Marland Jimmy swam
across the pill and crawled out steaming. His breath froze on his
muzzle, and his rudder was pointed with an icicle when he reached
Tarka, a hundred yards along the bank. Tarka was rubbing his head and
the side of his neck against a fish longer than himself, with gaps in
its dull-shining length. A week before, Jarrk the seal had chased it
over the bar, and as it turned past his head, he had taken a bite out
of its belly. The dying salmon drifted with the tides until Greymuzzle
and Tarka caught it in the pill. What a feast they had had! As soon as
they had carried it steaming out of the sea, ice crystals had glittered
on the scales.

Tarka rolled on the crisp snow while the aged otter tore at the fish,
breaking off bone and frozen pink flesh. He moved from gills to tail,
from tail to gills again, gulping icy mouthfuls, wheezing with hard
swallowing, and when he had breathed, yikkering at Tarka to keep away.
Tarka, warmed by his fullness, rolled and rolled, until he rolled into
the water. _Hu-ee-ee-ic_; whistled Tarka.

The split-eared dog had gorged himself when Greymuzzle returned for
another meal. He quaddled down the hard mud to where Tarka was sliding
into the water. With a heavy rippling of his body, he ran to the top
of the slide, and holding his legs rigid, slipped down on his ruined
feet into the water. Greymuzzle heard the happy whistles of the playing
dogs, and slid with them until she heard the squeals of rats fighting
by the broken carcass of the salmon. The noise made her remember her
cub, for rats had squealed among the scrikkits of bones and scales
around Tarka's fishing hole during the snowstorm. Tarka played on until
he was hungry, when he went back to the salmon. Marland Jimmy played
alone at the slide.

The ebb-tide moved along the sea-weedy perches stuck in the mud to mark
the fairway. A mist was rising like steam from the top of the water,
which moved slower with its weight of surface slush. The slush became
clotted, and hardened, and suddenly ceased to move. The star-points
dulled. Orion was stripped of his flashing, the green tongue of Sirius
was mute, the Swan lost her lustre, the glare of the Bull faded.

_Kack!_ croaked Old Nog, flapping up from the fish carcass as a fox
slunk down to it. The tips of his open beak were red with the frozen
blood of a speared rat, which was sticking in his gullet. In swaying
flight, reed-like legs hanging with weakness, the heron set off for the
gravel pools of the Shrarshook. _Kack!_ he called to his mate, who was
standing in the ebb to her knees, fifty yards beyond the slide. She did
not move; nor did the tide.

_Krark!_ called Old Nog at dawn, flying over the pill, and calling his
mate again. _Hu-ee-ee-ic!_ whistled Tarka to Marland Jimmy, who had not
answered since the star-points had suddenly dimmed and vanished off
the water. _Hu-ee-ee-ic!_--a thin, hard cry, which Greymuzzle heard
among the reeds of the duckpond. _Hu-ee-ee-ic!_ travelling through the
ice-blink in the pill, and out across the estuary.

Bubu stared down at Tarka walking over to the eastern sea-wall;
fanned above him before beating away. The Arctic Owl perched fifty
yards below Tarka's slide on something that swayed and creaked to its
weight, but bore it upright. Staring around with several complete
turns of its head, Bubu fixed orange-rimmed eyes on a mask set stiff
before and below it. There was no movement; there was no life. The owl
stared round again, and flew away, leaving its narrow perch swaying on
reed-like legs, as though nodding to the head of Marland Jimmy gazing
film-eyed out of the ice.




CHAPTER TEN


The little thin cub, on its couch among the reeds frozen and bent
like the legs of dead spiders, greeted Greymuzzle with husky mewing
whenever it heard her coming, and would not be comforted by tongue
caresses. Frost had stricken its eyes. Greymuzzle prowled all day and
all night when she was not warming and suckling her cub; and although
she was so hungry, she still played with Tarka, sliding headfirst down
a snowy hillock. They had to travel to the estuary for food, for
every incoming tide piled up its floating floes at the pill-mouth,
with grinding shrieks and shuddering booms that sounded far over the
Burrows. At low tide the frost welded them in a high and solid barrier.

Both otters had blistered their tongues by licking ice, and to ease
their thirst, they rasped them against snow on the sea-wall in the
middle of the day. Greymuzzle went into the village one night,
searching the gardens for food. She found the duckhouse under the
chestnut tree in the farmyard above the bridge, and although she sought
an entrance for more than an hour, she found none. The smell of the
ducks was painful. A fox slunk near her, passing with drooping brush
and ears laid back, pad, pad, pad in the snow.

Unable to get the ducks, she walked down the frozen pill to the
estuary, meeting Tarka at the pill-mouth, near the salmon-fishers'
hut built on the shillet slope of the sea-wall. The fox followed her,
hoping to get another meal of salmon. He followed her until the dawn,
and was near her at sunrise, when she returned to the couch in the
reeds of the duckpond. She winded him and ran him, and although he was
chased by the marshman's dog when she had left off pursuit, the fox
returned, knowing that she had young somewhere in the reeds. His name
was Fang-over-lip, and he had wandered far in his hunger.

While the pallor of day was fading off the snow, a skein of great white
birds, flying with arched wings and long stretched necks, appeared with
a measured beat of pinions from the north and west. _Hompa, hompa,
hompa_, high in the cold air. Greymuzzle and Tarka were eating seaweed
and shellfish on the Shrarshook, but when the swans splashed into the
estuary, they slipped into the tideway and drifted with the flow to
where the wild swans were floating. Fang-over-lip licked out some of
the mussel shells they had dived for, and cracked up a crab's claws,
before following along the beach.

The beams of the lighthouse spread like the wings of a star-fly above
the level and sombre sands. Across the dark ridge of the Shrarshook a
crooked line of lamps winked below the hill. In one of the taverns a
sailor was singing a shanty, the tune of which came distinctly over the
Pool. The swans moved up with the tide, the otters after them. They
were thin and weak; for mussels, winkles, and sometimes a sour green
crab were poor nourishment for an otter who, in careless times, had
eaten a three-pound sea-trout at a sitting and been hungry two hours
afterward.

The tide beyond the tail of the Shrarshook was divided by a string of
froth, made by the leap and chop of waters beginning to move north
and south, along the arms of the sea stretching to the Two Rivers.
The swans turned north, borne by the tide racing past Crow Island.
They paddled out of the main flow, and turning head to tide, began to
feed in the shallow over a sandbank. The otters drifted nearer, only
their wide nostrils above water. When they were ten yards away from
the nearest swan the nostrils sank, and chains of bubbles rose unseen
above them. A swan saw a dark form under the water, but before it could
lift out its head, Tarka had bitten on to its neck. Heavily its wings
beat the water. Every curlew on the sandbank cried in a long uprising
whistle, _cu-u-ur-leek, cur-r-r-leek!_, and the alarm flew up and down
the estuary as fast as sound travelled. The treble whistle of the
red-shank was piped from shore to shore, the ring plover sped over the
water, turning and wheeling as one bird. Old Nog cried _kra-r-rk!_ Wind
from the swans' wings scalloped the water and scattered the spray, and
one struck Tarka a blow that made him float slowly away. But Greymuzzle
hung to the swan's foot, even when her rudder was nearly out of the
water as she was dragged along. The swan trumpeted afar its anger and
fear. Bubu the Terrible flew towards the sound.

Before the Arctic Owl arrived Tarka was undazed and swimming to help
his mate. Seeing and hearing the struggle, Bubu stretched his toes,
opened his beak, and gave a loud and terrifying hoot; but when he
reached the conflict, fanning above like a shade of chaos, there was
nothing to see save only feathers and bubbles. Silent as snow and fog,
staring like the Northern Lights, taloned like black frost, the Arctic
Owl flew over the Shrarshook and dropped upon Fang-over-lip, but the
snarl and the snap of teeth drove him up again.

Across the pull of the tide, among the grating ice-floes, the otters
took the swan, whose flappings were getting feeble as the death-fear
grew less. Tarka had bitten the artery in the neck. When the otters
rested the bird lay quiet on the water. It heard the wings of its
brethren beating out the flying song of swans, _Hompa, hompa, hompa_,
high and remote in the night. It flapped thrice, and died.

Tarka and Greymuzzle swam with the swan to the shore, where they bit
into the throat and closed their eyes as they drank its hot blood. Soon
mouthfuls of feathers were being torn away, but before they could eat
its flesh Fang-over-lip crept upon them. He, too, was famished, having
eaten only a mouse that night--and that small biter of willow bark was
but fur and bone. With the boldness of starvation the fox rushed upon
them. The snarling brought a boar badger, who had been digging for the
roots of sea-beet in the crevices of the stones of the sea-wall. The
boar lumbered down the slope, over the seaweed, and across the shingle
to where Fang-over-lip, with fluffed-out brush and humped back, was
threatening the otters. The badger, who was called Bloody Bill Brock by
certain badger-digging publicans, had never before been so hungry. For
two days the walls of his belly had been flat. He had no fear of any
animal. The otters bit his hide, but could not hurt him, as under the
long grey tapered hairs his skin was nearly half an inch thick. Pushing
them away and grunting, he seized the swan in his jaws and dragged
it away. He dropped it again to bite Greymuzzle; and then he stood
absolutely still, except for his nose. Fang-over-lip did not move, nor
did Greymuzzle, nor Tarka. Their heads were turned towards the cottage
looming white on the sea-wall. A door had opened and closed.

The marshman had with him two bob-tailed cattle dogs, which rushed on
the shingle. They found a circle of feathers. Downwind the waveworn
shells tinkled, as though a wind had risen off the sea and was
running over the beach towards the tarred wooden hospital ship. This
was the sound of the fox's departure. Bloody Bill Brock was slower
and clumsier, and his black bear-claws slipped on the boulders of
the sea-wall's apron. Tarka and Greymuzzle were lying in three feet
of water, with only their ears and nostrils showing. They heard the
pursuit of the badger, and some moments later the hoarse voice of a
man. One dog yelped, two dogs yelped, and both returned to their master
on three legs, while the thick-skinned badger continued his way with
the swan on four sound legs.

Some hours later all of the swan, except the larger bones, feet, wings,
and bill, was inside Bloody Bill Brock, who was snoring inside a sandy
rabbit-bury, where he slept for three days and nights.

Greymuzzle returned to the duckpond with only seaweed and shell-fish
to nourish herself and her cub. Unsteadily it dragged its little body
towards her, and opened its mouth to greet her. No sound came from its
mouth. Its legs trembled and could not carry its head, which hung over
the couch of reeds. Its paws were frost-bitten, its eye-sockets empty.
Greymuzzle stared at it, before lying down and giving the shelter of
her body. She spoke to it and took it in her paws and licked its face,
which was her only way of telling her love. The cub tottered away, and
sought the milk which it could not find. Afterwards it slept, until
she left again to seek food in the wide daylight, following the slot
of deer across the snow. The hind, which had come down from the high
ground with a herd and wandered away with her calf that had been with
her since its birth the previous May, caught the scent of the otter and
ran away, the calf beside her. The otter followed, but turned away when
she saw a small bird crouching on the snow, unable to fly further. She
ate the fire-crested wren--a thimbleful of skin, bone, and feather.
After a vain prowl round the garden of the marshman, she returned to
the duckpond, crossing the pill three hundred yards below the place
where men were breaking up, for firewood, the hulk of an old dismasted
ketch. In the field she picked up the skull of a sheep and carried it a
few yards before dropping it. She had picked it up and dropped it many
times already.

The ice-talons set harder in the land. No twitter of finch or linnet
was heard on the Burrows, for those which remained were dead. Vainly
the linnets had sought the seeds locked in the plants of the glasswort.
Even crows died of starvation. The only noises in the frore air were of
saws and axes and hammers, men's voices, the glassy sweep of wind in
the blackened thistles, the cries of lambs and ewes, ravens' croaking,
and the dull mumble of breakers on the bar.

Every day on the Burrows was a period of silence under a vapour-ringed
sun that slid into night glowing and quivering with the zones and
pillars of the Northern Lights. More wild red deer from Exmoor strayed
to the Great Field, which even the rats had quitted. The deer walked
into the gardens of the village, some to be shot stealthily, others to
sleep into death. The shepherd of the marsh-grazing stamped at night
round his fire, clad in the skins of sheep, and swinging his arms.
Beyond the straw-and-sack-stuffed hurdles, foxes, badgers, and stoats
slunk and prowled and fought for each others' bodies. Over the lambs
in the fold flew Kronk the raven, black and croaking in the moonlight.
_Ck!_ cried Old Nog, tottering to the Shrarshook from the sandhills,
where he hid shivering during the time of high-tides. The wind whined
in the skeleton of his mate, broken at the knees, near the skull of
Marland Jimmy gaping at the crown, eyeless and showing its teeth in ice.

When two foxes and a badger had been shot, Greymuzzle went no more
where ewes pared hollow the frozen turnips and suckled peacefully their
tail-wriggling lambs. One night, raving with hunger, she returned to
the wooden duckshed in the farmyard by the railway station. High over
the shed rose the chestnut tree, black and bare and suffering, with
one of its boughs splitten by frost. Other creatures had been to the
duckhouse before her.

Fang-over-lip had started to dig a hole under the rotten floor boards,
but returning the night after, he had smelt that during the day the
hole had been deepened and a gin tilled there to catch him by the paw.
When he had gone Bloody Bill Brock had grunted to the duckshed, and
putting head between paws, had rolled on the metal tongue holding the
jaws apart. The gin had clacked harmlessly against his grey hairs.
The badger had scratched farther down and up again, reaching the
floorboards by daylight; and departed, to return in the next darkness
and to see a gin lying there with jaws as wide as his back--a gin
unhidden and daring him, as it were, to roll across it. The gin's rusty
jaws were open in an iron leer, its tongue sweated the scent of man's
hand. Bloody Bill Brock, who had sprung many gins in his life, grunted
and went away. There were no stars that night, for clouds loured in
the sky. As Greymuzzle walked on the ice upstream, snow began to fall
in flakes like the breast-feathers of swans. From the estuary the
scrambling cries of thousands of gulls, which had returned with the
south-west wind, came indistinctly through the thick and misty air. The
South was invading the North, and a gentle wind was its herald. The
dreadful hoot of Bubu was heard no more, for the Arctic Owl had already
left the Burrows.

Greymuzzle walked under the bridge, and smelling the ducks, climbed
up the bank. As she was walking past the beehives, she heard a sound
that made her stop and gasp--the _ic-clack!_ of a sprung gin. Tarka
was rolling and twisting and jerking the heavy gin and chain off the
ground. It held him. He lay still, his heart throbbing, blowing and
tissing and slavering. The sight closed Greymuzzle's nostrils, so
that she breathed through her open mouth. She called to him. The gin
clanked, the chain clinked. She ran round him until Tarka's leaps, that
wrenched the sinews of his leg, ceased in weakness, and he sank across
the long rusty spring, blowing bubbles of blood out of his nostrils.
A duck quacked loudly, and when its strident alarm was finished, the
air held only the slight sounds of snowflakes sinking on the roof of
the shed. They floated to rest on Tarka's fur, gently, and shrunk into
drops of water. The chestnut tree suddenly groaned, and the corpse of
a sparrow frozen for weeks to one of its twigs fell to the earth. It
dropped beside Greymuzzle, and was flicked against the duckshed by a
swish of her rudder as she stood over Tarka, gnawing in a fury the iron
jaws of the gin.

Far away in the estuary gulls were running on the sandbanks through
the yellow froth of wavelet-lap. Their jubilant and sustained cries
told the winter's end. Under the tree Greymuzzle rasped the bone of the
trapped paw with the sharp stumps of her broken teeth. A rat passed
near, brought by the smell of blood; it fled when it saw whose blood
was wasting. Greymuzzle's face was torn, but Tarka did not know that he
had bitten her.

She bit through the sinews, which were strong and thick, and Tarka was
free. He rushed to the river. Greymuzzle remained, remembering her cub.

When the ducks heard the gnawing of wood, they began to run round
inside the shed, quacking continuously. In the farmyard a dog in its
kennel was barking loudly. There was an answering shout in the house
that set the animal jumping against its chain. Both Greymuzzle and
Tarka knew the sequence of barking dog and the shout of a man in a
house! Greymuzzle stayed until the farm door opened, and then she ran
away, splinters of wood in her bleeding mouth.

When the farmer came to the shed with his gun and lantern, he found
his gin sprung and three toes of a paw lying in a red spatter about
it. Seeing dots of blood leading away over the snow, he hurried to the
cottage of one of his labourers and knocked on the door. He shouted,
"I've got'n," as his father had shouted in the church door during a
sermon half a century before, calling the men to leave and pursue the
tracks of a fox through the snow.

The labourer and his two sons put on their boots warming on the slate
hearth, and went out to the farmer. Armed with a dung-fork, the handle
of a pickaxe, a ferreting crowbar, and the gun, they set out on the
trail of the wounded otter. The lantern showed the red dots leading
over the railway crossing, and on the snow by the station yard. "Come
on, you!" cried the farmer to three men going home after the closing of
the inn. It was ten o'clock. One had a staff, and the others kicked up
what stones they could see.

The collie dog found the otters for them, in a shed where Tarka had
crawled for a refuge. Tarka stood back in a corner on a heap of
artificial manure sacks, while Greymuzzle ran at the dog, tissing, and
snapping her broken teeth. The lantern light made of her eyes two tawny
orbs of menace. Tarka found a hole in the wall, while Greymuzzle fought
the collie. Weakened by starvation, she was not able to fight for long,
and as the farmer said afterwards, it was not even necessary to waste a
cartridge when a dung-fork could pin her down and a ferreting bar break
her head.

They carried the body back to the farm, where the farmer drew a pint
of ale for each of his helpers from the XXXX barrel in the cellar.
While they were drinking "Best respects, Varmer," the collie dog began
to bark, and as it would not stop after several cries of "Shut that
rattle, you," the farmer went out and gave it a kick in the ribs. The
collie yelped and went to kennel, but hardly had the farmer gone into
his kitchen again when it set up a furious barking. It was banged on
the head with the stag's horn handle of a hunting whip, but even this
did not check its desire to tell its master that an enemy was in the
yard. It kept up an intermittent barking until the dawn, when it was
flogged with its head wedged in the door. The farmer was a poor man and
not very strong, and a sleepless night made him irritable. When he felt
better he gave the dog the skinned carcass of the otter, and praised
its courage and virtue in the Railway Inn, telling how it had warned
him and how it had tracked the "girt mousey-coloured fitches" to the
shed, where one escaped through a hole behind the sacks. He forebore to
say how noisy his dog had been afterwards, deeming this a point not in
its favour, for how was he, his natural senses dulled by civilization,
to have known that an otter had remained all night in the farmyard,
waiting for the mate that never came.

       *       *       *       *       *

Tarka was gone in the mist and rain of the day, to hide among the reeds
of the marsh pond--the sere and icicled reeds, which now could sink
to their ancestral ooze and sleep, perchance to dream;--of sun-stored
summers raising the green stems, of wind-shaken anthers dropping gold
pollen over June's young maces, of seeds shaped and clasped and taught
by the brown autumn mother. The south wind was breaking from the great
roots the talons of the Icicle Spirit, and freeing ten thousand flying
seeds in each brown head.

Water covered the pond ice, deep enough to sail a feather, and at night
every hoof-hole held its star.

After seven sunrisings the mosses were green on the hillocks, lapwings
tumbled and dived and cried their sweet mating cries, the first flower
bloomed in the Burrows--the lowly vernal whitlow grass, with its tiny
white petals on a single leafless stalk. Under the noon sun sheep
grazing in the marsh had silver outlines. Linnets sat on the lighthouse
telegraph wire, wing to wing, and talking to the sky. Out of the
auburn breasts fell ravishing notes, like glowing strokes of colour in
the warm south wind.

And when the shining twitter ceased, I walked to the pond, and again
I sought among the reeds, in vain; and to the pill I went, over the
guts in the salt grey turf, to the trickling mud where the linnets were
fluttering at the seeds of the glasswort. There I spurred an otter, but
the tracks were old with tides, and worm castings sat in many. Every
fourth seal was marred, with two toes set deeper in the mud. They led
down to the lap of the low water, where the sea washed them away.




THE LAST YEAR




CHAPTER ELEVEN


Bogs and hummocks of the Great Kneeset were dimmed and occluded; the
hill was higher than the clouds. In drifts and hollows of silence
the vapour passed, moving with the muffled wind over water plashes
colourless in reflection. Sometimes a colder waft brought the sound of
slow trickling; here in the fen five rivers began, in peat darker than
the otter that had followed one up to its source.

Broken humps, rounded with grey moss and standing out of a maze of
channers, made the southern crest of the hill. In the main chamber,
below banks of crumbling peat, lay water dark-stained and almost
stagnant. The otter walked out and lifted his head, sniffing and
looking around him. Drops from his rudder dripped into the water and
the stirred fragments of peat drifted slowly as they settled. The
river's life began without sound, in the darkness of peat that was
heather grown in ancient sunlight; but on the slope of the hill, among
the green rushes, the river ran bright in spirit, finding the granite
that made its first song.

Tarka climbed up one of the humps of grey club moss and trod in its
centre a bed soft and warm, yet cool for the paw thrust among the long,
tight-growing fronds. The moss grew on and over a bush of heather,
whose springy stems yielded to his curled body. He had travelled from
the estuary, sleeping by day in riverside holts and marshes and feeding
at night; remembering nothing, because the moor was unfamiliar to his
nose and ears and eyes. When his paw ached, he licked it. It had been
a happy journey up the river swollen with snow water, hunting fish and
playing with sticks and stones, while mating owls called through the
darkness of valleys.

He slept curled in the moss until the last sun-whitened wisps of clouds
trailed away into space above the northern slope of the hill, and the
plashes took light and colour. The sun awoke him and he heard the twit
of a bird--a little drab pipit alone in the fen with the otter. It
watched anxiously as the otter warmed the dingy, yellow-white fur of
his belly in the sun and rolled to scratch his ears with a sprig of
heather. The pipit had seen no enemy like Tarka before, and when the
rolling otter fell off his bed and splashed into the water below, the
bird flew out of the heather in straight upward flight, twittering as
it dropped, fluttering wings that seemed too feeble to carry it higher
than its first weak ascent. Up it mounted, to fall back again, until it
turned with the wind and slanted down quickly into the heather. Again
the wilderness was to wandering air and water, until webbed feet began
to patter in the black soft peat, past wan yellow tussocks of withered
grasses, and clumps of rushes dying downwards from their brown tips.
Running in the plashes, treading the spider-like tufts of red-rusty
cotton grass, he came to a deeper and wider channer fringed with
rushes. Down a crumbling sog of peat and into the still brown-clear
water. He swam its winding length, seeking eels under the ooze which
arose behind him in a swirl of heath fragments, dark and up scattered
by the kicks of his hind-legs. A minute's swimming and the channer
widened into a shallow pit above whose broken banks the heather grew,
on sprigs dispread and blasted under the sky. Some still bore the bells
of old summer, that made a fine sibilance in the wry wind-music of the
moor.

Tarka ran past a heap of turves, set around the base of a post marking
Cranmere tarn, now empty, whither his ancestors had wandered for
thousands of years. A fox had been walking there during the night,
seeking the oval black beetles which, with moths, pipits, wheatears,
and sometimes a snipe, were the only food it found in and around the
fen. As Tarka ran out of the tarn a bird passed swiftly over his head,
gliding on down-curving dark wings and crying _go-beck, go-beck,
go-beck!_ when it saw him--one of the few grouse which lived and bred
on the lower slopes under the wind. The bird had flown from a hut
circle to the south, where seeds of gromwell were to be found. The
gromwell had grown from a single seed carried from the lower tilled
slopes of the moor on the fleece of a sheep, to which it had hooked
itself. Gromwell seeds were the favourite food of the grouse around the
source of the Two Rivers. Tarka watched the bird until it glided below
the hill, when he ran on again, finding nothing in the plashes moving
only with images of sky and clouds and birds of solitude. Then the sun
took the water, breaking brilliant and hot in every plash; the otter
galloped with instant joy and sank in bog to his belly. He dragged
himself on to a tussock of grass, rolled, shook himself, and set off
again, roaming around the fen until he heard again the cry of running
water. The cry came out of a hollow, whose sides were scarred by the
sliding of broken hummocks--the faint cry of a river new-born. Through
a winding channel in the turf, no wider than the otter and hidden by
grasses growing over it, the little thread hastened, seeking its valley
to the sea.

It fell over its first cascade and cast its first bubbles; and through
a groove between hills it found a marsh where a green moss grew with
rushes. Beyond the marsh, it ran strong and bright over its bed of
granite gravel, everywhere glinting and singing. Over and under and
past boulders of granite, splashing upon mosses whose browny-red seeds
on the tall stalks were like bitterns standing with beaks upheld.
Lichens grew on other boulders: silver with black undersides, and
curled like strange pelts curing: grey-green in the shapes of trees
and plants: bones with scarlet knuckles: horns of moose: shells and
seaweeds. The lichens fastened to the granite were as the fantastic and
brittle miniatures of strange and forgotten things of the moor.

By pools and waterfalls and rillets the river Taw grew, flowing under
steep hills that towered high above. It washed the roots of its first
tree, a willow thin and sparse of bloom, a soft tree wildered in that
place of rocks and rain and harsh grey harrying winds. A black-faced
sheep stood by the tree, cropping the sweet grass; and when a strange,
small, flashing, frightening head looked out just below its feet,
the sheep stamped and bounded away up the hill to its lamb asleep by
a sun-hot boulder. Tarka had caught a trout, the first in a mile of
river; he ate it, drank, and slipped away with the water.

He caught sixteen fish in an hour, the biggest being three ounces in
weight; and then he climbed upon a slab of granite and dozed in the
sunlight. High above him a small bird was flying in sharp, irregular
flight, mounting high to swoop towards the marsh. Every time it swooped
it opened its tail against the rush of air, so that the feathers made
a sound between the bleat of a kid and a dove's cooing. Its mate was
flying near it. They were snipes, who had chosen for nesting-place a
rush-clump in the marsh, and Tarka had disturbed them. He lay still in
sleep, and they forgot that he was there, and flew down to find worms
by pushing their long bills into the juggymire. When the sun sank
behind the high tors, Tarka awoke and went down with the river. A small
bullock, with long, black, shaggy hair, was drinking by a gravelly
ford, and smelling the otter, it snorted and plunged away, alarming the
grazing herd.

At night the stars were shorn of their flashes and burning dully
through the cold vapour which drifted down from the hills. Everything
was moistened--sprigs and faded bells of heather, young ruddy shoots
of whortle-berry, mosses, lichens, grasses, rushes, boulders, trees.
Songlight rose grey and silent. When the sun, like an immense
dandelion, looked over the light-smitten height of Cosdon Beacon,
Tarka was returning along a lynch, or rough trackway, to the river.
The grasses, the heather, the lichens, the whortle-berry bushes, the
mosses, the boulders--everything in front of the otter vanished as
though drowned or dissolved in a luminous strange sea. The icy casings
of leaves and grasses and blades and sprigs were glowing and hid in a
mist of sun-fire. Moorfolk call this morning glory the Ammil.

The brimming light gladdened Tarka, and he rolled for several minutes,
playing with a shining ball he found in the grass--the old dropping of
a wild pony. Afterwards, running down to the water, he found a holt
under a rock. It was cold and wet inside, and Tarka always slept dry
when he could. He ran out again, liking the sun, and settled on a flat
rock in the warming rays.

The rock was embedded below a fall, its lower part green with mosses
hanging in the splashes. The mosses dripped and glistened. Tarka washed
himself, the water-sounds unheard; he would have heard silence if the
river had dried suddenly. The green weeds waved in the clear water with
a calmer motion than the tail-fanning of idle fish. And then a sturdy,
dark-brown bird, with white throat and breast, lit on a stone down the
stream, and pausing a moment, jumped down into the water. The dipper
walked on the river bed, seeking beetles and shrimps and caddis-grubs.
When its beak was crammed, it walked out of a shallow, flew up in a
coloured rain of drops, and following the turns of the river, checked
fluttering by the rock whereon Tarka lay. It thrust its beak into
the moss, six inches above the tumbling water. Rapid notes, as of
water-and-stones sharpened to music in a singing bird's throat-strings,
came out of the moss, a greeting by the dipper's mate, who was brooding
on five white eggs in her wet nest. When she had swallowed the food,
the water-ousel flew away upstream, low over the water, following the
bends of the river. As he flew he sang, sipping his song from the
stones and the water.

The shadows moved, and the bright green weeds of morning waved darkly
in the river. Many times the water-ousels flew to and from the nest,
but they did not see Tarka, he slept so still in the rocky cup above
them.

Tarka gave chase to a rabbit during the next night, bolting it from
a hillside clitter of rocks in a hollow at the head of a cleave.
Near the clitter a tall stone reared head, shoulders, and body above
the rocks embedded there, in the outline of a sea-lion, smooth and
curved. The rabbit ran as far as a hole in the north-western base of
the stone sea-lion, but turned back in terror as it smelt the dreaded
smell of a fitch, or stoat. The rabbit's wits went from it in a thin
squealing; its will to run away was gripped in the base of its spine
by a feeling of sickly fascination. Its squeals caused an excited
chakkering near it, and almost immediately the fitch had it by the
side of the neck, and was dragging it into the hole. The fitch, whose
name was Swagdagger, was about to kill it when Tarka ran through the
opening. Swagdagger loosened his bite to threaten the strange big
invader, flicking his black-tipped tail and glaring at Tarka. One
kick of the rabbit's hindlegs, so powerful for running, could have
broken Swagdagger's neck; but it crouched still, its nervous force
oozing away. Tarka ran at it. Swagdagger faced him with an angry
chakker, and was nipped in the shoulder. The fitch ran out through
the opening, but turned outside and gibbered in fury. Tarka looked
once at the green points that were the fitch's eyes, and went on
with his work. Swagdagger went away, to climb a granite stone, and
chakker into the night. The moon was rising, dim in the mist, and the
harsh notes echoed about the grey stillness of the granite clitter.
_Kak-h'kak-kak_, he rattled, throwing his call one way, then another.
He was summoning the stoats of Belstone Cleave.

Tarka had eaten half the rabbit when a strong scent made him look
round again. He saw in the low opening several greenish dots, that
stared and swung about and stared again. He went on eating. Delicate
sniffs, sudden rustles and paddings, scratchings, a quick sneeze--he
peered for another way out, wanting to be alone. He found a crack
and explored it with his nose, before beginning to scrape. He sucked
in the scent of fitch, for Swagdagger's mate had her nest of young
beyond the crack. She had been hunting a rabbit three hundred yards
away when Swagdagger had climbed the stone, and as soon as she heard
the call, she galloped back. Other fitches had run to the summons of
Swagdagger. Sharp-toothed, blood-thirsty, and without fear, they ran up
and down by the opening, sniffing the delicious scent of fresh-slain
rabbit, weaving quick bodies and lifting their small heads to sniff,
sniff, sniff. The noises of teeth at work made a furious stir in the
assembling tribe. The older dog-fitch yakkered with rage, as he wove in
and out of the swift and impatient throng.

The little angry fitches in the cranny, beyond the nose of Tarka,
heard the cry of their mother and spat at the enemy--all moving things
unknown were enemies to the little fitches. She ran through the fitches
outside in the moonlight and into the cave, jumping in her twisty way
for a bite behind the otter's ear. Tarka shook her and tried to kill
her, but she ran at him again, and with her ran Swagdagger and all the
fitches who had come at his alarm. Tarka trod on stoats; he was pricked
all over by the teeth of stoats; he chopped one through the ribs and
back, but its biting did not cease; he chopped it again, trying to hold
it by his forepaws, but though broken, it was alive and angry, and bit
through the skin of his throat and hung there, as long as his rudder.
He pushed through fitches into the moonlight, and the fitches followed
him, including the four young ones who were excited and eager for play.
The pack chased him, throwing their sharp tongues, all the rugged way
down to the river, into which Tarka jumped with a splash. Three of
them fell in after him, but they did not like the water and crawled
out spitting and sneezing, tough and lithe and sinuous as bines of
honeysuckle. Unable to find the otter, the dog-fitches started a fight
among themselves.

As Swagdagger's mate went up the hill again with her young running
behind her, she met a badger, who was going to drink in the river. The
grey waddler, animate granite, whose head was heavier than her whole
body, lumbered out of the way. He sought no unnecessary trouble with
fitches, and he had eaten up the rabbit under the Seal Stone.

       *       *       *       *       *

The river hurried round the base of the cleave, on whose slopes stunted
trees grew, amid rocks, and scree that in falling had smashed the
trunks and torn out the roots of willows, thorns, and hollies. It
wandered away from the moor, a proper river, with bridges, brooks,
islands, and mills.

Soon the oaks above the river would break into leaf. Magpies had
topped their nests with thorns, and buzzards were soaring long after
owl-light. Kingfishers and dippers had hatched their eggs--there was a
dipper's nest, hanging dishevelled like a beard of moss, under nearly
every stone bridge spanning the river. The innocent white flowers of
the savage blackthorn had withered brown and shaken into the wind. Lent
lilies--the wild daffodils of the woods and meads--clasped with their
blooms, shrivelled and loving, the seeds of winter's hope. Already
the celandines were old thoughts of the spring, their leaves hid by
rising docks and nettles and flowering dog's foot mercury. Badger
cubs had been taught to use the latrines outside the tunnels. It was
mid-April, swallow-time in the West Country. Otter cubs romped in a
big stick-heap resting on the nose of an island above a bridge, eager
to play with the moon on the water. Their mother, who was Tarka's
sister, attacked him when he looked on them in the stick-heap, and bit
him in the shoulder, for she was most anxious, and did not remember her
brother cub.

Though the birds scolded, the foxes snarled, and his own kind drove him
away, Tarka had many friends, whom he played with and forgot--sticks,
stones, water-weeds, slain fish, and once an empty cocoa-tin, a bright
and curious thing that talked strangely as it moved over the shallows,
but sank into the pool beyond, sent up three bubbles, and would play no
more.




CHAPTER TWELVE


At sunset, as he was crossing a shoal to deep water under an old ash
tree, he stopped at the taint of hounds lying on the scour pitted by
their feet. Quietly he turned back to the water to swim sunken in the
current, rising only to take in air. Round two bends he drifted, then
landed and harkened. Ran up the bank, uncertain. Rose on hind feet,
dripping and anxious. A dwarf owl making a peacock-like yowling in the
woods beyond the meadow, the squeak of mice, the dry cough of an ewe.
He ran back to the river, and after eating fish, he played with a rope
of water twisting and untwisting out of a drain, trying to catch it
between his paws and bite it as it plattered on his face and chest.

An otter-path lay across the next bend, and he followed it to the
middle of the field, where he hesitated. Strange smells lay in the dew.
He scraped at a place in the grass where paper had been rammed by a
pole, near orange peel covered by a loose tuft. He walked on, nose to
ground, and smelt man, where hobnailed boots had pressed the turf and
crushed cigarette-ends. He turned back, and would have gone straight to
water if he had not heard the cry of a bitch-otter at the far end of
the path. _Hu-ee-ee-ic!_ he answered, and ran along to find her. Near
the middle of the meadow he stopped as though he had trod on a gin. The
taint of hounds lay thick with the scent of otter. Grasses were smeared
with blood and spittle. His hair rose on his back. He blew through open
mouth, swung his head about as though looking for hounds, and was gone,
silent as his low moon shadow.

The river flowed darkly to the bend, where it broke shallow over
shillets that scattered the moonlight. Tarka saw a movement at the tail
of the shoal, where an otter was listening. She ran to him and licked
his face, then she mewed, and ran on alone by the riverside. Tarka
followed her. She was draggled and miserable. She caught a trout and
called him, but when he reached her she yikkered and started to eat
it herself. She mewed again, and ran into the water. And following
her, Tarka returned to the scour opposite the ash-tree holt where that
morning the hounds had plunged and bayed. All the way upstream she had
been calling, and searching under banks, and on the beds of pools.
At length she crawled on the scour with something in her mouth, and
dropped it on the stones. She licked it from head to tail, and mewing
again, sank back into the water and returned with another, which she
laid with the first-found. Perhaps she could not count beyond two;
perhaps White-tip had not known in her terror how many cubs she had
dropped in the water, when the terrier had driven her out of her holt.
The Master had seen them, sinking in the pool, lit by a sun-shaft;
and hounds were whipped off. They drew on up the river, and found the
dog-otter, her mate, and killed him three hours later as he tried to
cross a meadow to the wooded hillside.

The old dog and White-tip had wandered together since Tarka had been
driven from her in the autumn. Her first litter had been born in
January, when the river had frozen, and one day White-tip, returning to
the holt, had found them gone. She had called them, seeking everywhere,
and in pain, but she had found none to suckle, for a badger walking
on the ice had dug them out with his long black claws and eaten them.
White-tip's grief had been so keen that soon it had grown less; and she
had lain with her mate in the bracken of Ferny Hill.

And now White-tip was grieving again. For two nights, as she travelled
down the river with Tarka, she would cease hunting, and run aimlessly
on the banks, whining and searching. During the third night she left
him and returned to the ash-tree holt, wherein she had been making
ready a couch of reeds and grasses. Into the holt she carried a stone,
laying it on the couch, and licking it, until a sudden cry called
her outside again. She traced the cry to a stone on the shallow, and
brought it in her mouth to the holt; soon the couch was filled with wet
stones.

Tarka travelled on alone. As the river grew older, so the meadows and
cornfields beyond its banks stretched a wider green over the age-long
silt filling the valley's groin. Foxgloves claimed the hillsides
wherever the oakwoods were felled, storing in their leaves the green
power to raise red-purple spires to the midsummer sky. Seen by day
from the hilltops, the river lay in its course like a viper broken
by a buzzard's beak and claws, marked with brown on its twisted and
bluish-white coils. Twin burnished lines were set by the river,
touching its banks, straitly leaving it to its windings, and crossing
it on stone bridges topped by tarred iron girders. Under the girders
jackdaws were building their nests of sticks and sheep's wool and
paper picked up in the early morning from cottage gardens. The rolling
thunder over their heads did not disturb them, for, like the otters,
they had grown to the noise of trains in the valley.

Below one bridge the river slowed into a wide pool, where the waters
of a smaller south-flowing river meditated before turning north with
big brother Taw. Tarka was cruising over the bed of the Junction Pool
when the moon, shaking and distorted by eddies above, was cut by dark
and narrow slips. A down-stroke of his strong rudder and a push off a
rock by his hind-legs swung him up for the chase of shoaling fish. They
darted away in a zigzag, turning together, up and down and across the
pool. Tarka pursued one until he caught it but as he was swimming to
the bank he saw another, and followed it with the fish in his mouth. He
snicked it as it darted back past his shoulder. Strokes of the heavy
tapering rudder, over two inches wide at its base and thirteen inches
long, that could stun a fish by its blow, enabled him to turn his body
in water almost as quickly as on land. He shook the fish out of his
mouth as soon as he had killed them, for now he was hunting for sport.
The dace glinted about the water, the slayer often leaping after a fish
that threw itself into the air and jumped as it hit water again. A
stain began to move in the water, and a plaice flapped off the bottom
and swam in what it thought was the beginning of a flood, when worms
came swirling into the Junction Pool. This sea-fish had lived a strange
and lonely life in fresh water ever since it had been swallowed in the
estuary by a heron and ejected alive from the crop a quarter of an hour
afterwards when the bird, flying up the valley, had been shot by a
water-bailiff.

The shape of an otter loomed in the water, and the plaice swam down
again in a rapid, waving slant, perceived by a one-eyed eel that was
lying with its tail inside a bullock's skull wedged in a cleft of
rock. Thrust through the eel's blank eyesocket was the rusty barbed
point of a hook, the shank of which stuck out of its mouth--a hook
almost straightened before the line had broken. Tarka swam up behind
the eel on its blind side, and opened his mouth wide to bite across the
back.

The eel was longer than Tarka. It lashed its tail round his neck and
bit on to his nose, when gripped below the paired fins. Bubbles were
blown in two strings, one of them fine as charlock seeds, for the
hook-shank was rammed up the otter's left nostril. Then the strings
ceased, and stray bubbles arose, for the eel was throttling the otter.
Tarka clawed it with his paws, but the small claws were worn by many
weeks' scratching for trout in granite hides, and the eel's skin was
slippery. Flattened on the pool's bed, the plaice watched the struggle
of its two enemies.

Tarka knocked it with his paws, and scraped himself against stones
and rocks, so that he could be free to swim up and eat it. For three
minutes, until his breath was gone, he tried to shake off the eel. Then
he kicked heavily and slowly up to the surface and tried to climb out
by the nearest land--a sheer bank. Its head in the air, the eel lifted
its bite on the otter's bleeding nose and sank away down. Immediately
Tarka sprang half out of the water and with a _plop!_ like a round
stone went after it, catching it below the vent. The eel lashed again,
and Tarka unbit. He swam under and bit it at the back of the neck,
and again released it. The eel tried to wobble down to the bullock's
skull, but Tarka dragged it back; and so he played with it, always
avoiding the bite of its big jaws. At length it grew feeble, and he
took it to a shallow, where, after walking round it and pretending it
was not there, he ate what he wanted of the tail-end.

When he had washed his face he went back into the pool, harrying the
dace until many score of the silvery fishes floated away on their
sides. He harried them until the moon sank under the hill and he grew
tired of his sport. Then spreading his legs, he drifted away out of the
pool, past an island that divided the river--a narrow island, shaped
like an otter, with a rudder of mud carved at its lower end by the
swift waters. Alders and willows grew on the island, many broken by
uprooted trees lugged down by floods.

Two hours later Tarka was hungry again, and eating a two-pound trout,
fat with easy feeding on mullyheads, taken under the third railway
bridge after the Junction Pool. Below the bridge, on the right bank,
the river passed part of its old course, now dry save for green-scummed
pools, left by March risings, among the shillets. The law of life was
also the law of water--everlasting change. It had carved this deserted
bed through the centuries, raised it with shillets, and turned away
to a newer course. Brambles, thorns, elderberry bushes, nettles, and
briars grew entangled along the silent waterway. It was the haunt
of grass snakes, frogs, mice, and a wild sandy ram-cat without any
paws. For the first three years of its life the cat had been lean,
feeding on rats in and around a corn-mill and answering to the name
of Shaggery. During its fourth year it had gone wild in the woods and
grown fat on rabbits, until caught in a gin. It limped back to the mill
and became tame again, but when the pad had rotted away and the stump
had healed, it had lain rough in the woods. It was caught a second
time, losing its other paw. For two years it had lived in the old
river-bed, prowling forth at night and living on frogs, mice, beetles,
and carrion fish left by otters on the banks and shoals. It moved by
bounding hops from its hindlegs, like a rabbit. Its claws had drawn
up above the ends of the short stumps, useful for a hugging hold on
its prey, but a hindrance in washing its face. Sometimes otter-hounds,
tearing their way through the undergrowth, had owned the scent of this
cat, whose hiding-place was in a deep rabbit bury under a thorn brake.

Tarka ran over its scent, and followed it along the old riverbed.
The cat was sitting on a boulder, from which it had been watching a
vole run below. Tarka stopped, surprised as the cat. Shaggery's ears
flattened, its body increased into a loop of agitated fur, and it let
out such a waul that Tarka's back began to twitch. The cry was loud,
and slowly champed through teeth. It sank to a low grinding threat when
Tarka stood up to sniff what was wailing at him. He steadied himself
by touching the stone on which it stood, and the ram-cat made a noise
like one Tarka had heard before, when a pailful of hot embers had been
shot over the village quay by the estuary. He fled, remembering a burn.
Alone again, the ram-cat lowered body on stumps, and lifted ears to
listen for voles.

When the next night White-tip followed Tarka's trail along the dry bed,
Shaggery was sitting above the bury, in an old mossy-damp magpie's
nest. Again the waul and the grinding of teeth, again the spitting
hiss, and again an otter hurrying back to water.

Tarka had gone under the last bridge above the tide, and the sun was
rising when he crept out by a mud glidder and curled himself in a bed
of green flags. Water ran clear and shallow on its rocky bed below the
mud. Swallows flew to and fro over the river channel, winding deeper
and broader through the meadows. All things were warmed in the sun. The
grass and dock-leaves under the tide-wall was greenish-grey with salt
and silt dried on blade and stalk and leaf, after the sluggard tide's
lapse. Seaweed, black and brittle, lay below the wall with scriddicks
of old rush-tops and sticks among white flowers of scurvy-grass. The
sun moved above the oakwood that sloped from the rocky bank across
the river; the leaves of lower branches were blenched, and weed-hung.
A hot, broken glitter, like a flight of silver birds, played lightly
on the green flags where Tarka was lying. One brilliant beak of light
slipped round a flag and pecked at his eye until he awoke, and yawned,
and turned on his back. His nostrils lazily tested the wind that
sometimes trembled the tips of the flags. It was a clean wind, and he
lay content.

Three buzzards sailed over the river, one above the other, like
the stars in Orion's Belt; the top bird moving with steady wings,
the lower bird circling, and the lowest veering on broad vanes,
cleaver-shaped, heavily with rolling sweeps into the lingering wind
that eddied about the top of oak trees. The tree-trunks were dark; only
from the high young branches had the sun struck colour, yellow and pale
green.

A lustrous blue line was drawn against the dark forest of trunks as
a kingfisher sped down-river. The buzzards drifted away south, their
wings narrowing with a gold glister, and shrank into the sun.

_Peet!_ The short, shrill cry came from a silver point drawing a
ruddy line over the mud. With a fish in its beak the kingfisher sped
upriver to its young in a sandy bank above the Mouse Hole Pool.
Martins twittered along the river-bank, and hovered about the heads
of bullocks, taking crisp-winged flies from their muzzles and between
their horns. Tarka yawned, and dozed again.

A dark cloud arose over the crest of the oakwood, and the greenery of
young leaves faded. Rain beat on the flags. A million million drops in
the river leapt to meet the drops fresh-risen from the Atlantic. The
cloud passed, and again the meadow was hot and bright. The swallows
flew up the river, quitting at the coils its glitter and yellow
kingcups, and fleeing on across the green meadow to the road by the
bridge. Here, in the hollows of the broken road surface, was to be
found after rain a greyish mud that set harder than the browny mud of
the salty scourings in the river. Only by the bridge was this mud
to be found, for the road sloped up and down over the river, and the
slopes were not tarred, lest the feet of horses slip. The aerial masons
were about to build their nests on the rafters of shippen and barn;
they flew in pairs, singing their sun-songs.

Beside the bridge grew an elderberry tree, straight and sturdy as a
young oak in a park; one of the few soft-cored elderberry trees in
the country of the Two Rivers that had not grown up a cripple of the
winds. Its leaves partly hid a motor-car, in whose closed body, shut
away from the wind and the sun of the English spring, sat some men and
women. They were awaiting hounds before moving to the parapet of the
bridge, and perhaps, if a kill seemed certain and early, to the meadow
over the low wooden fence. Other motor-cars stopped on the bridge. The
swallows swooping over the stonework saw the sunlight browned by the
smoke of engines, and dived back again over the grass. The baying of
hounds above the bridge became louder, for the otter had swam through
the lower stickle, and was travelling downstream.

The hunted otter was White-tip. She had been chased for nearly three
hours. Always the cries and tongues and legs had followed her, up the
pools and down the pools, from holt to holding, from holding to shallow.

_Tally Ho!_

She saw faces and waving arms above the bridge, but she did not turn
back.

       *       *       *       *       *

Light-laden drops rolled down the green flags as their points drew
down the sky. Tarka lay still, watching. They rustled and broke with
soft sappy noises. White-tip was pressing through the bed of flags.
Her mouth was open. Tarka, who had been listening for half an hour to
the distant cries of men and hounds, stared at the movement. A sudden
clamour ran down the river, loud and startling, for Deadlock had found
White-tip's deep seals in the mud, where she had crept out of the water.

The two otters ran through the flags and slid down the mud to the river
again. Tarka spread himself in the shallow flow, moving with light
touches of claws just over the rocks and stones of the bed. He moved
slowly, as an eel moves, as smooth as the water, and with sinuous ease.
Sometimes he crept out at the edge of the mud, walked a few yards,
and slipped back into the water again. Hounds were crushing the flags
around his bed, and throwing their tongues along his line.

He swam through a long pool at his fastest pace, putting up his
nostrils every fifty yards to breathe, and down again immediately. He
left the oakwood behind him, and came to a narrow gut draining the
water of a small marshy valley, where bullocks were grazing. The gut
lay under trees above a rocky bank. Its other bank was mud. Seaweed
hung on the roots of trees six feet above his head. Tarka walked up
the gut, as far as the first channer in its glidder, partly hid by the
broad strongly keeled leaves of river sedge. He followed it into the
marsh, and climbing out, ran along a path trodden by cattle, through
a gate and down to a lower marsh, hidden from the opposite bank by a
tide-wall. The tongue of Deadlock spoke across the river, and Tarka
slipped into another gut. He trod through brown mud to a black ooze,
in which he moved like an eel. The drain led under the tide-wall to
the glidder above the river. It led into darkness, with light coming
through the chinks of a circular wooden trap, that kept the tides back
from the land. He sniffed at a chink, and waited in the ooze.

For two hours Tarka lay behind the wooden trap, while the noises of
hunting moved away into remoteness. Slowly the sound of the low running
river was stilled into slack water. Tricklings, the lap and slanting
wash of ripple-ends, a turning drift of froth and sticks below the
mud--the sea was moving up again. A heron alighted at the bottom of the
muddy glidder, and stalked gravely into water to his knees. Flukes were
rising off the silt, seeking food. The heron bent down and peered. He
stepped forward on one foot, and speared with a swift plunge. Then he
stared up the river. A thin-drawn thread of sound in the air, looped
to another and another and another; loosed as four gossamers floating
by in the wind. It was the re-call to hounds. In the after-quiet
the heron stalked to his spearing again. The murky water twirled by
the knee-joints of his thin green legs. Splash, flicker, and shaken
drops--he swallowed fluke after fluke; but when twenty yards beyond the
trap he straightened up his neck, stood on his toes, jumped hurriedly
out of the water, and flapped away, pulling up his shanks after him
and tucking his long neck and head between his shoulders. He had seen
the heads of men.

Smells of the lower river, riding up with the young tide into the Mouse
Hole Pit, had overspread the wishy washy otter-scent, and the pack
was being taken back to kennels. The horn-like voice of the huntsman,
as he talked to hounds by name, came to the otter through the chinks
of the sodden elm-wood trap. They trotted on the opposite bank, happy
at the huntsman's heels, led home by aged Harper, who had taught them
all to mark an otter. Flews to flews with him was Deadlock, and at his
stern, Bluemaid, old before her time, worn-out by swimming. Then came
Pitiful, who worked hard and alone; whenever it was possible to go
wrong, Pitiful went wrong; it was Pitiful who, whenever they passed by
the dry river-bed, led them on the trail of Shaggery the ram-cat; if
a hound were missing, it was always Pitiful. Near her was Captain, a
black-and-tan rough dog, who looked like a lurcher; the huntsman did
not take Captain to important meets, for Captain's voice was like a
knife whose edge is turned. He did not throw his tongue, he screamed;
and sometimes in his excitement he babbled, flinging waterflies
about. Bite'm the terrier hurried among them, sometimes sniffing in
tufts, hoping to find a rat to shake; and following Bite'm, like an
easy-going, big, heavy boy led by a sharp little quick-eyed tacker,
came Rufus, who cared more for a nest of fieldmice than for a joint or
rib of rank otter. After Rufus on the tide-wall ran Dewdrop, whose
long fawn-coloured hair was curly with wet. Her ears hung long and
loose.

Often while the trophies were being taken by the huntsman those
ears would flap between blue-stocking'd legs, and teeth would slyly
nip through wool, as though it were brown fur of the worry. By the
Wharfdale bitch--for Dewdrop was the only true otter-hound in the
pack--ran Playboy and Actor, whose dingy-white shapes were so alike
that only the huntsman could name them truly. Behind them came Render
and Fencer, who always tore at roots of a holt with their teeth;
Hemlock, with one eye blind, the dark pupil grey-veined with the scar
of a black-thorn prick; Hurricane, the ancient Irish staghound with
the filed canines; Barbrook and Bellman, Boisterous and Chorister,
Coraline, Sailoress, Waterwitch, and Armlet, who always stood apart
from the pack during holt-marking and bayed moodily like a lighthouse
siren. Then came Sandboy, who fought other hounds at the worry, and
Grinder and Darnel--hounds who had chased the fox. They trotted on
the tide-wall between the short, quick-stepping huntsman and the
long-legged whip and kennel-boy, whose long loose striding had been
formed in early years by crossing ploughlands on his way to school.

Twenty paces behind the pack walked the Master, with two members of
the Hunt. He was saying that it had been a great day, only lacking a
kill to complete it, when old Harper stopped and lifted his muzzle.
The air on the water, colder than the land air, was brimming over the
sea-wall, and Harper had smelled an otter. Deadlock moved into the
air-stream, threw up his head, whimpered, and ran down the grassy bank
to the broken turf above the glidder. Sterns were waved like feathers.
Deadlock leapt into the river, followed by half the pack. Pitiful
started patiently to work the water-line of the mud, and Captain
babbled in excitement as he lapped and swam.

The water was three feet deep. Hounds scrambled up the glidder, some
slipping down, drawing long claw-lines on the harder clay beneath. They
whimpered and scratched before the round wooden trap, and Armlet bayed
them on from the bank above. Terrier Bite'm pushed his small eager
body between their flanks, under their legs, whining and yelping. Five
men waded the river, testing a footway with taps of iron-shod poles
before them. Thinking that the otter they had hunted for more than
five hours was hiding inside, and that the tired hounds would have no
chance to kill even an exhausted otter in the rising water, the pack
was not withdrawn when Bite'm was taken to the open end of the drain,
where Tarka's deep seals in the lower ooze showed like big blackberries
crushed in the mud. Bite'm was given a pat on his ribs and gently
shoved into the dark hole. He crept in, quick and shivering.

The ooze sucked at Tarka's webs as he turned away from the
light-striped lid of the drain. His heart beat as fast as water-drops
drip without dribbling. The hanging sodden door went _sug-plog-sug_ as
paws struck it. He looked up and down, round and up again, for a way
of escape. He crawled in the ooze, away from the immense din, and saw
an enemy coming towards him an instant before he smelled it. _Is-is-iz!_

They met and joined and twisted into shapes smoothed by ooze. The
terrier got a grip on the otter's rudder and hung on to it. Tarka
bit and bit and bit, quick as a striking viper, in cheek, shoulder,
flank, nose, and ear. Noises of bumping and squelching and snarling and
tissing became louder when the trap was lifted and light showed the
red and black shaking shapes. The otter's rudder, near the opening,
was seized and pulled by a hand. Another hand gripped the terrier's
scruff. The long black smooth shape was lugged out of the drain, the
terrier fixed to it. Hounds were leaping and clamouring up at the men.
A hand held Bite'm's tail-stump, another hand squeezed, trying to make
him unclench. Tarka writhed and contorted as he hung by his rudder; his
back became a bow, suddenly bending up, and his teeth made a row of
holes in a hand. The jerk made his rudder slip, and he dropped among
boots, to squirm between legs and away down the glidder. He pulled
Bite'm with him.

Hounds trod on him, snarling and thrusting. Tarka was hidden under
their heads, picked up and thrown sideways, then dropped and picked up
and shaken. Eight jaws held him at one time in the midst of a deep
sullen growling. He was hid in the plunging of white and brown and
black bodies. He bit Deadlock through the flews, and again in the nose,
as he was lifted on other muzzles, Bite'm still joined to the base
of his rudder. The pack bore him down to the tide, where the worry
broke up. Heads were lifted again, and tongues thrown. Hounds stooped
to water; some swam after Captain, who was cutting the air with his
knife-edge voice.

But Tarka was gone, and so was Bite'm. The terrier came to the surface
a minute later, forty yards away, and swam inshore, spluttering and
gasping, the short hairs of the otter's rudder still between his teeth.




CHAPTER THIRTEEN


The tide was flooding fast in midstream. It carried with it sunken
branches that sometimes showed a stick, and turned under again. Tarka
passed them as he swam into a riband of water returning under the
steep and broken rock-face that was the river's left bank. The riband
moved down again, feeling the roots of oak trees, and reclaiming the
seaweed hung there since the morning ebb. The otter drifted to a root
and rested his paws upon it, breathing through his mouth. Two pink
nicks above his nose welled red immediately; so did his paws. He bled
also from rudder, back, neck, flank, and shoulder. While he was among
the hounds he had felt neither fear nor hurt, for the power of all his
senses had been in movement to escape. Now his wounds smarted with the
salt in the water, and he listened in a still dread for Deadlock's
tongue. He lay still for a quarter of an hour.

No hound spoke. The water rose, and lifted him off the root, and
carried him away. He drifted through the Mouse Hole Pit and beyond the
oakwood to the deeper winding bed in the meadow, where oarweed hung dry
on the lower branches of thorns, with sticks, grasses, sometimes the
skeleton of a rabbit or bird. Dead brambles tangled in the thorns were
swinging in the water, combing the scum of the tide. Cuckoo flowers
grew above the top of the flood, their small pale gentle faces rising
on tall stems from the dead stumps of trees, some broken and wilting,
trodden into the mud and asleep again.

Through the soft pasture ground the river roamed, coiling and
uncertain. The tide-water filling it gleamed dully like a seal's hide,
greyish brown and yellow freckled. The mud at its edges streamed with
tiny bubbles out of the ragworms' holes. It carried Tarka with its
other flotsam to the middle of its last sea-bend, where the tide lay
like a dead seal. Already it had started to ebb. Tarka crawled into
shallow fresh water singing round stones, and reached two rocks covered
with brown water-weed. Here he sat and licked his wounds, and lapped
the salt from his mouth. Long shadows were on the grass, and the
faint-screaming swifts were high over the valley, eager for the sunset
and their mystic star-games.

Above the tide's head the banks were of brown soil and upright under
the broken turf. Seedling plants of balsam were four inches high.
Willows were green and waving in the evening wind. Tarka walked under
the bank on dry shillets and sandy scours washed loose of mud, until he
reached the roots of a big tree based at the tail of an eddying pool.
He crept into darkness, to a dry shelf within, and slept.

The high stars of mid-May were shining through the branches when he
came out of the holt, slow and stiff and hungry. Below the two rocks
the water gushed in many clear rills. Tarka walked across a bend, down
a bank, over the shallow, and up the other bank. He made a landloop
that took him to the bottom of the railway embankment, and pushing
through a low thorn hedge, he climbed the grassy bank to the rails.
Over the wooden sleepers he walked, so that the stenches of oil and tar
and cinder would mingle with his own scent, in case the enemies were
trailing him.

At the next bridge, under which a dwarf owl nested, he left the track
and went to water again. Working down the river, crossing from side to
side and searching for fish under stones and in deep holes, he left
the grassy sloping tide-walls behind and passed by boats resting on a
ridge of gravel above a long road-bridge. Swimming with a fluke to the
riverside, he could find no bank. The water lapped a stone wall. He
swam under an arch of the bridge and ate the fish on a ledge of sand
raised over an old galvanized-iron bath thrown away into the river.
Below the bridge was a railway bridge, supported by round iron piers
sunk into the gravel. A wave washed against the base of the pier near
the right side of the river as he swam round it, hoping to find mussels
clinging there. The sea was returning again. It poured over the ridges
of sand, making a sound with every stone and shell and shillet tumbling
before its eager spread. _Hu-ee-ic!_ Tarka chopped at the froth, the
new smarting of his wounds unheeded. _Hu-ee-ic!_ The salt wave was
of the sea, and the sea was the friend of otters. As he was swimming
down in a turbulent pool, Tarka saw a big fish turn before him. He
raced after it. His hind legs pushed forward under his body for the
full double-thrust, and the arch of his back opened the big bite of
Deadlock that had nearly touched the spine. He bled, but felt no pain
in the joy of hunting a big fish. The mullet--one of many that had
come up from the estuary, feeding in the muddy collar of the tide's
head--nearly dashed into the stone wall of the quay in its terror. It
saved itself by a leap that took it a yard into the air, and falling
back, it sped swiftly down the river. Tarka followed it to where it
had leapt, stood head and shoulders out of the water, while he looked
round, before rolling under again. He swam up the base of the wall and
turned back by the railway bridge, swimming three double-thrusts to the
left, then three to the right, while watching for the glint of scales.
He followed the wall until he came to an opening in the quay where the
tide was rushing. Another fish turned in the turbid swirling water
before him, and darted up the pill. Tarka swam up the narrow way, but
seeing nothing, swung back into the wide river. He swam across the tide
to the opposite bank by a shipyard, then returned along the piers of
the bridge, searching by the stone sterlings.

The tide was pouring fast between the piers when he reached the wall
again. Swimming along the wall he turned up the pill, and let the tide
take him. With easy strokes he explored the water, swinging in a zigzag
course from side to side. At the end of each crossing he threw head and
shoulders out of the water, to breathe and survey before pushing off
again with a thrust of hind legs from the stones under the glidders.
Many times he swerved off his course to peer round and under things
that lay on the bed, broken kettles, cooking pots, basins, and battered
oil-drums thrown away in the mud.

He saw fish-shapes in the water beyond and above him, and headed them
again as they would dash back to the estuary. The mullet swam away
from him at thrice his speed, but he followed surely. The spring-tide
was now flowing at six knots and the mullet went up with the press of
water. Tarka drove them under another bridge, past which, by some steps
in the quay, water from a mill-leat was splashing under a culvert.
Above this the walls of stone ended, and rows of weed-hung stakes
leaned over the mud glidders. Following the westward curve of the pill,
Tarka passed by a timber-yard, and after a minute's swimming, swung
north again and then east. The creek was like a great hollow slug
filling with water.

Above the next bridge the leading fish rushed back and skurried by him,
missing his snap by a curve that gleamed all its side, and a flack of
its tail that filled Tarka's mouth with air. It escaped, with six of
its grey brethren, but the last two were headed again. Tarka drove them
up the straight and narrowing pill, through the collar of the tide and
into still water, which was strange to the mullet, it was so clear and
shallow.

Tarka was now a mile from the pill-mouth. The image of the bright moon
rolled in shaken globules in the hollows of the brook's swift waters,
blending as quicksilver. Points of shining rested on the black bubbles
riding on the crests of hollows. Every ten yards two clusters of tiny
silver beads arose out of the blackness and vanished in a silver
streak. Sometimes a delicate silver arrow pointed up the brook and was
tangled in a fish-tail swirl. Every ten yards the whiskered head looked
up for direction--only the immediate foreground was visible under
water--and smoothly vanished. Tarka swam with all his webs thrusting
together against the swift current, just above the bed of the brook,
ready to leap up and snap should the fish try to pass him.

He swam under a bridge of the small-gauge railway, whose shadow
darkened the water. As he thrust up his head to vent, Tarka saw beyond
the shadow-bar the white blur of water sliding over the sill of a
weir. Under water again, he looked from side to side more quickly, for
in this dark place the fish might easily slip by him, although the
water was not two feet deep.

When midway through the shadow, his rudder swished up sickle-shaped,
slanting his body. His hind legs touched stones; he sprang. The scales
of the two fish coming straight towards him in the darkness reflected
only the darkness, but he had seen a hair of faintest light where
the ream of a back-fin had cut the surface and glimmered with the
moon-frosted slide. His teeth tore the tail of the leading fish, which
escaped--his rudder lashed for another turn, his body screwed through
the water, and struck upwards with teeth into the mullet's gorge. Tarka
swam into moonlight and dragged the five-pound fish (despite its beats
and flaps) on to a shillet heap under the spillway of the slide. He
gripped it with his paws and stood over it and started to eat it, while
its gills opened and closed, and it tried feebly to flap.

The chewing of its bony jaws soon made him impatient, and he fixed
his teeth into the shoulder and tore away his bite. For five minutes
he ate, then stretched up his head, with its spiky neck-hair raised,
and assayed the air. _Hu-ee-ic!_ His nostrils opened wide. _Hu-ee-ic!_
White-tip looked over the weir-sill and slid down with the water.
_Yinn-yinn-y-y-ikk-r!_ she cried, through her white teeth, and pulled
the fish away from Tarka, who rolled on his back and tried to play with
her tail. Then he rolled on his pads again and stared down through the
rectangular space under the bridge, remembering the other fish. He slid
off the rock. White-tip ate two pounds of the mullet. Then she followed
Tarka.

The leat, with its swift clear water and brown weed--like clusters of
stoats' tails--ran parallel to the brook, a few yards away, and past a
lime-washed mill with a ruined water-wheel. A fence made of old iron
bedsteads was set in the leat's grassy bank, and here White-tip saw
the dark shape of Tarka's head against the nobbled lines of framework.
He was eating. Seeing her, he whistled. As she ran over the grass, she
smelled the scales where he had dragged the fish. _Yinn-yinn!_ she
cried again, jumping on the fish and clutching its head in her paws.
Tarka watched her. Then he licked the blood from his wounds and ran
back to the pill. He was going after more big fish.

In the meadow near the lime-washed mill was a dump of house-rubbish,
tipped there by dust-carts, and spread about. A sow and her growing
litter were routing in the mess of rotten flesh and vegetable food,
crunching up egg-shells and bones and cinders with eager delight.
Here, while the moon was waning and the low mist was growing white,
the otters returned to play a strange game. It was begun by White-tip
making a splash before Tarka, to make sure that he would see her leave
the water and climb the bank. When he followed, she ran around the
meadow and back again, passing close by, but not once looking at him.
After a while, they went back to the pill and romped like porpoises.
Then they ran up the bank together and wandered off alone, up and
down, passing and repassing many times through the squares of the wire
fencing, without recognition or purpose, as though they were both
mazed. To the water once more, a drink and a search for eels, and again
the strange play in the meadow.

Each was pretending not to see the other; so happy were they to be
together, that they were trying to recover the keen joy of meeting.

On the seventh round White-tip ran near a young pig that, on sniffing
her scent, jumped and grunted and squealed and then stood still. Every
black jowl lifted from the pleasant garbage. Hot ears ceased to flap.
White-tip moved, and ten pigs jumped, and squealed, and hurriedly
bolted. The sow, a ponderous and careful animal with eyes sunken in
fat, that had eaten two rats and a cat besides twenty pounds of other
food that night, pointed her ringed snout at the troublesome smell and
moved her big shaking body towards it. White-tip threatened her, crying
_Is-iss-iss!_ If the sow had caught her, White-tip would have been
eaten by sunrise, since she weighed only fourteen pounds and the sow
weighed seven hundred pounds. She whistled to Tarka, who ran at the sow.

Seven hundred pounds of flesh returned from the fence with pricked ears
and a tail-tip gone; and Tarka ate grass blades, although he was not
hungry. He wanted to get the taste of sow out of his mouth.

All night the swifts had been racing over the valley, so high that not
even the owls had heard their whistling screams. When these birds saw
the golden fume of the sun rising out of the east, they poured down in
three funnels to the lower airs of the valley. Their narrow wings made
a whishing noise as they fell. Tarka and White-tip in the weir-pool
lay on their backs and watched them as they linked into chains and
chased away, some up the valley, others to the estuary. Suddenly the
otter heads lifted, looked round, and sank together--they had heard the
otter-hounds baying in the kennels on Pilton Hill.

In daylight they drifted down the mill-leat that drew out of the pool,
passing from grassy banks to concrete, above which were walls and
windows of houses and lofts where pigeons sat and croodled. Some of
the older pigeons were already cocking red-rimmed eyes at the sky, for
it was near the time of year when the peregrine falcons wheeled aloft
the town of Barum, coming from the cliff eyries of Bag Hole, Hercules
Promontory, and the red cliffs along the Severn Sea.

A stag-bird, or farmyard cock, saw the otters from its perch on a bough
over the leat, and cried _Wock-wock-wock-wick_, while its comb became
redder. Then it saw nothing but water, and crowed in triumph among the
hens. Tarka had not forgotten the time when a cock had crowed before.

The leat flowed under a road, and under a brick cliff that was one
wall of the town mills, swirled back from the locked wheel and gushed
under a penstock and through a culvert to the pill, from which the sea
was ebbing. Tarka and White-tip swam over the drowned white flowers of
scurvey-grass to the bend where timber lay, and climbing out, sought
a hiding-place among the pile of oaken trunks. As they crept along a
rough bole a rat squealed, another squealed, and soon all the rats of
the timber stack were squealing. An old buck saw Tarka and fled away,
followed by others, who were either bucks or does without young. Some
of the rats dived into the water, others ran to farther wood stacks,
where lived families that fought with the invaders. Their squeals came
out of the planks all the morning, while the ringing rasp of circular
saws was loud in the sunlight. These rats were heard by the sawyers,
and during the dinner-hour one went off to fetch his ferrets.

       *       *       *       *       *

Tarka and White-tip were lying in a hollow trunk, curled side by side,
their heads close together. The hollow was damp; its crevices still
held skulls and leg-bones of mice and sparrows, that had looked at
Tarka when he was very young. There were also fishbones with a faint
smell, but even these were beyond memory. In the autumn, long after
the cubs had left its friendly hollow, the tree had been cut off from
its roots and dragged by horses across the meadow and taken away, with
other trees, to the saw mills.

Hidden in the pile of trunks, the otters heard the grumbling of the
grist mill across the creek, with the noises of traffic and the voices
of men. During the morning Tarka shook his ears, tickled by the
irritant buzzing of a bluebottle-fly caught and fanged in a spider's
web outside the hollow. Long after the fly was dead Tarka heard the
buzzing, but without twitching his ears; for similar sounds now came
from the bridge, where the motor-traffic crossed two roads. The noises
were quieter when the sun was on the top of the sky, and the otters
heard distinctly the chirping of sparrows. Then the chirping grew less,
for the birds had flown to feed in the quieter roadways. Tarka ceased
to listen for footfalls, and slept.

White-tip awakened before Tarka, by the time of an eye-blink. Light
from a crevice above, between the trunks resting on the old tree,
made two eyes to gleam like no eyes the otters had seen before. They
were pink as some blossoms of the balsam, a flower that rose tall by
the sides of the Two Rivers every summer. The pink eyes blinked and
moved nearer, above a white body. The creature's strong smell, blent
with the smell of man, its bold silence, its likeness to an otter,
yet so curiously small, made them move uneasily. It peered with its
pallid eyes, and sniffed at the tip of Tarka's rudder. Tarka followed
White-tip, who was more nervous than he was. As they were moving along
a trunk, a rat jumped upon Tarka's back and clung to his hair, while
screwing up its eyes and yinnering through its bared teeth. It was
crying aloud its fear, not of the otter, but of the ferret. This tamed
animal of the weasel tribe, whose name was Zippy, followed the rat in a
quiet fury, and while Tarka was climbing up through a gap between the
first and second layer of trunks, it leapt and bit the rat through
the neck, dragging it from its clutch on the bark and shaking it as it
drank its blood. Hearing another squeal, Zippy left the limp and dying
rat and rippled after the squealer.

When White-tip looked from under the pile of trunks, she saw a dog
peering bright-eyed, its head on one side, above her. A man stood
beyond with a cudgel. The dog stepped back three paces as she ran out
and yapped as the man struck at her with his cudgel. White-tip turned
back, meeting the sharp face of the ferret under a log. She ran round
the stack.

The broad sky, grey with heat beating down on the dusty peninsula,
dazed the eyes of Tarka, who was stiff with wounds and bruises. He ran
to the grassy bank above the creek, slower than the man, who struck
him a glancing blow. The blow quickened Tarka, and the man, eager to
kill him, threw the ground-ash stick at his head. It twirled past
Tarka and scored a groove in the hot and hardening mud. Tarka ran over
the cracks beginning to vein the glidder, and sank into the water. He
was seen from the bridge, moving round the larger stones like a brown
shadow, slowly stroking with his hind legs and never once rippling the
waterflow, which was just deep enough to cover an old boot.

       *       *       *       *       *

At night Tarka whistled in the creek, but heard no answer. He returned
twice to the bend by the silent timber yard, where the eyes of rats
were pricked in vanishing moonlight, but White-tip was not there. The
flood tide took him two miles up the river again, to the railway bridge
where a pair of dwarf owls had their eggs, in a stolen jackdaw's nest.
These owls, scarcely bigger than thrushes, flew both by day and night,
feeding on flukes and shrimps, frogs, snipe, oak-webs or cockchafers,
worms, rats, mice, butterflies, and anything small they could catch and
kill. When they saw Tarka under the bridge they wauled like Shaggery
the ram-cat, they barked like foxes, they coughed like sheep, they
croaked like bull-frogs. They flew over him as he walked up the gut
that emptied a small brook from the east-lying valley beyond, blaking
like herring gulls a yard above his head. When he was driven away from
their eggs they hooted with soft pleasure, and left him.

Tarka walked under the road and climbed into a mill-pond, where three
eels died. Travelling up the brook, under the mazzard, orchards growing
on the northern slope of the valley, he reached a great hollow in the
hillside, shut in with trees and luminous as the sky. Tarka saw two
moons, one above trees, the other level and in front of him, for the
hollow was a flooded limestone quarry. _Hu-ee-ic!_ The whistle echoed
from the face of rock across the water. He swam down and down, and
could not touch bottom. The sides of the quarry dropped sheer down into
the still depths, except at the far end, where was a little bay under a
knuckle of land.

He found no fish in the pit, and ran past the deserted lime-burners'
cottages and kilns to the brook again. Climbing the right bank he ran
over grass-grown hillocks of deads, or rejected shillets of slatey
rock, to another drowned quarry. Sombre brakes of blackthorns grew in
the slag-heaps near the ivy-covered chimney of the ruinous furnace,
and willows bound with mosses leaned in the water, which was dark and
stagnant. A tree-creeper had her nest in a crack of the tall chimney,
which rocked in every gale, for only the ivy, whose roots had made food
and dust of nearly all the mortar between the stones, held it upright
against the winds. Every April for five years the tree-creeper's young
had been reared within the crack, in a nest that always looked like a
chance wind-wedging of dry grasses and little sticks. The crows and
magpies never found the nest, so cunningly was it made each year.

Fish, big and slow-swimming, lived in the sombre waters of the pit,
and Tarka chased one down to the mud forty feet under the surface,
where it escaped. It was a carp, more than fifty years old, and so
wise for a fish that it knew the difference between a hook baited
with dough-and-aniseed and one baited with dough-and-aniseed and
cottonwool. Its habit, when it found a baited hook, was to expel
through its mouth a flume of water on the dough until it was washed off
and then it would swallow it; but dough stiffened with cottonwool was
left alone.

_Hu-ee-ic!_

The sky was growing grey. Tarka could not catch a carp, and he was
hungry. He went back to the brook.

_Hu-ee-ic!_

Only his echo replied, and he wandered on.




CHAPTER FOURTEEN


When the bees' feet shake the bells of the heather, and the ruddy
strings of the sap-stealing dodder are twined about the green spikes
of the furze, it is summertime on the commons. Exmoor is the high
country of the winds, which are to the falcons and the hawks: clothed
by whortleberry bushes and lichens and ferns and mossed trees in the
goyals, which are to the foxes, the badgers, and the red deer: served
by rain-clouds and drained by rock-clittered streams, which are to the
otters.

The moor knew the sun before it was bright, when it rolled red and
ragged through the vapours of creation, not blindingly rayed like
one of its own dandelions. The soil of the moor is of its own dead,
and scanty; the rains return to the lower ground, to the pasture and
cornfields of the valleys, which are under the wind, and the haunts of
men.

The moor is to the deer, the badgers, the foxes, the otters, the
falcons, and the hawks, pitiless despoilers of rooted and blooded
things which man has collected and set apart for himself; so they are
killed. Olden war against greater despoilers began to end with the
discoveries of iron and gunpowder; the sabre-toothed tigers, the bears,
the wolves, all are gone, and the fragments of their bones lie on
the rock of the original creation, under the lichens and grasses and
mosses, or in the museums of towns. Once hunted himself, then hunting
for necessity, man now hunts in the leisure of his time; but in nearly
all those who through necessity of life till fields, herd beasts, and
keep fowls, these remaining wildings of the moors have enemies who care
nothing for their survival. The farmers would exterminate nearly every
wild bird and animal of prey, were it not for the landowners, among
whom are some who care for the wildings because they are sprung from
the same land of England, and who would be unhappy if they thought the
country would know them no more. For the animal they hunt to kill in
its season, or those other animals or birds they cause to be destroyed
for the continuance of their pleasure in sport--which they believe to
be natural--they have no pity; and since they lack this incipient human
instinct, they misunderstood and deride it in others. Pity acts through
the imagination, the higher light of the world, and imagination arises
from the world of things, as a rainbow from the sun. A rainbow may be
beautiful and heavenly, but it will not grow corn for bread.

Within the moor is the Forest, a region high and treeless, where sedge
grasses grow on the slopes to the sky. In early summer the wild spirit
of the hills is heard in the voices of curlews. The birds fly up from
solitary places, above their beloved and little ones, and float the
wind in a sweet uprising music. Slowly on spread and hollow wings they
sink, and their cries are trilling and cadent, until they touch earth
and lift their wings above their heads, and poising, loose the last
notes from their throats, like gold bubbles rising into the sky again.
Tall and solemn, with long hooped beaks, they stalk to their nestlings
standing in wonder beside the tussocks. The mother-bird feeds her
singer, and his three children cry to him. There are usually but three,
because the carrion crows rob the curlews of the first egg laid in each
nest. Only when they find the broken empty shell do the curlews watch
the crows, black and slinking, up the hillside.

Soon the curlew lifts his wings and runs from his young, thrilling with
open beak; his wings flap, and up he flies to fetch song from heaven to
the wilderness again.

A tarn lies under two hills, draining water from a tussock-linked
tract of bog called The Chains. The tarn is deep and brown and still,
reflecting rushes and reeds at its sides, the sedges of the hills, and
the sky over them. The northern end of the tarn is morass, trodden
by deer and ponies. Water trickles away under its southern bank, and
hurries in its narrow course by falls, runnels, pools and cascades. One
afternoon Tarka climbed out of the rillet's bed, scarcely wider than
himself, and looked through green hart's-tongue ferns at the combe up
which he had travelled. Nothing moved below him except water. He walked
up the hill, and saw the tarn below him. He heard the dry croaking of
frogs, and ran down the bank that dammed the dark peat-water. A yard
down the slope he stopped.

A hen-raven, black from bristled beak to toes, hopped along the edge
of the tarn when she saw him. Tarka heard small plopping sounds and
saw ripples in the water, where bull-frogs had dived off the bank. The
raven took three hops to a pile of dead frogs, then stopped, crouched
down, poked out her head with flattened feathers, and gazed at Tarka.
Her small eyes flickered with the whitish-grey membranes of the third
eyelids. The raven was not afraid of an otter.

She had been fishing for frogs by dapping the water with her beak.
Hearing the noises, the bull-frogs swam to the surface and turned with
bulging eyes towards the dapping. The raven made a dry and brittle
croak. When the frogs heard it, the skin swelled under their necks,
and they croaked a challenge, mistaking the noises for the struggle of
a choking female. They swam within a few inches of the raven's beak.
One, perhaps two, would leap out of the water, and then the raven
opened her beak and caught one, perhaps two. She was very quick. She
hopped with them to her pile, spiked them through the head, and walked
quietly to another fishing place. She could carry eight or nine frogs
in her craw at once to her nest of young in a rocky clitter near the
head of the river Exe. When loaded, she flew with gaping beak.

Tarka lifted his head and worked his nostrils. The steadfast glance
of the small eyes along the black beak pointed at him. He smelled the
frogs, took three quaddling steps towards the raven, and stopped again.
The raven did not move, and he did not like her eyes. He turned away.
She hopped after him, and nipped the tip of his rudder as he slipped
into the tarn.

_Krok-krok-krok!_ said the raven, cocking an eye at the sky. Tarka lay
in the water and watched her picking up frog after frog and pouching
them, before she jumped off the bank and flew over the eastern hill.

When she returned, her mate was with her. They soared above the tarn.
Sometimes the cock raven shut his wings, rolled sideways, and twirled
on open wings again. _Krok-krok!_ he said to the hen, seeing below the
form of the swimming otter, darker than the dark tarn. The raven opened
his beak wide, set his wings for descent, and croaked _kron-n-n-n-n-k_
during the slow, dipping swoop, in the curve of a scythe, from one
green-lined margin to the other. Then he tumbled and twirled,
alighting on the slope of the hill, and walked down to the water to
catch frogs.

Several times each day the two ravens flew to the tarn. The cockbird
talked to Tarka whenever he saw him, and pestered him when he was
sunning himself on the bank. He would hop to within a few feet of him,
with a frog in his beak, and drop it just to windward of Tarka's nose.
Once, when Tarka was playing with a frog and had turned his back on it
for a moment, the raven picked it up and threw it to one side. Bird and
otter played together, but they never touched one another. The raven,
who was one of the three hundred sons of Kronk, would drop a stick into
the tarn and Tarka would swim after it, bringing it to the bank and
rolling with it between his paws. Occasionally the raven slyly pinched
his rudder, and Tarka would run at him, tissing through his teeth. With
flaps and hops the raven dodged him, flying up out of his way only when
driven to water.

Day after day Tarka slept in the rushes in the morass at the north
end of the tarn. Unless he was tired after the nightly prowl, the
_kron-n-n-n-k_ of the zooming raven would always wake him, and he
would either run along the bank or swim by the reeds to play with the
bird. One morning five ravens flew over the tarn, the hen leading
three smaller ravens in line and the father behind them--a black
constellation of Orion. They lit on the turf of the dam. The youngsters
sat on the bank and watched their mother dapping for frogs. Tarka ran
along the bank, amid guttural squawks and cronks, to play with them,
but the parents stabbed at him with their beaks, beating wings in his
face, and hustling him back to water. They flew over him when he bobbed
for breath, and worried him so persistently that he never again went
near a raven.

When the wind had blown the seeds of the cotton grass and the sedge
drooped tawny under the sun, the curlews flew away to the seashore and
the rivers. Little jerky flights of pipits crossed over the hollow
in the hills, their twittering passed on, and the tarn lay silent as
the sky. One afternoon in early September the silence stirred, and
along the tawny hillcrest moved something like a leafless top of an
oak-branch. It became a stag hastening with tongue a-loll to the wooded
valleys of the south. Silence settled on the moor until the hill-line
was broken by a long and silent file of staghounds running down from
The Chains on the line of a deer. Tarka stood on his bed of rushes
and watched them until they loped into the sky. When he had settled
again, a blackcock hurtled down the western hill and flew over the
tarn, followed by a grey hen with her two heath poults. Two horsemen
in redcoats slanted down the side of the hill; and after them came a
young farmer riding bare-back a stallion with blown mane and flying
tail. Then came a grey hunter, carrying a man with a face nearly as red
as his coat. Others followed, singly, and at long intervals, on weary
horses.

That evening Tarka quitted the tarn, and journeyed over The Chains to
water that hastened in a bright thread out of the bog. It entered a
narrow goyal, and the moon was hid by the hill before him. After a mile
the water turned north, under the hill whose worn grey feet it had
broken for its bed. The goyal widened by the Hoar Oak, whose splintered
stump, black as its shadow with the moon behind, glistered with the
tracks of slugs. Near the Hoar Oak stood a sapling, caged from the
teeth and horns of deer, a little tree by the grave of its father.

And Tarka went down the Hoar Oak Water which, under ridge and common,
shattered the moon into shards and lost them under the trees which grew
together in the lower valley. Its voice passed from leaf to leaf, up
through the woods where badgers were seeking mice and black slugs, and
to the night over the autumn hills.

Where two waters met, to seek the sea together, Tarka walked over the
trail of otters, and recognizing the scent of White-tip, he followed up
the water the otters had travelled. Near the end of the night, while
he was swimming in a pool scooped in the rock below a fall, he saw an
otter-shape before him. It moved slowly with the sway of water, its
head lolled on a stone. It had been drowned some hours. The whistles of
otters playing at the fall, during the previous night, had been heard
by the water-owner, who had set a gin under the wash of the fall, on a
sunken ledge of rock where otters touched after the joyful pounding of
the plunge. The otters had come back again.

Iron in the water sinks, and however long cubs call her, a bitch otter
cannot swim with three legs forever.

Tarka heard the clink of the chain as the swollen body rolled; and his
bubbles blown of fear rose behind him.

At sunrise he had crossed two miles of woods and fields--stubble
with lines of sheaves, stacked in sixes and tied in fours, fields
of mangel and sweet turnip, where partridges crouched, and pasture
given over to sheep--and found other water below Beggars' Roost hill.
Ducks were paddling by a farm as he walked upstream, passing under a
bridge, by which grew a monkey-tree with leaves as sharp as magpies'
beaks. Cottages by the waterside and a mill were left behind, and he
came to quiet meadows where only robins were singing. He crossed from
side to side, looking for a place to hide during the sunlight. Half a
mile above the mill he found a rock in the left bank of the stream,
with a wide opening half under water. Hazels grew on the bank above.
Their leaves took on the golden-green of spring in the beams of the low
autumn sun as Tarka crept under the rock.




CHAPTER FIFTEEN


He was awakened by the tremendous baying of hounds. He saw feet
splashing in the shallow water, a row of noses, and many flacking
tongues. The entrance was too small for any head to enter. He crouched
a yard away, against the cold rock. The noise hurt the fine drums of
his ears.

Hob-nailed boots scraped on the brown shillets of the water-bed, and
iron-tipped hunting poles tapped the rocks.

_Go'r'n leave it! Leave it! Go'r'n leave it! Deadlock! Harper! Go'r'n
leave it!_

Tarka heard the horn and the low opening became lighter.

_Gor'n leave it! Captain! Deadlock! Go'r'n leave it!_ The horn twanged
fainter as the pack was taken away. Then a pole was thrust into the
holt and prodded about blindly. It slid out again. Tarka saw boots and
hands and the face of a terrier. A voice whispered, _Leu in there,
Sammy, leu in there!_ The small ragged brown animal crept out of the
hands. Sammy smelled Tarka, saw him, and began to sidle towards him.
_Waugh-waugh-waugh-wa-waugh._ As the otter did not move, the terrier
crept nearer to him, yapping with head stretched forward.

After a minute Tarka could bear the irritating noises no more. Tissing,
with open mouth, he moved past the terrier, whose snarly yapping
changed to a high-pitched yelping. The men on the opposite bank stood
silent and still. They saw Tarka's head in sunlight, which came through
the trees behind them and turned the brown shillets a warm yellow. The
water ran clear and cold. Tarka saw three men in blue coats; they did
not move and he slipped into the water. It did not cover his back, and
he returned to the bankside roots. He moved in the shadows and under
the ferns at his ordinary travelling pace. One of three watching men
declared that an otter had no sense of fear.

No hound spoke but the reason of the silence was not considered by
Tarka, who could not reason such things. He had been awakened with a
shock, he had been tormented by a noise, he had left a dangerous place,
and he was escaping from human enemies. As he walked upstream, with
raised head, his senses of smell, sight, and hearing were alert for his
greatest enemies, the hounds.

The stream being narrow and shallow, the otter was given four minutes'
law. Four minutes after Tarka had left he heard behind him the short
and long notes of the horn, and the huntsman crying amidst the tongues
of hounds, _Ol-ol-ol-ol-ol-ol-over! Get on to 'm! Ol-ol-ol-ol-over!_ as
the pack returned in full cry to the water. Hounds splashed into the
water around the rock, wedging themselves at its opening and breaking
into couples and half-couples, leaping through the water after the wet
and shivering terrier, throwing their tongues and dipping their noses
to the wash of scent coming down.

Deadlock plunged at the lead, with Coraline, Sailoress, Captain, and
Playboy. They passed the terrier, and Deadlock was so eager that he
knocked him down. Sammy picked up his shivery body and followed.

Tarka sank all but his nostrils in a pool and waited. He lay in the
sunlit water like a brown log slanting to the stones on which his
rudder rested. The huntsman saw him. Tarka lifted his whiskered head
out of the water, and stared at the huntsman. Hounds were speaking
just below. From the pool the stream flowed for six feet down the
smooth slide up which he had crept. When Deadlock jumped into the
pool and lapped the scent lying on the water, Tarka put down his head
with hardly a ripple, and like a skin of brown oil moved under the
hound's belly. Soundlessly he emerged, and the sun glistened on his
water-sleeked coat as he walked down on the algae-smeared rock. He
seemed to walk under their muzzles slowly, and to be treading on their
feet.

_Let hounds hunt him! Don't help hounds or they'll chop him!_

The pack was confused. Every hound owned the scent, which was like a
tangled line, the end of which was sought for unravelling. But soon
Deadlock pushed through the pack and told the way the otter had gone.

As Tarka was running over shillets, with water scarcely deep enough to
cover his rudder, Deadlock saw him and with stiff stern ran straight
at him. Tarka quitted the water. The dead twigs and leaves at the
hedge-bottom crackled and rustled as he pushed through to the meadow.
While he was running over the grass, he could hear the voice of
Deadlock raging as the bigger black-and-white hound struggled through
the hazel twigs and brambles and honeysuckle bines. He crossed fifty
yards of meadow, climbed the bank, and ran down again on to a tarred
road. The surface burned his pads, but he ran on, and even when an
immense crimson creature bore down upon him he did not go back into the
meadow across which hounds were streaming. With a series of shudders
the crimson creature slowed to a standstill, while human figures rose
out of it, and pointed. He ran under the motor-coach, and came out into
brown sunshine, hearing above the shouts of men the clamour of hounds
trying to scramble up the high bank and pulling each other down in
their eagerness.

He ran in the shade of the ditch, among bits of newspaper, banana and
orange skins, cigarette ends and crushed chocolate boxes. A long yellow
creature grew bigger and bigger before him, and women rose out of it
and peered down at him as he passed it. With smarting eyes he ran two
hundred yards of the road, which for him was a place of choking stinks
and hurtful noises. Pausing in the ditch, he harkened to the clamour
changing its tone as hounds leaped down into the road. He ran on for
another two hundred yards, then climbed the bank, pushed through dusty
leaves and grasses and briars that would hold him, and down the sloping
meadow to the stream. He splashed into the water and swam until rocks
and boulders rose before him. He climbed and walked over them. His
rudder drawn on mosses and lichens left a strong scent behind him.
Deadlock, racing over the green shadowed grassland, threw his tongue
before the pack.

In the water, through shallow and pool, his pace was steady, but not
hurried; he moved faster than the stream; he insinuated himself from
slide to pool, from pool to boulder, leaving his scent in the wet marks
of his pads and rudder.

People were running through the meadow, and in the near distance arose
the notes of the horn and hoarse cries. Hounds' tongues broke out
united and firm, and Tarka knew that they had reached the stream. The
sun-laden water of the pools was spun into eddies by the thrusts of
his webbed hind legs. He passed through shadow and dapple, through
runnel and plash. The water sparkled amber in the sunbeams, and
his brown sleek pelt glistened whenever his back made ripples. His
movements in water were unhurried, like an eel's. The hounds came
nearer.

The stream after a bend flowed near the roadway, where more motor-cars
were drawn up. Some men and women, holding notched poles, were watching
from the cars--sportsmen on wheels.

Beggars' Roost Bridge was below. With hounds so near Tarka was heedless
of the men that leaned over the stone parapet, watching for him. They
shouted, waved hats, and cheered the hounds. There were ducks above
the bridge, quacking loudly as they left the stream and waddled to the
yard, and when Tarka came to where they had been, he left the water
and ran after them. They beat their wings as they tried to fly from
him, but he reached the file and scattered them, running through them
and disappearing. Nearer and nearer came Deadlock, with Captain and
Waterwitch leading the pack. Huntsman, whippers-in, and field were left
behind, struggling through hedges and over banks.

Hounds were bewildered when they reached the yard. They ran with noses
to ground in puzzled excitement. Captain's shrill voice told that Tarka
had gone under a gate. Waterwitch followed the wet seals in the dust,
but turned off along a track of larger webs. The line was tangled
again. Deadlock threw his belving tongue. Other hounds followed, but
the scent led only to a duck that beat its wings and quacked in terror
before them. A man with a rake drove them off, shouting and threatening
to strike them. Dewdrop spoke across the yard and the hounds galloped
to her, but the line led to a gate which they tried to leap, hurling
themselves up and falling from the top bar. A duck had gone under the
gate, but not Tarka.

All scent was gone. Hounds rolled in the dust or trotted up to men and
women, sniffing their pockets for food. Rufus found a rabbit skin and
ate it; Render fought with Sandboy--but not seriously, as they feared
each other; Deadlock went off alone. And hounds were waiting for a lead
when the sweating huntsman, grey pot-hat pushed back from his red brow,
ran up with the two whippers-in and called them into a pack again. The
thick scent of the Muscovy ducks had checked the hunt.

Tarka had run through a drain back to the stream, and now he rested in
the water that carried him every moment nearer to the murmurous glooms
of the glen below. He saw the coloured blur of a kingfisher perching on
a twig as it eyed the water for beetle or loach. The kingfisher saw him
moving under the surface, as his shadow broke the net of ripple shadows
that drifted in meshes of pale gold on the stony bed beneath him.

While he was walking past the roots of a willow under the bank, he
heard the yapping of the terrier. Sammy had crept through the drain,
and was looking out at the end, covered with black filth, and eagerly
telling his big friends to follow him downstream. As he yapped,
Deadlock threw his tongue. The stallion hound was below the drain, and
had re-found the line where Tarka had last touched the shillets. Tarka
saw him, ten yards away, and slipping back into the water, swam with
all webs down the current, pushing from his nose a ream whose shadow
beneath was an arrow of gold pointing down to the sea.

Again he quitted the water and ran on land to wear away his scent. He
had gone twenty yards when Deadlock scrambled up the bank with Render
and Sandboy, breathing the scent which was as high as their muzzles.
Tarka reached the waterside trees again a length ahead of Deadlock,
and fell into the water like a sodden log. Deadlock leapt after him
and snapped at his head; but the water was friendly to the otter, who
rolled in smooth and graceful movement away from the jaws, a straight
bite of which would have crushed his skull.

Here sunlight was shut out by the oaks, and the roar of the first fall
was beating back from the leaves. The current ran faster, narrowing
into a race with twirls and hollows marking the sunken rocks. The roar
grew louder in a drifting spray. Tarka and Deadlock were carried to
where a broad sunbeam came down through a break in the foliage and lit
the mist above the fall. Tarka went over in the heavy white folds of
the torrent and Deadlock was hurled over after him. They were lost in
the churn and pressure of the pool until a small brown head appeared
and gazed for its enemy in the broken honeycomb of foam. A black and
white body uprolled beside it, and the head of the hound was thrust up
as he tried to tread away from the current that would draw him under.
Tarka was master of whirlpools; they were his playthings. He rocked
in the surge with delight; then high above he heard the note of the
horn. He yielded himself to the water and let it take him away down the
gorge into a pool where rocks were piled above. He searched under the
dripping ferny clitter for a hiding-place.

Under water he saw two legs, joined to two wavering and inverted
images of legs, and above them the blurred shapes of a man's head and
shoulders. He turned away from the fisherman into the current again,
and as he breathed he heard the horn again. On the road above the glen
the pack was trotting between huntsman and whippers-in, and before them
men were running with poles at the trail, hurrying down the hill to the
bridge, to make a stickle to stop Tarka reaching the sea.

Tarka left Deadlock far behind. The hound was feeble and bruised and
breathing harshly, his head battered and his sight dazed, but still
following. Tarka passed another fisherman, and by chance the tiny
feathered hook lodged in his ear. The reel spun against the check,
_re-re-re_ continuously, until all the silken line had run through the
snake-rings of the rod, which bent into a circle, and whipped back
straight again as the gut trace snapped.

Tarka saw the bridge, the figure of a man below it, and a row of faces
above. He heard shouts. The man standing on a rock took off his hat,
scooped the air, and holla'd to the huntsman, who was running and
slipping with the pack on the loose stones of the steep red road. Tarka
walked out of the last pool above the bridge, ran over a mossy rock,
merged with the water again, and pushed through the legs of the man.

_Tally-ho!_

Tarka had gone under the bridge when Harper splashed into the water.
The pack poured through the gap between the end of the parapet and the
hillside earth, and their tongues rang under the bridge and down the
walls of the houses built on the rock above the river. Among rotting
motor tyres, broken bottles, tins, pails, shoes, and other castaway
rubbish lying in the bright water, hounds made their plunging leaps.
Once Tarka turned back; often he was splashed and trodden on. The
stream was seldom deep enough to cover him, and always shallow enough
for the hounds to move at double his speed. Sometimes he was under the
pack, and then, while hounds were massing for the worry his small head
would look out beside a rock ten yards below them.

Between boulders and rocks crusted with shell-fish and shaggy with
seaweed, past worm-channered posts that marked the fairway for fishing
boats at high water, the pack hunted the otter. Off each post a gull
launched itself, cackling angrily as it looked down at the animals.
Tarka reached the sea. He walked slowly into the surge of a wavelet,
and sank away from the chop of old Harper's jaws, just as Deadlock ran
through the pack. Hounds swam beyond the line of waves, while people
stood at the sea-lap and watched the huntsman wading to his waist. It
was said that the otter was dead-beat, and probably floating stiffly in
the shallow water. After a few minutes the huntsman shook his head, and
withdrew the horn from his waistcoat. He filled his lungs and stopped
his breath and was tightening his lips for the four long notes of the
call-off, when a brown head with hard dark eyes was thrust out of the
water a yard from Deadlock. Tarka stared into the hound's face and
cried _Ic-yang!_

The head sank. Swimming under Deadlock, Tarka bit on to the loose skin
of the flews and pulled the hound's head under water. Deadlock tried to
twist round and crush the otter's skull in his jaws, but he struggled
vainly. Bubbles blew out of his mouth. Soon he was choking. The hounds
did not know what was happening. Deadlock's hind legs kicked the air
weakly. The huntsman waded out and pulled him inshore, but Tarka
loosened his bite only when he needed new air in his lungs; and then he
swam under and gripped Deadlock again. Only when hounds were upon him
did Tarka let go. He vanished in a wave.

       *       *       *       *       *

Long after the water had been emptied out of Deadlock's lungs, and the
pack had trotted off for the long uphill climb to the railway station,
the gulls were flying over something in the sea beyond the mouth of
the little estuary. Sometimes one dropped its yellow webs to alight on
the water; always it flew up again into the restless, wailing throng,
startled by the snaps of white teeth. A cargo steamer was passing up
the Severn Sea, leaving a long smudge of smoke on the horizon, where
a low line of clouds billowed over the coast of Wales. The regular
thumps of its screw in the windless blue calm were borne to where Tarka
lay, drowsy and content, but watching the pale yellow eyes of the
nearest bird. At last the gulls grew tired of seeing only his eyes, and
flew back to their posts; and turning on his back, Tarka yawned and
stretched himself, and floated at his ease.




CHAPTER SIXTEEN


Swimming towards the sunset Tarka found a cleft in the high curved red
cliff, and on the crest of a wave rode into the cavern beyond. The
broken wave slapped against the dark end as he climbed to a ledge far
above the lipping of the swell, and curled himself on cold stone. He
awoke when the gulls and cormorants were flying over the sea, silent as
dusk, to their roosts in the cliff.

The straight wavelets of the rising tide were moving across the rock
pools below the cleft, where under green and purple laver-weed crabs
and prawns were stirring to feed. The weed, so placid before, was
kicked and entangled by the searching otter. The crab he climbed out
with was bitter, and leaving it, he swam into deep water.

A herring shoal was coming up with the evening tide, followed by a herd
of porpoises, which when breathing showed shiny black hides through
the waves. Fishermen called them errin-ogs. Once these warm-blooded
mammals had ears and hair and paws, but now their ear-holes were small
as thorn-pricks, and their five-toed paws were changed into flippers.
Their forefathers, who had come from the same family as the forefathers
of otters and seals, had taken early to water, shaping themselves for
a sea-life while yet the seals were running on land. Their young, born
under water, needed no mother's back to raise them to the air of life,
for ancestral habit had become instinct.

An old boar porpoise flung himself out of a trough near Tarka and fell
with a clapping splash on its back, to shake off the barnacle-like
parasites boring into its blubber. Near the boar swam a sow porpoise,
suckling her little one, who, towed along on its back, breathed during
every rise and roll of its mother. Tarka caught his first herring and
ate it on a rock, liking the taste, but when he swam out for more, the
under-seas were vacant.

For a week he slept in the disused lime-kiln on the greensward above
the Heddon water, that lost itself in a ridge of boulders above the
tide wash. While he was exploring the fresh water a storm broke over
the moor, and the roaring coloured spate returned him to the sea. He
went westwards, under the towering cliffs and waterfalls in whose ferny
sides he liked to rest by day. Once he was awakened by a dreadful
mumbling in the wind far above him. As he lifted his head he heard a
whishing noise, as of falcons in swoop. Flakes of scree clattered and
hurtled past him; then a stag, and three staghounds. The bodies smashed
on the rocks, and were of silence again. Soon the cries of seabirds and
daws were echoing out of the cliffs. Ravens flew down, and buzzards,
and the air was filled with black and white and brown wings, with deep
croaking, wailing, and shrill screaming. They jostled and fought for an
hour, when a motor-boat, holding a red-coated figure, came round the
eastern sheer and drove them into flight. The gulls mobbed Tarka when
they saw him slipping down from his resting ledge, but he found the sea
and sank away from them. That night, quatting on a rock and eating a
conger, the west wind brought him the scent of White-pit.

At dawn he was swimming under the sea-feet of the Great Hangman; and he
followed the trail until sunrise was shimmering down the level sea and
filling with aerial gold the clouds over the Welsh hills.

       *       *       *       *       *

At dusk the shore-rats on Wild Pear Beach, searching the weed-strewn
tide-line, paused and squealed together when their sharp noses took
the musky scent of water-weasels. They ran off chittering as terrible
shapes galloped among them. A rat was picked up and killed in a swift
bite. The cub did not want it for food; he killed it in fun. He ran
into the sea after White-tip, who had been taking care of them since
their mother had been trapped under the waterfall.

Six hours later Tarka ran up Wild Pear Beach and his thin, hard cries
pierced the slop and wash of waves on the loose, worn, shaley strand.
He followed the trail over the weeds to the otters' sleeping place
under a rock, and down again to the sea. In a pool off Briery Cave he
scented otter again, for at the bottom of the pool lay a wicker pot,
holding something that turned slowly as the ribbons of the thong-weed
lifted and dropped in the water. The long blue feelers of a lobster
were feeling through the wickerwork; it was gorged, and trying to get
out from the otter cub it had been eating. The cub had found no way out
of the cage it had entered at high tide, intending to eat the lobster.

_Hu-ee-ic!_ Tarka did not know the dead. Nothing answered, and he swam
away, among green phosphoric specks that glinted at every wave-lop.

Autumn's little summer, when day and night were equal, and only the
woodlark sang his wistful falling song over the bracken, was ruined
by the gales that tore wave and leaf, and broke the sea into roar and
spray, and hung white ropes over the rocks. Fog hid cliff-tops and
stars as Tarka travelled westwards. One night, as he was drinking fresh
water from a pool below a cascade, he was startled by immense whooping
bellows that bounded from the walls of mist and rebounded afar, to
return in duller echoes as though phantom hounds were baying the
darkness. Tarka slipped into a pool and hid under lifting seaweed; but
the sounds were regular and harmless, and afterwards he did not heed
them. On a rock below the white-walled tower of Bull Point lighthouse,
whose twin sirens were sending a warning to sailors far out beyond the
dreadful rocks, Tarka found again the trail of White-tip, and whistled
with joy.

Travelling under the screes, where rusted plates of wrecked ships
lay in pools, he came to the end of the land. Day was beginning. The
tide, moving northwards across Morte Bay from Bag Leap, was ripped and
whitened by rocks which stood out of the hollows of the grey sea. One
rock was tall above the reef--the Morte Stone--and on the top pinnacle
stood a big black bird, with the tails of mullet sticking out of its
gullet. Its dripping wings were held out to ease its tight crop. The
bird was Phalacrocorax Carbo, called the Isle of Wight Parson by
fishermen, and it sat uneasily on the Morte Stone during most of the
hours of daylight, swaying with a load of fishes.

Tired and buffeted by the long Atlantic rollers, Tarka turned back
under the Morte Stone, and swam to land. He climbed a slope strewn
with broken thrift-roots and grey shards of rock, to a path set on
its seaward verge by a fence of iron posts and cables. Salt winds had
gnawed the iron to rusty splinters. The heather above the path was
tougher than the iron, but its sprigs were barer than its own roots.

Over the crest of the Morte, heather grew in low bushes, out of the
wind's way. There were green places where among grass cropped by sheep
grew mushrooms mottled like owls' plumage. The sky above the crest was
reddening, and he found a sleeping place under a broken cromlech, the
burial place of an ancient man, whose bones were grass and heather and
dust in the sun.

Tarka slept warm all day. At sunset he ran down to the sea. He worked
south through the currents that scoured shelly coves and swept round
lesser rocks into the wide Morte Bay. Long waves, breaking near the
shallows, left foam behind them in the shapes of dusky-white seals.
Bass were swimming in the breakers, taking sand-eels risen in the sandy
surge. A high-flying gull saw a fish flapping in the shallows, with
ribbon weed across its head. The gull glided down, and the ribbon weed
arose on low legs tugging at the five-pound fish, and dragged it on to
firm, wet sand. _Hak-hak!_ cried the gull, angrily. _Tu-lip, tulip!_
the ring-plover arose and flickered away in a flock. Other gulls flew
over, and dropped down. Tarka feasted among the noise of wings and
angry cries. When he was full, he lapped fresh water trickling over the
sand in a broad and shallow bed. _Hu-ee-ic!_ He galloped up the sand,
nose between paws. He ran up into the sandhills, where his passing
sowed round orange-red seeds from the split dry pods of the stinking
iris. Over a lonely road, among old stalks of ragwort and teasel, and
up a steep bank to the incult hill, pushing among bracken, furze, and
brambles, following the way of White-tip. He found the head of a
rabbit which she had caught, and played with it, whistling as he rolled
it with his paws.

Already larks were ceasing to sing. When he reached the top of Pickwell
down, eastern clouds were ruddy and Hoaroak Hill, seventeen miles away
as the falcon glides, was as a shadow lying under the sky. He descended
to a gulley in the hills, a dry watercourse marked by furze bushes,
and thorns, and hollies, growing down to sandhills by the sea. The
gulley lay south-west; the trees lay over to the north-east, bitter and
dwarfed by salt and wind. Under a holly bush, bearer of ruined blossoms
and spineless leaves, whose limbs were tortured by ivy thicker in trunk
than its own, the otter crawled into a bury widened by many generations
of rabbits, and lay down in the darkness.

The wind rushed up the gulley, moving stiffly the blackthorns
which squeaked as they rubbed against each other. Dry branches of
elderberries rattled and scraped as though bemoaning their poverty.
Gulls veered from hilltop to hilltop, calling the flock standing far
below on the sands that gleamed with the dull sky. The dark base of the
headland lying out in the Atlantic was flecked along its length with
the white of breaking waves. The sea's roar came with blown spray up
the gulley. Tarka slept.

He awoke before noon, hearing voices of men. Mist was drifting between
the hills. He lay still until a man spoke at the day-dim opening of
the bury. An animal moved down the tunnel, whose smell immediately
disturbed him. He remembered it. The animal's eyes glowed pink, and
a bell tinkled round its neck. Tarka crawled farther into the bury
and ran out of another hole, that was watched by a spaniel sitting,
shivering and wet, behind a man with a gun on the bank above. The
spaniel jumped back when it saw Tarka, who ran down the gulley,
hastening when he heard a bark, a shout, and two bangs of the gun.
Twigs showered upon him, and he ran on, hidden by the thorny brake.
Two men clambered down the banks, but only the spaniel followed him,
barking with excitement, but not daring to go near him. It returned to
its master's whistle. Tarka hid under a blackberry bush lower down, and
slept among the brambles until darkness, when he left the shelter and
climbed up the hillside.

He ran under a gate to a field beyond, but crossing a rabbit's line,
he followed it through hawthorns wind-bent over the stone bank to the
waste land again. The rabbit was crouching under the wind in a tussock,
and one bite killed it. After the meal Tarka drank rainwater in a
sheep's skull, which lay among rusty plough-shares, old iron pots,
tins, and skeletons of sheep--some broken up by cattle dogs, and all
picked clean by crows and ravens. Tarka played with a shoulder-blade
because White-tip had touched it in passing. He ran at it and bit the
cold bone as though it were White-tip. He played with many things that
night as he ran across field and bank.

Following the trail, he came to a pond in a boggy field below a hill.
Moorhens hid in terror when he swam among them. He caught and played
with an eel, which was found dead next morning on the bank, beside the
seals pressed in the mud by his clawed feet, and the hair-marks of his
rolling back. _Hu-ee-ic!_ Tarka ran under a culvert that carried a
trickle to a smaller pond in the garden of a rectory. _Hu-ee-ic!_ while
clouds broke the light of the moon.

He climbed round the hatch of the pond, sniffing the tarred wood,
and crept under a gap in the wall which ended the garden. The stream
flowed below a churchyard wall and by a thatched cottage, where a man,
a dog, and a cat were sitting before a fire of elm brands on the open
hearth. The wind blew the scent of the otter under the door, and the
cat fumed and growled, standing with fluffed back and twitching tail
beside her basket of kittens. The otter was scraping shillets by a flat
stone under a fall by the road, where farmers' daughters crouch to
wash chitterlings for the making of hogs'-pudding. An eel lived under
the kneeling stone, fat with pig-scrap. Its tail was just beyond the
otter's teeth. White-tip had tried to catch it the night before.

_Hu-ee-ic!_

The cottage door was pulled open, the spaniel rushed out barking. A
white owl lifted itself off the lopped bough of one of the churchyard
elms, crying _skirr-rr_. An otter's tiss of anger came from out of the
culvert under the road. Striking a match the man saw, on the scour of
red mud, the two-toed seal, identical with the seal that led down to
the sea after the Ice Winter.

Tarka was gone down the narrow covered way of the culvert, amid
darkness and the babble of water. The stream ran under a farmhouse, and
through an orchard, under another culvert and past a cottage garden to
the water meadow below. Wood owls hunting far down in the valley heard
the keen cries of Tarka.

_Hu-ee-ic!_

Often the trail was lost, for the otters had left their seals on bank
and scour before the rain had pitted and blurred them.

Tarka followed the stream. At the beginning of Cryde village the water
was penned above the curve of the road, the pond being kept back by a
grassy bank where stood a hawthorn clipped like a toadstool. Swimming
round the edge among flags and the roots of thorns and sycamores, he
saw a head looking at him from the water, and from the head strayed a
joyous breath. He swam to it--a snag of elm-branch stuck in the mud.
White-tip had rubbed against it when swimming by. Tarka bit it before
swimming round the pond again, to sniff the wood of the penstock. He
climbed out and ran along the bank, by the still mossy wooden wheel
of the mill. They heard his shrill cry in the inn below. A cattle dog
barked, and Tarka ran up a narrow lane which led to the top of a hill.
In hoof-mudded patches he found the trail again, for the otters had run
the same way when alarmed by the same dog. The trail took him under a
gate and into a field, over a bank where straight stalks of mulleins
were black in moonlight, to land that had forgotten the plough, a
prickly place for an otter's webs. Sea-wind had broken all the
bracken's stalks. Suddenly he heard the mumbling roar of surf and saw
the lighthouse across the Burrows. He galloped joyfully down a field of
arrish, or stubble. He travelled so swiftly that soon he stood on the
edge of sandy cliffs, where spray blew as wind. He found a way down to
the pools by a ledge where grew plants of great sea stock, whose leaves
were crumbling in autumn sleep.

The trail led over the sandhills with their thin stabbing marram
grasses, and to the mossy pans behind them, where grew privet bushes
and blunt-head club-rushes. The way was strewn with rabbit skulls and
empty snail shells. Tarka crossed the marsh of Horsey Island--where
grew Russian thistles, sprung from a single seed blown from the estuary
off a Baltic timber ship years before--until he came to the sea-wall,
and below the wall, to the mouth of the Branton pill. The tide took him
slowly in a patch of froth which the meeting waters had beaten up, the
gossip of the Two Rivers. He ran over the eastern sea-wall, and along
the otter path to the Ram's-horn pond.

_Hu-ee-ic!_

He swam to the wooden bridge by the boathouse, and to the withies on
the islet.

_Hu-ee-ic!_

He hunted the brackish waters until the stars were dimmed by dawn,
when he pressed through the reeds by a way he had trodden before, but
forgotten, and slept on an old couch where lay bones, and a little
skull.




CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


All day the wind shook the rusty reed-daggers at the sky, and the
maceheads were never still. Before sunset the couch was empty. The
purple-ruddy beams stained the grass and the thistles of the meadow,
and the tiles of the cattle-shippen under the sea-wall were the hue of
the sky. Westward the marshman's cottage, the linhays, the trees, the
hedges, the low ragged line of the Burrows, were vanishing in a mist of
fire.

The tide was ebbing, the glidders grey, with ruddy tricklings. In the
salt turf below the seawall great cracks wandered with the fire of the
sky. Ring-plover and little stints ran by the guts, and their slender
peering images quenched the flame in the water. Bunches of war-weed on
each sodden perch dripped their last drops among the froth and spinning
holes of the gliding tide. The mooring buoys rolled and returned, each
keg gathering froth that the current sucked away under its lowest
stave. By an old broken wicker crab-pot, only its rib-tops up, a small
head showed without a ripple, moving with the water. Men were walking
on the deck of a ketch below; other men were sitting at oars in a boat
under the black hull waiting for their mates. A dog began to bark, then
it whimpered, until it was pushed over the gunwale. It met the water in
a reddish splash.

Men climbed down to the boat, oars were dipped, and the dog swam
astern, breathing gruffly and whining. The otter head, drifting nearer,
sank when a man pointed with his pipe-stem. Fifty yards below, by the
chain sagging and lifting from the bows of the riding ship, the head
looked up again beside the broken wickerwork. "Artter," said the man
who had pointed, and forgot it. They were going to drink beer in the
Plough Inn.

Their voices became faint as they walked on the wall. Flocks of
ring-plover and little stint flickered and twisted over the mud and
the water. A late crow left the saltings, as a sedge-owl swept on long
wings over the drooping yellow grass of the wall, and slunk away across
the water.

Where the pill merged into the estuary the mud was scoured, leaving
sand and gravel. Below the stone setts and pebbles of the wall's apron,
whose cracks held the little ruddy winter leaves of the sea-beet, was
an islet of flat stones, apart from the wall by a narrowing channel
where water rushed. On the stone stood Old Nog, watching for shapes of
fish. The broken crab-pot bumped and lurched along the channel, and the
heron straightened his neck when he saw a fish jump out of its crown.
He peered in the dusky water, where weeds moved darkly, and saw the
fish darting before a tapered shadow. It was green and yellow, with a
streamer flying from its back. Old Nog snicked the gemmeous dragonet
from before the otter's nose, shook it free of his beak, caught it in a
jerk that pushed it into his gullet, and swallowed it while the otter
was still searching.

Tarka saw a blur of movement above, and swam on under water to the wide
sea.

Colour faded; the waves broke grey. Across the marsh a shining fly
had lit on the white bone of the lighthouse. A bird flew in hooped
flight up the estuary, wheeled below the islet, and began feeding.
It saw Tarka, and out of its beak, hooped as its wings in downward
gliding, fell a croak, which slurred upwards to a whistle, and broke
in a sweet trill as it flew away. Other curlews on the sandbanks heard
the warning, and to the far shore the wan air was beautiful with their
cries.

Rows of hurdles, black and weed-hung, stood out of the water farther
down the estuary. They were staked on three sides of a pool, while
every rising tide flooded over the tops of the fences. It was an
old salmon weir. The hurdles had been torn away so many times by
the dredging anchors of gravel barges and ketches, whose crews were
friendly with poor net-fishermen, that the owner had let the weir fall
ruinous. Herons fished from the hurdles, and at low tide crows picked
shellfish off the stakes, and flying with them to the islet, dropped
them on the stones.

At half tide Old Nog flew to the seventh hurdle up from the western
row, where, unless gorged or in love or disturbed by man, he perched
awhile during every ebb-tide. He stood swaying and sinuating his neck;
the grip of his toes was not so strong as it had been in his early
tree-top life. While he was trying to stand still, before jumping to
the rim of the sandbank awash below him, a salmon leapt in the lagoon,
gleaming and curved, and fell back with a thwack on the water. Old Nog
screamed, and fell off the hurdle. Three heads looked up, and dipped
again. Old Nog walked along under the hurdles, watching the water. The
salmon was many times Old Nog's own weight, but it was a fish, and Old
Nog was a fisher.

Tarka was drifting past the weir when he heard the whistle of White-tip
beyond the hurdles. His head and shoulders were out of the water; he
listened.

_Hu-ee-ic!_

White-tip answered him. Her cry was like wet fingers drawn over a pane
of glass. Tarka's cry was deeper, more rounded, and musical. He ran
across the strip of wet sand, clambered over the hurdles, and down to
the lagoon. He touched water, and a ripple spread out from where he
had disappeared. His seals in the sand crumbled as they welled water.

_Ka-ak!_ Old Nog ejected the gemmeous dragonet in his excitement, for
the salmon had leapt again, a glimmering curve. The teeth of White-tip
clicked at its tail. Three otter heads bobbed, flat as corks of a
salmon net. They vanished before the double splash fell.

The salmon passed through the cubs, cutting the water. They turned
together. Tarka drove between them and slowed to their pace, keeping
line. Then White-tip, who was faster than Tarka, overhauled them, and
the old otters took the wings. The line swung out and in as each otter
swam in zigzag. The eager cubs swam in each other's way. Once more
the salmon rushed back against the current, straining through the top
hurdles, where the water was deeper and safer. Tarka met it; and the
thresh of its turning tail beat up splinters of water. The line of
otters forced it into the shallow by the lower hurdles. They swam upon
it, resting in two feet of water, but it escaped past one of the cubs.

Soon the tide dropped back from the top row of hurdles and the water
was cleared of sand. A race poured steadily through a gap in the
sandbank, spreading wider as it drained the lagoon. In the penned and
slack upper water the salmon was lying, its fins and tail so still that
shrimps rose out of their hiding-places in the sand beside it. While
it rested in the water, its gills opening and closing, a dark squat
thing was walking on the sand towards it, using its fins as feet. It
was the shape of an immense tadpole, covered with tatters of skin like
weed. Its head was as broad as a barrel, gaping with a mouth almost
as wide. Its jaws were filled with bands of long pointed teeth, which
it depressed in the cavern of its mouth when it came near the salmon.
Out of the middle of its head rose three stalks, the first of which
bore a lappet, which it waved like a bait as it crept forward. It was
a sea-devil, called rod-and-line fish by fishermen. During the spring
tide it had left the deep water beyond the bar where usually it lived,
and moving up the estuary, had been trapped in the hurdle weir.

It crept forward so slowly that the salmon did not know it for an
enemy. The close-set eyes behind the enormous bony lips were fixed on
the salmon. Chains of bubbles loomed beyond, with otter-shapes; the
salmon swirled off the sand, into the cavern of jaws; the teeth rose in
spikes and the jaws shut.

Thrice the old otters worked round and across the dwindling lagoon in
search of the fish, and then they forgot it, and went down with the
tide. Stars shone over the estuary, the cries of wading birds were
wandering as the air. The otters drifted down, passing the cottage
glimmering white on the sea-wall, passing the beached hulk of the
hospital ship, silent and dark, but for a solitary candle in a port
hole. The tide took them to the spit of gravel, crowned by sandhills
bound with marram grasses, called Crow Island, and here they left the
water for a ragrowster. While the cubs were rolling and biting, Tarka
and White-tip played the game of searching and pretending not to find.
They galloped up the sandhills to slide to the hollows again. They
picked up sticks, empty shells of skate's eggs, old bones and feathers
of sea-birds, corks from the jetsam of the high tide, and tossed with
them in their paws. They hid in the spines of the tussocks, and jumped
out at each other.

The lighthouse beams shone on the wet sands down by the water, and
across the Pool the lights of the village lay like wind-blown embers.
_Craa-leek, cur-lee-eek!_ The curlews saw them as they swam the shallow
water to the top of the Shrarshook. White-tip and Tarka ate mussels
down by the black-and-white Pulley buoy, and the cubs followed them to
the pools of the lower ridge.

Salmon, feverish to spawn in the fresh waters of their birth, were
"running" up the fairway, and with the flow came a seal, who tore a
single bite from the belly of each fish it caught, and left it to chase
others. Tarka brought one of the wounded fish to the rocks, and the
otters scratched away scales in their haste to eat its pink flesh. They
sliced from the shoulders, dropping pieces to feel the curd squeezed
from the corners of their mouths. Tarka and White-tip ate quietly, but
the cubs yinnered and snarled. Their faces were silvery with scales
when they left the strewn bones. Being clean little beasts they washed
chins and whiskers and ears, and afterwards sought water to drink in
the pond behind the sea-wall cottage.

Among the reeds the four otters lay, dozing and resting, while rain
pitted the grey sheet of water and wind bent down the stalks of the
wild celery that grew in the marsh. When the clouds became duller they
left the pond, and saw the tide lapping almost over the top of the
wall, coloured with the fresh from the rivers.

Mullet had come up with the tide, and a school of nearly a hundred
found a way through a drain-lid under the sea-wall of the pill. At
the end of the night the otters, who had been gorging on eels in the
mires--reed-fringed dykes in the grazing marsh, filled with fresh
drinking water from the hills--found them in the pit in the corner
of Horsey marsh. For two hours they chased and slew, and when every
fish was killed Tarka and White-tip stole away on the ebb to the sea,
leaving the young otters to begin their own life.

The next night was quiet and windless, without a murmur of water in
the broad Pool, on which the lights of the village drew out like gold
and silver eels. Sound travels far and distinct over placid water, and
fishermen standing in groups on the quay, after the closing of taverns,
heard the whistling cries of the young otters, a mile away on Crow
Island, lost on the shingle where the ring-plovers piped. They were
heard for three nights, and then the south-west gale smote the place
and filled the estuary with great seas.

       *       *       *       *       *

Black bits of old leaves turned and twirled in the flooded weir-pool
above Canal Bridge, like the rooks turning and twirling high in the
grey windy sky. The weir in flood was an immense loom in sunlight;
the down-falling water-warp was whitey-yellow with bubbles; to and fro
across the weir moved the air-hollows, a weft held by a glistening
water-shuttle. Below, the bubble-woven waters were rendered on the
shillets; they leapt and roared and threw up froth and spray. A branch
of a tree was lodged on the sill; the rocks had stripped it of bark.
Sometimes a lead-coloured narrow shape, longer than a man's arm, would
appear in the falling water-warp, moving slowly against the torrent
with sideways flaps of tail, until washed back into the lower river
again, which roared and heaved like fighting polar bears. The sun lit
the travelling air-hollow under the sill of the weir. The salmon never
reached the sill. Some fish tried to swim up the fish-pass, but the
pound of the flood was mightier on the steps. Above in the weir-pool a
bird was swimming, low in the water, watching with small crimson eyes
for trout. Its beak was sharp as a rock-splinter. Above the water it
was brownish-black, foam-grey beneath--a great northern diver in winter
plumage. When Tarka saw it first it was rolling from side to side and
stretching out first one wing then the other. The otter on the bank
alarmed the diver, who tipped up and vanished quick as the flash of a
turning fish, hardly leaving a ripple. When it appeared again the otter
was gone. It lay in the water, nearly a yard long, with head and neck
stretched out, and swam rapidly up-river. At the top of the pool it saw
another otter, and uttering a wailing cry of alarm, it splashed along
the water to rise, making a dozen oar-like dips with the tips of its
wings. With neck outstretched it took the air and flew round the curve
of the river, with wing-beats quicker than a heron's.

Tarka and White-tip had come from the wood in daylight, lured to
play by the sun and the flood. Tarka dropped over the sill, the
whitey-yellow turmoil bumped and tossed him below. A minute later a
narrow lead-coloured shape pushed slowly up the concrete spill-way, and
behind it the darker, sturdier shape of an otter. Fish and animal made
slow and laborious headway; they seemed to be hanging in the warp; and
then White-tip dropped over in the smooth and glistering water's bend.
They instantly disappeared. The racing churn carried them on its top to
the bank thirty yards below, and there left them on stones; and there,
an hour later, a thirty-pound fish, clean-run, its gills crusty with
ocean shellfish, was found by the water-bailiff, with bites torn from
behind its shoulder--the mating feast of otters.

November, December, January, February were past--but otters know only
day and night, the sun and the moon. White-tip and Tarka had followed
the salmon up the big river, but at the beginning of the new year they
had come down again. Drifting with the ebb under Halfpenny Bridge,
they crossed the marsh and came to the Pool of the Six Herons, out of
whose deep middle reared the black iron piers of the Railway Bridge.
Just below the Railway Bridge, the muddy mouth of the Lancarse Yeo was
washed and widened by the sea, and in here, on the flood tide, the
otters turned. White-tip was way-wise in this water, having known it in
cubhood. She was going back to the Twin-Ash Holt above Orleigh Mill,
where she had been born.

With the tide the otters drifted under the road bridge to a holt in
an old rabbit bury above high-water mark. It was fallen in, and the
home of rats, so they left it, and travelled on in daylight. A mile
from the pill-mouth the water ran fresh and clear. After another mile
they came to the meeting of two streams. White-tip walked up the left
stream, and soon she reached the slide where she had played during
many happy nights with her cub-brothers; and climbing up, she was in
the remembered weir-pool. It was narrow, and nearly hidden by trees.
Past six pines, and round a bend, where two ash trees leaned over the
brook. Ivy grew on one, moss on the other. Floods had washed the earth
from their top roots, carving a dark holt under the bank. White-tip had
forgotten the baying and yapping and thudding one day long ago, when
an iron bar had broken a hole in the roof and scared the five of them
into the water. She had remembered the bass at night round the bridge
piers in the Pool of the Six Herons, the frogging places in the Archery
Marsh, the trout and the mullyheads in the Duntz brook, the eels in the
mill-pool; and she had come back to them.

The soft elderberry tree broke into leaf, with the honeysuckle; the
wild cherry blossom showed white among the oaks. The green shovels of
the celandine dug pale gold out of the sun, and the flowers were made.
Oak and ash remained hard budded; these trees, enduring and ancient,
were not moved to easy change like lesser growths.

On the first day of March Halycon the kingfisher, speeding up the
brook, hit the sandy bank with his beak, and fell away. His mate
followed him, knocking out another flake of earth, and thus a perching
place was made. They picked out a tunnel with their beaks, as long
as a man's arm, with a round cave at the end in which seven round
eggs were laid, shiny and white, among bones of fishes and shucks of
water-beetles. Then the river-martins came back to their old drowned
homes in the steep sandy banks above the springtime level of the
brook. In the third week of March the carrion crow, secure in her nest
of sticks atop one of the six pines growing over the pool below the
Twin-Ash Holt, watched the first chipping of her five eggs, watched the
tip of a tiny beak chip, chip, chipping a lid in a green black-freckled
shell. The crow sang a song, low and sweet, in the tree-top. White-tip
heard the song as she suckled her cubs in the Twin-Ash Holt. Every
night Tarka came up from the Pool of the Six Herons to see her.

March winds brought the grey sea-rains to the land, and the river ran
swollen, bearing the floods of its brooks and runners. Salmon, languid
from spawning, dropped tail-first over the sills and down the passes of
the weirs, and Tarka caught them easily in the eddies and hovers, and
dragged them on the bank. He took bites from the infirm and tasteless
flesh, and left the fish uneaten. Many of the salmon that reached the
sea alive were taken in the nets of fishermen rough-fish-catching, in
the estuary Pool, to be knocked on the head and thrown back--for the
fishermen hated the water-bailiffs who upheld the Conservatory Bye-laws
protecting salmon out of season, and secretly killed the fish because
of their hatred. The fishermen did not believe that salmon spawned in
fresh water, where the rivers were young, but regarded it as a story
told to prevent them fishing for salmon throughout the year.

Oak and ash broke their buds, and grew green; the buzzards repaired
their old nests, and laid their eggs. The heron's young, after days
of flapping and unhappy crying, flew from their tree-top heronry in
the wood below Halfpenny Bridge. And one evening in June, between the
lights, Old Nog and his mate sailed down to the pool by the Railway
Bridge to give the four fledglings their first lesson in fishing.
Curlews saw the dark level wings gliding over the mudbanks, and cried
the alarm, being afraid of the sharp beaks. Every year Old Nog and his
mate taught four fledglings to spear fish in the pool, which lay placid
when the sea had lapsed.

Six herons stood in a row eighty yards above the bridge, in the sandy
shallow at the head of the pool. _Kack! Kack! Kack! Kack!_--the young
birds squawked with eagerness and delight. Dusk deepened over the wide
and empty river, the pool shone faintly with the sky. Down by the round
black piers of the bridge something splashed. Old Nog raised his head,
for he had been awaiting the splash. It was a sign that the bass in
the pool were beginning to feed.

Splash, splatter, splash. Soon many fish were rising to take the
shrimp-fry on the surface. They were hungry after the daytime rest,
having gone up with the tide to Halfpenny Bridge, and returned to the
pool without feeding, while men on the banks fished with lines of
rag-worm baited hooks. Usually the men went home to supper, with empty
baskets, before the fishes' feeding time. Then to the quiet pool came
that wise fisher, Old Nog, with his family, standing motionless while
the bass swam into the shallow water;--splash, splatter, splash, as
they turned on their gleaming sides to take the shrimp-fry. Old Nog
peered, with beak held low, and snicked--_Kack! Kack! Kack! Kack!_
cried the four small herons, beating vanes and falling over long toes
in their eagerness to gulp the silvery fish.

_Gark!_ said Old Nog, swallowing the bass, and thrusting his beak and
long feathered neck at the four. _Gark!_ They got out of his way; never
before had he spoken so severely to them. One saw the flicker of a fish
in the water, and stepped towards it; the bass saw the enemy, and sped
into deeper water. _Rark!_ said Old Nog, sharply, and they stood still.

Sucking noises arose out of the pool as it grew darker. These were the
feeding noises of male eels, thin and small and mud-coloured, whom the
larger blue females would meet in the autumnal migration. In wriggling
rushes the eels sought the shrimp-fry in the shallows, and whenever one
passed near a beak--_dap!_ it was snicked, lifted from the water as a
writhing knot, and swallowed.

The Railway Bridge loomed low and black against the glimmer of sky and
water. Splash, splatter, the bass were moving about the pool. Two or
three lay, troutwise, in the slight downward current by each round iron
pier, watching the surface above them for the dark moving speck of a
shrimp. The splashes of their jumps echoed under the girders.

A summer sandpiper flew over the bridge, crying in the darkness, for
it had been alarmed while feeding under the glidders of the empty
pill. It was answered by a curlew on the gravel bank above the herons.
Immediately below the bridge the brook poured its little fresh stream
into the pool; raising up little ridges of sand, sweeping them away
again with sudden little noises. Splash, splatter, the bass were
feeding in the weed on the stone piling below the bridge-end. Patter,
patter, five dark shapes moving on the soft wet sand of the pill's
mouth--the pattering ceased, and the brook slurred its sand-sounds as
they slid into the pool. White-tip had brought her four cubs from the
Twin-Ash Holt.

The vigorous splashing of the bass was lessening, for many fish were
gorged with fry. A whitish shine by the stone piling, and one had
risen to seize a shrimp in its large mouth--splash, flicker, splatter,
bubble. A dark shape crawled out of the water with the bass. Three
lesser shapes followed, yikkering on the stone piling. White-tip turned
back into the pool.

_Krark! Kak! Ark! Kak! Kack! Kack! Kack! Kack! Kak! Kak! Gark! Kack!_

With heads upheld and watching, the herons talked among themselves.
They saw three cubs fighting over the fish on the piling; and two heads
in the water between the first and second pier. Tarquol, the eldest
cub, was following White-tip, for he liked to do his own hunting; and
it was in the pool of the Six Herons that the strange big otter, who
chased him in and out of the piers, never biting or sulking, was to be
found. Tarquol, who had two white toes on one of his paws, was stronger
than the other cubs, and often hurt them in play without knowing it.
The bass, staying in the flumes around the piers with fin and tail,
watched the dim forewater above them. All was dark beside and below
them. Tarquol and White-tip swam one on either side of a pier, deeper
than the bass, whose narrow shapes were dark and plain above them. A
fish darted around the pier before White-tip, and was taken by Tarquol.
He ate it on the quick-sand of the right bank, away from the cubs. The
sharp point of the back fin pricked his mouth.

The otters caught eels in the shallow edges of the pool, watched by the
hungry herons, whose harsh continuous cries told their anger. When the
cubs had eaten enough they played on the sand, running on and on until
they were behind the six birds, on the ridge of gravel where snags
were part buried. Curlews--the unmated birds which had not gone to the
moors--flew off the glidders, and away up the tidal reaches of the
river.

_Hu-ee-ic!_

Tarquol, playing with the rotten crown of an old bowler hat--fishermen
always kept their bait in old Sunday chapel-going hats--heard the
whistle, and dashed back to the pool. _Krark!_ cried Old Nog, flying
up before him, his toes on the water. _Kak! Kack! Kack! Kack! Kack!_
as his mate and youngsters followed. Old Nog flew over the bridge,
but seeing and hearing the tide flowing up, he wheeled and beat up
the Yeo valley. The five herons followed him, but he dived at them,
screaming _Gark! Gark!_ Old Nog was weary after many weeks of hunger,
of disgorging nearly all he caught into the greedy maws of four grown
fledglings, and often, the greedy maw of his mate. _Krark!_ a cry of
satisfaction. Old Nog flew alone.

Every night for a week the otters came to the pool at low water, until
the tides, ebbing later and later, and so into daylight, stopped the
fishing. One evening, when the Peal Rock in the river below Canal
Bridge was just awash after a thunderstorm, Tarka and White-tip and
the four cubs followed a run of peal as far as the weir-pool, staying
out until after sunrise, when several fish were taken in the water,
then low and clear again. The Twin-Ash Holt was far behind them, so
they slept in a holt under an oak, which was entered by an opening two
feet below the water-level. The next night they went on up the river,
catching and eating fish on the scours and shoals, then hastening back
to water again. Tarquol swam near Tarka; the cub was lithe and swift as
his parent, and sometimes snatched fish from his mouth. They rolled and
romped together, clutching rudders and heads and pretending to bite;
their joyful whistles went far down the river, heard by Old Nog as he
sailed by in the wasting moonlight.

Paler the moon rose, and at dawn White-tip went down with the cubs and
Tarka wandered on alone; but he turned back again, calling her to Canal
Bridge to play one last game.

_Hu-ee-ic!_

They played the old bridge game of the West Country otters, which was
played before the Romans came. They played around the upper and lower
cutwater of the middle pier, while the lesser stars were drowned in
the heavenly tide flowing up the eastern sky, and the trees of the
hill-line grew dark, and larks were flying with song.

_Hu-ee-ic!_

Tarquol followed Tarka out of the river and along the otter-path across
the bend, heedless of his mother's call. He followed up the river and
across another bend; but, scared of the light, returned to water and
sought a holt under a sycamore. Tarka went on alone, up three miles
of river, to a holt in a weir-pool shadowed by trees, where peal were
leaping. The sun looked over the hills, the moon was as a feather
dropped by the owls flying home, and Tarka slept, while the water
flowed, and he dreamed of a journey with Tarquol down to a strange sea,
where they were never hungry, and never hunted.




CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


At half-past ten in the morning a covered motor-van stopped at the
bridge below the Dark Pool. From the driver's seat three men got down,
and at the sound of their footfalls deep notes came from the van.
Hearing the hounds, the two terriers--Biff and Bite'm--held by a girl
in jacket and short skirt of rough blue serge, yapped and strained
against the chain.

Motor-cars were drawn up on one side of the road. The men, women, and
children who had come to the meet of otter hounds stood by them and
talked or lounged against the stone parapets of the bridge. Some men
leaned on long ash poles, stained and polished with linseed oil and
shod with iron and notched from the top downwards with the number of
past kills, two notches crossed denoting a double-kill. The women
carried smaller and slenderer poles, either of ash or male bamboo.
There were blackthorn thumbsticks, hazel-wands, staves of ground-ash;
one boy held the handle of a carpet-sweeper, slightly warped. He had
poked the end in some nettles, lest the wooden screw be seen by other
boys. It had no notches.

Faces turned to the hound-van. Huntsman and his whipper-in each lifted
a rusty pin from the staples in the back of the van and lowered the
flap. Immediately hounds fell out and over each other, and to the road,
shaking themselves, whimpering, panting with pink tongues flacking,
happy to be free after the crush and heat of the journey from kennels.
They were admired and stroked, patted and spoken to by name; they
scratched themselves and rolled and licked each others necks; they sat
and looked up at the many faces--old Harper solemnly, with eyes sunk by
age, the younger hounds, still remembering their walking days, going to
seek their human friends, and sniff and nuzzle pockets where biscuits,
cake, and sandwiches were stored. The kennel-boy and whip called them
by name and flicked gently near the more restless with his whip:
Barbrook and Bellman, Boisterous and Chorister, Dewdrop, Sailoress,
Coraline, and Waterwitch; Armlet, who lay down to sleep, Playboy
and Actor, Render and Fencer; Hemlock the one eyed, with Bluemaid,
Hurricane, Harper, and Pitiful, the veterans; Darnel and Grinder, who
sat behind Sandboy. Then two young hounds of the same litter, Dabster
and Dauntless, sons of Dewdrop and Deadlock.

And there Deadlock, his black head scarred with old fights, sat on his
haunches, apart and morose, watching for the yellow waistcoat of the
Master. His right ear showed the mark made by the teeth of Tarka's
mother two years before, when he had thrust his head into the hollow
of the fallen tree. The swung thong of the whip idly flicked near
Deadlock; he moved his head slightly and his eyes; from upper and lower
teeth the lips were drawn, and, looking at the kennel-boy's legs,
Deadlock growled. The hound hated him.

People were watching. The whipper-in felt that the hound was making him
ridiculous, and flicked Deadlock with the lash, speaking sharply to
him. The hound's growls grew more menacing. Between his teeth the hound
yarred, the dark pupils of his eyes becoming fixed in their stare. Then
seeing Dabster trotting off to the bridge the whipper-in gladly went
after him. Deadlock looked away, ignoring all eyes.

Other cars descended the hill above the bridge and stopped on the left
of the road. For a week in the early summer of each year, known as the
Joint Week, a neighbouring Hunt visited the country of the Two Rivers,
bringing their own hounds with them, so that the home pack might rest
every other day of the six hunting days. Other otter-hunters came from
their rivers which flowed into the seas of Britain west and south and
east. Their uniforms were coloured as the dragonflies over the river.
There were grey pot-hats, dark blue jackets and stockings, and white
breeches of the Cheriton; the grey hats and breeches and stockings and
red coats of the Culmstock; the cream-collared bright blue coats and
stockings and cream breeches of the Crowhurst from Surrey, Kent, and
Sussex; men of the Dartmoor, all in navy-blue, from pad-pinned cap
to black brogues, except for white stock round the throat; the green
double-peaked caps, green coats, scarlet ties, white breeches, and
green stockings of the Courtenay Tracey from Wessex. A man like a great
seal, jovial and gruff among laughing friends, wore the gayest uniform,
in the judgment of two ragged children. It blazed and winked in the
sunlight, scarlet and blue and brass.

Shortly after half-past ten o'clock eleven and a half couples of hounds
and two terriers, nearly throttling themselves in eagerness to press
forward, were trotting behind the huntsman through the farmyard to the
river. The huntsman repeated a cooing chant at the back of his nose
of _C-o-o-o-o-orn-yer! Co-o-o-o-orn-yer! W-wor! W-wor!_ with names of
hounds. They trotted with waving sterns, orderly and happy, enjoying
the sounds, which to them were promise of sport and fun if only they
kept together and ignored the scent of duck, cat, offal, mouse, and
cottage-infant's jammy crust. They pattered through the farmyard in
best behaviour; they loved the huntsman, who fed them and pulled
thorns out of their feet and never whipped them, although he sometimes
dropped unpleasant medicine at the back of their tongues, and held
their muzzles, and stroked their throats until they could hold it there
no longer, but had to swallow. The _W-wor! W-wor!_ and other cooing
dog-talk was understood perfectly; they caused even Deadlock to forget
to growl when young Dabster, avoiding a kitten, bumped into him. For
the two strongest feelings in Deadlock, apart from those of his private
kennel life, were blood-thirst for otters and his regard for the
huntsman.

They jumped down the bank into the river, leaping across the shallows
to the left bank, and working upstream to the occasional toot of the
horn. Almost at once Deadlock whimpered and bounded ahead. Tarka had
touched there, on the shillets, six hours before.

They came to the groove in the right bank, between two hazel stoles,
where Tarka had climbed out to cross the meadows to the weir, for the
river-course was like a horseshoe. The grasses still held enough scent
for the hounds to own, and they followed the trail to the wood that
grew steeply up from the water. A crow, that had been waiting on the
weir-sill for beetles and little fish to pass in the gentle film of
water near its feet, heard them as they splashed up the leat and flew
to the top of a tall tree to watch hidden in the leaves. The crow had
seen Tarka as he swam from the leat into the Dark Pool at five o'clock
in the morning. Then he had loudly cawed, calling his mate to annoy the
otter; now he kept quiet. Hounds swam up the pool.

A furlong above the weir was a ford, where, in summer, horse-drawn
butts go for the gravel heaped up by winter floods. By the ford was a
tree, and under the roots of the tree was a holt. Deadlock, Render, and
Fencer swam to the tree, whimpering, splashing, scratching and tearing
at roots with their teeth. Soon the pack was trying to break into the
entrance. They did not obey voice, horn, and whip at once, but had
to be urged away by taps of whip-handles on ribs, and by individual
commands. _Go'r'n leave it! Go'r'n leave it!_ cried one of the honorary
whips in a yarring voice, to Deadlock and Render who remained. A little
shivering sharp-nosed terrier, uncollared, peered with cock-ears and
whined on the bank above. The entrance of the holt was under water, and
Biff's collar was slipped round her neck again.

The honorary whip, a retired senior officer of the army, prodded with
his pole among the roots, and finding soft earth tried to force the
pole to the back of the holt. The water moved away in a yellow muddy
wound. He worked until he was hot. He stopped, pushed his hat back from
his forehead, and rubbed it with his goatskin glove. "Where's that chap
with the bar?" Below the holt, at intervals of ten to fifteen yards,
men were gazing into the sun-dappled water of the Dark Pool. Voices
sounded high above, where on the road cut in the rock many of the cars
were waiting.

A man came hastening down the cart-track with the iron digging bar. A
hole was worked in the ground over the holt, while a sportsman in the
Cheriton uniform banged the turf with the length of his pole. The hole
was made deeper, the bar worked backwards and forwards, and plunged
hard down.

The Master, leaning his chin upon his hands clasping the top of his
pole, saw a chain of bubbles rise a yard from the bank, and steadily
lengthen aslant the river. Sweeping off his grey hat, he scooped the
air with it, crying _Tally-ho!_ Hounds poured down the track and
splashed into the river, giving tongue and stirring up the gravel silt.
Through shadows of trees lying on the water the lit dust drifted. Many
hounds swam mute, striving hard to take the lead, urged by the cries
and gestures in front of them.

The chain drew out from one bank to another, in stretches of fifty and
sixty yards, until by the sill of the weir a ripple was made by a brown
head that sank immediately; but was viewed.

_Yoi-yoi-yoi-yoi! Ov-ov-ov-ov-ov-ov-over! Tally-ho! He's gone down the
leat!_

       *       *       *       *       *

The dark green weeds were bended and swayed silently by the slow glide
of the water. The leat was deep, with a dark brown bed. It had been dug
to carry water to the elm wheels of the two mills by the bridge a mile
below. Now the larger wheel had been replaced by a turbine, which used
less water. Leaves rotted on the leat's bed, the water brimmed almost
into the meadow. Tarka swam through the dark green swaying weed, and
over the dark brown bed. When he swung up to breathe his nose showed in
the ripple like a dead leaf turned up in the current, and settling down
again. He swam under the crinkled top-scum by the heavy oaken fender,
which was raised to let the water through. A trout darted by him as he
passed under the fender, and he caught it with a sudden turn of his
body.

Trees made the leat shadowy; ferns hung over it; the taloned brambles
stretched down to the water. It flowed in the low ground of the valley,
bending like the river below it. It left the meadows, the tall grasses,
and the reddening sorrel, and flowed through a jungle of rushes and
grasses, briars and hazel bushes, where the webs of spiders were loaded
with bees, flies, and grasshoppers. Only a weasel could run on the
banks. The blue flowers of borage and comfrey grew in the jungle, where
the buds of the dog-rose were opening.

Sometimes a swift, cutting the air with alternate strokes of its narrow
blade wings, dashed a ripple as it sipped and sped on. Willow wrens
flitted in the ash-sprays lower down, taking insects on the leaves. A
chiff-chaff sang its two-note song. By a briar raking the water the
otter's head was raised; he listened and swam to the bank. Hounds
spoke remotely; he knew Deadlock's tongue among them. He climbed out
of the leat, the trout still in his mouth, and pushed through the
undergrowth, among nettles and marsh-wort, and over soft damp ground.
Robins ticked at him, wrens stittered. Burrs and seeds tried to hook to
his hair, finding no hold. Warble flies tried to alight on his back
and suck his blood; the rushes brushed them off. He ran in a loop back
to the leat, and slipped into the water above the hounds, who had gone
down. He swam up for a quarter of a mile, then rested by an alder root
and listened to the pack running over his land-trail. He looked round
for a stone whereon to eat the fish, but hearing Deadlock's tongue, he
lay still.

From the wooded hillside above the distant bank of the river came the
knock of axes on the trunk of an oak tree, the shouts of woodmen, a
sudden crack, the hissing rush and thud of breaking branches, and then
quietness, until began the steady knocks of boughs being lopped. After
a while Tarka did not hear these sounds--he was listening in another
direction. He scarcely heard the shooting buzz of sun-frisked flies
over the leat. He felt no fear; all his energy was in listening.

_Chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff_ sang the bird among the ash
trees. And soon the voices of men, the tearing of brambles against
coats, boots trampling and snapping the hollow green stalks of hog-weed
and hemlock. Tarka saw their heads and shoulders against the sky, and
swam on up the leat.

His scent was washed down by the water, and the hounds followed him.
He crept out on the other bank, on soft ground littered with dead
leaves, which lay under crooked oak trees. He ran swiftly up the slope
and entered a larch plantation, where the sky was shut out. The narrow
lines of thin straight boles stood in a duskiness as of midsummer
night. All sound was shut out; nothing grew under the trees. A wood owl
peered down at him as he ran among the brittle fallen twigs; it peered
over its back and softly hooted to its mate. The plantation was silent
again.

Tarka sat by a bole in the middle of the Dark Hams Wood, listening
through the remote sough of wind in the branches to the faint cries
below. The smell of the sap was strong in his nostrils. He dropped the
fish. Sometimes he heard the querulous scream of a jay, and the clap of
pigeon-wings as the birds settled in the tree-tops.

For nearly twenty minutes he waited by the tree, and then the hunting
cries swelled in the narrow groves of the wood. The owl flapped off
its branch, and Tarka ran down the leat again, passing the hounds nine
lines of trees away from them. Sunlight dazzled him when he ran out of
the plantation. Then he saw many men and women before him.

_Tally Ho!_

Tarka ran round them and dived into the leat. When first he had swum
down, the water had brimmed to the meadow, floating the green plants
in its slow-gliding current; now the bank glistened with a sinking
water-mark, and only the tags of the starwort were waving. Trout darted
before him as he swam against the water flowing faster. Often his head
showed as he walked half out of water beside the starwort. He reached
the square oaken fender, where only a rillet trickled. It rested on the
bed of the leat, penning the water above.

_Tally Ho!_

Tarka turned and went down the leat again. He reached water deep
enough to cover him before he met the hounds who, hunting by the sense
of smell, did not see him moving as a dark brown shadow through the
channels in the weeds. Hounds passed him, for the wash--or scent on the
water--was still coming down.

Tarka swam down to the mill end of the leat, which was dark with the
brown stains of stagnant life on its muddy bed. Trees kept the sun from
it. A runner, or streamlet, from other woods joined it at this end, and
waited in the pool to pass through the grating to the mills. Tarka swam
under the culvert of the runner, but finding shallow water he returned
and looked for a hole or drain in the banks. Shafts of sunlight pierced
the leaves and dappled the water. A broad shade lay before the grating,
where oak planks, newly sawn, were stacked over the water. The ringing
rasp of a circular saw cutting hard wood suddenly rang under the trees,
overbearing the shaken rumble of millstones grinding corn. Specks of
wood settled on the water beyond the shade, where Tarka rested, staying
himself by a paw on a rusty nail just above the water level.

He waited and listened. The sawdust drifted past him, and was sucked
away between the iron bars of the grating. The noise of the saw ceased.
He heard the hounds again, coming down the leat. A voice just over his
head cried, _One o'clock!_ Footfalls hurried away from the saw. The
hatch was closed, the trundling wheel slowed into stillness. Tarka
heard the twittering of swallows; but he was listening for the sound
of the horn. Deadlock speaking! Up the leat waterside plants were
crackling as feet trod them down. Voices of the whips, one harsh and
rating, were coming nearer. Heads and shoulders moved over the culvert.
When the leading hound swam into the pool, throwing his tongue, Tarka
dived and found a way through the grating, where one iron bar was
missing--a space just wide enough for an otter. He drew himself on to
the hatch and walked slowly up the wet and slippery wooden troughs to
the top of the wheel. He quatted low and watched the grating. Hounds
swam along it and Deadlock pushed his black head in the space of the
missing bar. His flews pressed the iron and stopped him. He bayed into
the cavern where the ancient water-wheel dripped, beside the curved
iron conduit of the modern water-turbine. The place was gloomy; but in
a corner, framed in a triangle of sunlight, three ferns hung out of the
mortar--spleenwort, wall-rue, and male fern. Five young wagtails filled
a nest built on the roots of the male fern; the nestlings crouched down
in fear of the baying.

Drops from the elmwood troughs dripped into the plash hollowed in the
rock under the wheel. Tarka sat on the topmost trough, his rudder
hanging over the rim of the wheel. He heard the shrill yapping of
terriers on leash; the shuffle of feet on the road over the culvert;
the murmur of voices. Poles were pushed among the layers of planks;
feet of hounds pounded the deep water as they swam under the timber
baulks. He listened to their whimpers; smelt their breath. After a
time the noises receded, and he heard _chik-ik, chik-ik_--the cries
of the parent wagtails, waiting on the roof with beakfuls of river
flies. Tarka licked his paws and settled more comfortably in the sodden
elmwood trough. Sometimes his eyes closed, but he did not sleep.

At two o'clock he heard voices in the gloomy wheel-house. The men were
returning to work after dinner. The hatch was lifted. Water gushed
in and over the trough. The wheel shuddered and moved. Water gushed
in and over each trough as it was lowered on the rim, and the wheel
began its heavy splashing trundle. Tarka was borne down into darkness
and flung on the rock. Under the troughs he crept, to the shallow
stream that was beginning to flow through a lower culvert to the river.
Sunlight dazed him. The bridge was ten yards below.

The parapet before and above him was a smooth line across the sky,
except for a wagtail's pied body, the tops of three polypody ferns, the
head and shoulders of an old grey-bearded man in a blue coat, and a
black empty beer-bottle.

_Tally-ho!_




CHAPTER NINETEEN


Tarka became one with the river, finding his course among the slimy
stones so that his back was always covered. He rose beside the middle
pier, whose cutwater was hidden by a faggot of flood sticks. Under the
sticks was dimness, streaked and blurred with sunlight. Tarka hid and
listened.

His paws rested on a sunken branch. The water moved down, clouded with
the mud-stirrings of the leat. He lay so still that the trout returned
to their stances beside the stone sterlings.

_B'hoys, b'hoys! Com' on, ol' fellars! Leu in, ol' fellars. Com' on,
all'v yer!_

The stain spread into the pool below the bridge. Hounds whimpered and
marked at the stick-pile. Their many tongues smote all other sounds
from Tarka's ears. He knew they could not reach him in his retreat,
and so he stayed there even when a pole, thrust into the heap, rubbed
against his flank. Then over his head the sticks began to crack and
creak, as a man climbed upon them. The man jumped with both feet
together on the heap. Tarka sank and turned downstream. Cries from the
lower parapet; thudding of boots above. The chain of bubbles drew out
downstream.

Tarka swam to the left bank, where he touched and breathed. He heard,
in the half-second his head was out of water, the noise that had
terrified him as a cub--the noise as of an iron-shod centipede crossing
the shallows. Way down the river was stopped by a line of upright
figures, standing a yard apart and stirring the water with poles. Tarka
heard the noise under water, but he swam down until he saw before him
the bright-bubbled barrier. He swung round and swam upstream as fast as
three-and-a-half webbed feet could push him.

He swam under the heap of sticks again, enduring the massed tongues
of marking hounds until the creaking and thudding over his head drove
him to open water again. He swam under an arch, turned by the lower
sterling, and swam up another arch, to a backwater secluded from the
main stream by the ridge of shillets made by the cross-leaping waters
of the runner in flood. An ash tree grew over the backwater, but Tarka
could find no holding in its roots. He swam past the legs of swimming
hounds and went down again.

_Tally Ho!_

He swam through the plying poles of the stickle, and ran over the
shallow, reaching safe water before the pack came down. He was young
and fast and strong. Hounds were scattered behind him, some swimming,
others plunging through the shallows below the banks, stooping to the
scent washed on scour and shillet, and throwing their tongues. He could
not see them, when swimming under water, until they were nearly over
him. He swam downstream, never turning back, touching first one bank to
breathe, and then swimming aslant to the other. Once in the straight
mile of river under the Town on the Hill, he emerged by a shallow
almost by Deadlock's feet; instantly he turned back. Farther down, by a
jungle of balsam, whose top drought-roots were like the red toes of a
bird, he left the river and ran on the bank, under trees. He had gone
thirty yards on the hot land when Render and Deadlock crashed through
the jungle of hollow sap-filled stalks after him. Although his legs
were short--it was difficult to see them when he ran--he moved faster
than any of the men hunting him could run. He left the land a hundred
yards above Taddiport Bridge, by a bank where shards of Roman tiles
were jutting.

Below the bridge was a ridge of shillets, long and wide as the broken
hull of a sailing ship. Alders and willows grew here, and tall grasses
that hid the old dry twigs and reeds on the lower branches of the
trees. Floods had heaped up the island. The wet marks of Tarka's feet
and rudder soon dried on the worn flakes of rock; but not before the
larger pads of hounds, making the loose shillets clatter, had covered
them.

_Leu-in! Leu-in, b'hoys. Ov-ov-ov-ov-over!_

Tarka's feet were dry when he took again to water, after trying to rid
himself of scent on the stones so hot in the sun. He passed plants of
water-hemlock and dropwort, tall as a man, growing among the stones,
some sprawling with their weight of sap. He swam on down the river,
passing Servis Wood, over which a buzzard, pestered by rooks, was
wailing in the sky. The rooks left it to see what the hounds were
doing, and wheeled silently over the river. Their shadows fled through
the water, more visible than the otter.

A thousand yards from Taddiport Bridge, Tarka passed the brook up
which he had travelled with his mother on the way to the Clay Pits. He
swam under a railway bridge, below which the river hurried in a course
narrow and shaded. An island of elm trees divided the river bed; the
right fork was dry--hawk-weed, ragwort, and St. John's wort, plants of
the land, were growing there. Tarka swam to the tail of the island,
and climbed up the dry bank. The place was cool and shady, and filled
with the stench arising from the broad leaves and white flowers of wild
garlic growing under the trees. Tarka trod into a thick patch, and
quatted low.

Hounds passed him. He listened to them baying in the narrow channel
below the island.

Deadlock clambered up the dry bank, ran a few yards among the grasses,
threw up his head, sniffed, and turned away. Tarka held his breath.
Other hounds followed, to sniff and run down the bank again. Tarka
listened to them working among the roots under the island bank,
and across the river. He heard the chaunting voices of huntsman
and whippers-in; the noises of motor-cars moving slowly along the
hard-rutted trackway, the old canal-bed, above the right bank of the
river; the voices of men and women getting out of the motor-cars; and
soon afterwards, the scrape of boots on the steep rubble path down to
the dry, stony bed.

Tarka had been lying among the cool and stinking garlic plants of Elm
Island for nearly five minutes when he heard gasping and wheezing
noises at the top of the island. The two terriers, Bite'm and Biff,
were pulling at their chains, held by the kennel-boy. Their tongues
hung long and limp, after the two-mile tug from the mills over
sun-baked turf, dusty trackway, and hot stones, to Elm Island. Just
before, while tugging down the path, Bite'm had fainted with the heat.
A lapping sprawl in the river had refreshed the couple, and now they
strove against the collars pressing into their wind-pipes.

Tarka started up when they were a yard from where he lay. The
kennel-boy dropped the chain when he saw him. Tarka ran towards the
river, but at the sheer edge of the island he saw men on the stones
six feet below. He ran along the edge, quickening at the shout of the
kennel-boy, and had almost reached the island's tail when Bite'm pinned
him in the shoulder. Tissing through his open mouth, Tarka rolled and
fought with the terriers. Their teeth clashed. Tarka's moves were low
and smooth; he bit Bite'm again and again, but the terrier hung on.
Biff tried to bite him across the neck, but Tarka writhed away. The
three rolled and snarled, scratching and snapping, falling apart and
returning with instant swiftness. Ears were torn and hair ripped out.
Hounds heard them, and ran baying under the island cliff to find a way
up. The kennel-boy tried to stamp on and recover the end of the chain,
for he knew that in a worry all three might be killed. White terriers
and brown otter rolled nearer the edge, and fell over.

The fall shook off Bite'm. Tarka ran under the legs of Dabster, and
although Bluemaid snapped at his flank he got into the water and sank
away.

_Tally Ho! Tally Ho! Yaa-aa-ee on to'm!_

By the bank, fifty yards below Elm Island, stood the Master, looking
into water six inches deep. A fern frond, knocked off the bank
upstream, came down turning like a little green dragon in the clear
water. It passed. Then came an ash-spray, that clung around the pole
he leaned on. Its leaves bent to the current, it stayed, it swung
away, and drifted on. A dead stick rode after it, and a fly feebly
struggling--and then the lovely sight of an otter spreading himself
over the stones, moving with the stream, slowly, just touching with his
feet, smooth as oil under the water. A twenty-pound dog, thought the
Master, remaining quiet by the shallow water, listening to the music of
his hounds. There was a stickle below Rothern Bridge.

The hounds splashed past him, stooping to the scent. Tarka's head
showed, and vanished. He swam under Rothern Bridge, whose three stone
arches, bearing heavy motor-transport beyond their old age, showed the
cracks of suffering that the ferns were filling green. A sycamore grew
out of its lower parapet. Deeper water under the bridge; the frail
bubble-chain lay on it. A cry above the bridge; a line of coarser
bubbles breaking across the stickle, where six men and two women stood
in the river.

Tarka's head looked up and saw them. He lay in the deep water. He
turned his head, and watched hounds swimming down through the arch. He
dived and swam up; was hunted to shallow water again, and returned,
making for the stickle. The water was threshed in a line from
shillet-bank to shillet-bank, but he did not turn back. As he tried to
pass between a man in red and a man in blue, two pole-ends were pushed
under his belly in an attempt to hoick him back. But Tarka slipped off
the shillet-burnished iron and broke the stickle. The whips ran on the
bank, cheering on the hounds.

_Get on to 'm! Hark to Deadlock! Leu-on! Leu-on! Leu-on!_

       *       *       *       *       *

A quarter of a mile below Rothern Bridge the river slows into the lower
loop of a great S. It deepens until half-way, where the S is cut by
the weir holding back the waters of the long Beam Pool. Canal Bridge
crosses the river at the top of the S.

Where the river begins to slow, at the beginning of the pool, its left
bank is bound by the open roots of oak, ash, alder, and sycamore. To
hunted otters these trees offered holding as secure as any in the
country of the Two Rivers. Harper, the aged hound--he was fourteen
years old--knew every holt in the riverside trees of Knackershill
Copse, and although he had marked at all of them, only once had he
cracked the rib of an otter found in the pool. Leeches infested the
unclear water.

Tarka reached the top of the pool. Swimming in the shade, his unseen
course betrayed by the line of bubbles-a-vent, he came to the roots of
the sycamore tree, where he had slept for two days during his wandering
after the death of Greymuzzle. He swam under the outer roots, and was
climbing in a dim light to a dry upper ledge when a tongue licked his
head, and teeth playfully nipped his ear. Two pale yellow eyes moved
over him. He had awakened the cub Tarquol.

Tarka turned round and round, settled and curled, and closed his eyes.
Tarquol's nostrils moved, pointing at Tarka's back. His small head
stretched nearer, the nostrils working. He sniffed Tarka's hair from
rudder to neck, and his nose remained at the neck. It was a strange
smell, and he sniffed carefully, not wanting to touch the fur with
his nostrils. Tarka drew in a deep breath, which he let out in a long
sigh. Then he swallowed the water in his mouth, settled his ear more
comfortably on his paw, and slept; and awoke again.

Tarquol, the hairs of his neck raised, was listening at the back of the
ledge. He was still as a root. The ground was shaking.

_Go in on 'm, old fellars! Wind him, my lads! B'hoys! B'hoys! Come on,
b'hoys, get on to 'm._

The otters heard the whimpers of hounds peering from the top of
the bank, afraid of the fall into the river. They watched the dim
root-opening level with the water. Footfalls sounded in the roots
by their heads; they could feel them through their feet. Then the
water-level rose up and shook with a splash, as Deadlock was tipped
into the river. They saw his head thrust in at the opening, heard his
gruff breathing, and then his belving tongue. Other hounds whimpered
and splashed into the river.

_Pull him out, old fellars! Leu-in there, leu-in, leu-in!_

Heavy thuds shook down bits of earth on the otters' heads and backs.
The iron-bar, with its ball-handle, started to break through the top of
the holt. Tarquol tissed, moving to and fro on the ledge in his fear of
the unknown. Often he looked at the opening, wanting to escape. The bar
was pounding a root.

Tarka quatted on the ledge; he knew that Deadlock would follow him
wherever he swam in water. Tarquol, twisting and weaving his head,
ran down on roots to the water, dragging his rudder for a dive; but
a whitish light alarmed him and he ran up to the ledge again. The
whitish light was reflected from the breeches of a wading man. A voice
sounded near and hollow. Then a pole pushed through the opening between
two roots. Its end was thrown about, nearly striking Tarquol's head. It
was pulled out again, and the whitish light moved away. The pounding of
the bar stopped. Tarka heard the whining of Bite'm.

Hands held and guided the terrier past the outside root. Tarquol tissed
again as the dim light darkened with the shape of the enemy, whose
scent was on the hair of Tarka's neck. Bite'm whined and yapped, trying
to struggle up to the otters. His hind feet slipped off the roots, and
he fell into the water below. _Plomp, plomp, plomp_, as he trod water,
trying to scramble up the side.

Again the opening grew dark with arms holding and guiding another
terrier, and Biff began to climb. _Wough! wough! wough!_ Soon she
fell into the water. The terriers were called off. Tarka settled more
easily, but Tarquol could not rest. Hounds and terriers were gone, but
still the voices of men were heard. The sound was low and regular, and
Tarka's eyes closed. Tarquol quatted beside him, and for many minutes
neither moved. Then the murmur of voices ceased with footfalls along
the bank, coming nearer, and stopping above. A man climbed down the
bank and slid feet first into the water; the chalky light was reflected
in at the opening. An arm was thrust in, and the wrist-jerk sent a
handful of small pieces of rock into the holt. The pieces hissed when
they met the water, and gave off streams of bubbles. The otters gazed
down at them. The man moved away from the holt, and his friends hauled
him to the top of the bank.

Silence, except for the hissing and bubbling in the holt. The otters
were immobile in curiosity. Neither Tarka nor Tarquol thought of the
strange bubbling as an act of the man. Often they had seen bubbles
arising from the holes of eels and ragworms in mud. Sometimes in
solitary underwater play they had blown bubbles, and tried to bite them
before they broke at the surface. Tarka and Tarquol moved lower along
a root to be nearer the strange bubbles. Tarka was lower than the cub,
near the water, when he started and sprang as though trapped, gave a
retching cough, and tumbled into the water. Tarquol tissed with fright,
gaped when he breathed the acetylene gas, and followed Tarka out of the
holt. He saw Tarka's chain rising bright before him. He turned upstream
and was alone.

Seventy yards from the holt he rose under the bank to rest, and heard
the baying of hounds. He dived again and went on upstream at his
greatest speed. At his next vent he knew that the terrible beasts were
following him. He swam out of the pool, turned back again, saw their
heads in the water from bank to bank, became scared, and left the river.

Galloping across the meadow faster than he had ever run in his life,
with the hunting cries behind him and the thudding hooves of bullocks
cantering away from hounds on his left, Tarquol came to sheds where
farm machines were stored, and going through a yard, he ran through a
gap in a hedge into a garden, where an old man was picking off the tops
of his broad beans in a row, muttering about the black-fly on them.
Tarquol passed him so near and so swiftly that the granfer's short clay
pipe dropped from between his gums. He muttered in the sunshine and
pondered nearly a minute. Hardly had he stooped to pick up his pipe
when a great black and white hound crashed through the hedge and ran
over his tetties and sun-dried shallots, followed by three more hounds,
and after them a couple, and then his garden was filled with them.

_Git'oom!_ The hounds were gone, leaving him staring at his broken
beans.

Tarquol had run round the walls of the cottage and into a farmyard,
scattering fowls in terror before him. One of the hens, who was broody,
ran at him and leapt at his back, pecking and flapping. Tarquol kicked
a little dust behind his straight rudder. At full speed he ran into
a pigsty, where a sow was lying on her side with a farrow of eleven
tugging at her. Seeing him, they stopped tugging, stared together,
squeaked together, and scampered away into corners. The sow, too fat
to get up quickly, tried to bite Tarquol as he rippled from corner to
corner. The baying of the pack grew terribly loud, and still Tarquol
darted about the sty, seeking a way of escape. The sow, after many
grunts, flung herself on her trotters and bundled her flabby mass to
the door, unlocked her dirty teeth to bite Deadlock, who had just
arrived. Squealing with rage, her bristly, mud-caked ears flapping on
her chaps, she chased him out of the sty, followed him back into the
yard, and scattered the rest of the pack.

Tarquol had run out behind the sow. He gained three hundred yards
before hounds found his line again. He ran with the sun behind him for
two hundred yards over grass, then he turned and went through a thorn
hedge, climbed the railway embankment, and ran up over Furzenbeam Hill,
leaving an irregular trail. He ran for three miles on land, hiding
among the dry spikes of gorse, and under branches. Sometimes he mewed
in his misery.

Hounds ran far ahead of the men and women. Eventually the pack--with
the exception of Pitiful, who was lost--hunted him back to the railway
line, to where he was crouching low in the thorn hedge. A bird with
a loud rasping voice, and a beak like a bent iron nail, clacked
and chattered on a briar rising out of the hedge. It was a bird of
property, or red-backed shrike, and Tarquol was quatting by its larder
of bumble-bees, grasshoppers, and young harvest mice impaled on thorns.
The mice were dead, but the bees still moved their legs.

Tarquol ran out of the thorns just before Render's muzzle pushed into
his hiding place; but hounds leapt the low hedge and overtook him,
before he had gone very far on his short, tired legs. Deadlock seized
him and shook him and threw him into the air. Tarquol sprang up as
soon as he fell, snapping and writhing as more jaws bit on his body,
crushed his head, cracked his ribs, his paws, and his rudder. Among
the brilliant hawkbits--little sunflowers of the meadow--he was picked
up and dropped again, trodden on and wrenched and broken, while the
screaming cheers and whoops of sportsmen mingled with the growling
rumble of hounds at worry. Tarquol fought them until he was blinded,
and his jaws were smashed.




LAST CHAPTER


When he had swum out of the gassed holt, Tarka had turned to deeper
water and gone under the railway bridge twenty yards below--the line
with its embankment and three bridges cut the S from south to north. He
kept close to the left bank, in the margin of shade. The copse ended at
the bridge; below was a meadow. He rose to breathe, heard the hounds,
and swam on under water. He passed a run of peal, which flashed aside
when they saw him, and sped above the bridge at many times the pace
of a travelling otter. Sixty yards below the bridge, by the roots of
a thrown alder, Tarka rose to listen. Looking around, he saw neither
hound nor man, and knew he was not being followed. He thought of the
holt under the oak tree above the next railway bridge, and swam on down.

Where the river's bend began to straighten again, the right bank lay
under oak trees growing on the hill-slope to the sky. Tarka dived and
swam across the river to the holt he had remembered as he left the
roots of the sycamore. This holt had a sunken opening, where no terrier
could enter. Here Tarka's sire had been asleep when hounds had found
him two years before. Tarka swung up, coming into a dark cavern lit
by a small hole above, and stinking of the paraffin poured there the
previous afternoon. He sniffed the oil film on the water, and turned
back into the weir-pool.

Again he made a hidden crossing, to listen under cover of flag-lilies
for more than a minute. The river was quiet. He heard the sound of
falling water, and swam slowly down, often touching under the bank.
He passed under the middle arch of the railway bridge, and reached
the weir slanting across the river. The summer water tumbled down the
fish-pass, but glided thin as a snail's shell over the top end of the
concrete sill. The lower end, by the fender at the head of the leat,
was dry. Tarka walked along the sill, nearly to the end, which was two
inches above the level of the pool. He stretched his weary back on the
warm concrete and sprawled in the sun.

He lay basking for more than an hour, enjoying the sound of water
tumbling in the pass and sliding down the face of the weir. Swallows
dipped in the pool, and sometimes a peal leapt in the shadow of the
bridge. Tarka's head was always raised before the fish fell back, but
he did not leave the sill. Warm and brilliant sun-flickers on the
shallows below dazed his eyes, and made him drowsy. But when a hound,
working alone down the left bank, climbed on the sill by the pass and
shook itself, he was instantly alert. Half lying down, he remained
quite still, while the hound lifted its muzzle to sniff. Something
moved on the bridge--otter and hound turned their heads together,
seeing a man behind the railing. At first the man saw only the hound,
but when it walked along the sill and ran down the face of the weir,
he saw the otter it was following. The man had come along the railway
to see if many fish were in the pool; he was a poacher nicknamed
Shiner, and the top of one of his fingers was missing. He had no love
for otters. Along the railway line he hastened, and shouted to the
otter-hunters.

Followed in silence by the hound Pitiful, Tarka swam leisurely. He
watched, from under a tree, a single enemy working down the shallow,
crossing to deeper water to seek his scent along the banks. He let it
come within a few feet of his head, then dived and swam away. Pitiful
never saw him, or the chain of bubbles. Often she followed the wash
carried down with the current; and when it grew weak, she would amble
along the banks until she found where the otter had touched.

Tarka felt neither fear nor rage against the hound. He wanted to be
left alone. After several hidden swims from bank to bank, and finding
no holding where he might lie up and sleep until evening, he walked out
by a cattle-trodden groove in the right bank, and ran away over land.
He followed the otter-path across a quarter of a mile of meadow, and
came to the river again by the third oak above Canal Bridge.

Tarka drifted under the high lime-spiky arches of the bridge, and the
white owl, roosting on a ledge below the parapet, beside the briars of
a dog-rose growing there with hawkweeds, saw him going downstream.

Bees came to the wild roses, crammed more pollen into their laden
thigh-bags, and burred away over the bridge. A petal dropped, a swallow
played with it as it fell, clipping it with first one wing and then the
other, until it dropped into the water, and was carried away, past the
gap in the bank where the Owlery Oak, Tarka's birthplace, had been held
by its roots two years before.

Then Pitiful swam under Canal Bridge, and after her the pack came down,
and many men, and the owl was driven into wavy flight down the river.
It pitched in the tree of Leaning Willow Island, as a dull clamour
broke out half a mile up the river. Hounds had marked the otter under a
hover, and driven him out.

The water of the pool was swimming-deep from the shallow above Canal
Bridge to the shallow above Leaning Willow Island. The surface above
Tarka mirrored the bed of the river--the dark rocks, the weed, the
sodden branches, with the legs and bodies of hounds--until ripples
broke the mirror into shards of light. In this underwater realm,
where sounds were so distinct--the crush of nailed boots on stones,
the tip-tap of poles, the thresh of hounds' legs, and even the flip
of cyclops and water-flea--Tarka swam until he was forced to vent,
which he did at the river verge, under the banks, or by clumps of
yellow flags. Sometimes he crept on the stones, hiding himself under
overhanging roots as he sought a refuge, until dreading the nearness
of hounds he slipped into the river again, covered with a silver skin
of air. As he swam, twin streams of bubbles came out of his nostrils,
raced over his head and neck, and shook off his back to lie on the
surface in a chain, watched by many eyes. Up and down the pool he
went, swimming in midstream or near the banks, crossing from side to
side and varying his depth of swimming as he tried to get away from
his pursuers. Passing under the legs of hounds, he saw them joined to
their broken surface-images. From under water he saw men and women,
pointing with hand and pole, as palsied and distorted shapes on the
bank. However hard he swam with his three and a half webs, always he
heard the hounds, as they spoke to his scent lying in burst bubble,
in seal on muddy scour, on leaf and twig. Once in mid-river, while on
his way to a clump of flags, his breath gave out, and he bobbed up to
breathe a yard from Deadlock. He stared into the eyes of his old enemy;
and dived. During forty seconds he swam a distance of seventy yards, to
a bed of reeds, where he breathed and rested. No one saw him; but they
saw the chain.

Up the river again, past the Peal Rock, and under the middle arch of
Canal Bridge to the shallow, crossed by a line of men and women, white
and blue and green and red and grey, standing close together.

_Tally Ho!_

He turned and reached covering water just before hounds.

_Get on to 'm! Leu-on, leu-on! Wind him, old fellars!_

The huntsman was wading up to his waist in the water, scooping the
air with his grey hat. Bellman, a small-footed hairy black-and-tan,
cross between a drafted harrier and a Dumfriesshire rough otter-hound,
yelped his impatience, seeming to snap the water as he swam. Sometimes
the huntsman gave an encouraging spitnote on his horn. Tarka went down
river, but a blurred and brilliant colour band stretched from bank to
bank above Leaning Willow Island. He tried to get through the stickle,
but stocking'd leg was pressed to stocking'd leg, a fixed barrier
behind plying poles. The owl flew out of the willow, miserable in the
sunlight with small birds pursuing it

Tarka turned and swam upstream again, leaving hounds behind. For five
minutes he rested under a thorn bush. Deadlock found him, and on he
went, to Canal Bridge once more, where he lay in the water, weary after
the long chase. At the beginning of the sixth hour he tried to pass the
higher stickle, but his enemies stood firm on the stones. The tongues
swelled under the bridge. He was nearly picked up by Hurricane, the
Irish staghound, but the blunted canine teeth could not hold him.

The chain became shorter. Tarka was too weary to seek a holding in the
banks. He breathed in view of his enemies. Seven and a half couples of
hounds swam in the pool, their sterns throwing behind them arc-lines of
drops on the surface. Others splashed in the shallows under the banks.
The huntsman let them work by themselves.

During the sixth hour the otter disappeared. The river grew quiet.
People not in uniform sat down on the grass. The huntsman was wading
slowly upstream, feeling foothold with his pole and keeping an eye
on Deadlock. Stickles stood slack, but ready to bar the way with
pole-strokes. Look-outs gazed at the water before them. It was known
that the otter might leave the river at any moment. The boy with the
warped pole, on whose cheeks were two patches of dried otter-blood, was
already opening his knife, ready to cut another notch on the handle, in
the form of a cross.

But more than an hour the sun-thongs flickered across the placid water;
and in softening light the owl returned, flying high over the bridge,
to the mouse runs in the quiet meadow beyond.

       *       *       *       *       *

A fallen bough of willow lay in the pool near one bank, and Tarka
lay beside it. His rudder held a sunken branch. Only his wide upper
nostrils were above water. He never moved. Every yard of the banks
between the stickles was searched again. Poles were thrust into
branches, roots, and clumps of flag-lilies. The wading huntsman prodded
Peal Rock and the rock above it. Hounds sat on the banks, shivering,
and watching Deadlock, Render, and Harper working the banks. The crack
of a whip, a harsh voice rating--Rufus had turned a rabbit out of a
bramble and was chasing it across the meadow. He returned to the river
in a wide circle, eyeing the whip.

At the beginning of the eighth hour a scarlet dragonfly whirred and
darted over the willow snag, watched by a girl sitting on the bank. Her
father, an old man lank and humped as a heron, was looking out near
her. She watched the dragonfly settle on what looked like a piece of
bark beside the snag; she heard a sneeze, and saw the otter's whiskers
scratch the water. Glancing round, she realized that she alone had seen
the otter. She flushed, and hid her grey eyes with her lashes. Since
childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father, looking for
flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old
friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes
beheld.

For two minutes the maid sat silent, hardly daring to look at the
river. The dragonfly flew over the pool, seizing flies and tearing them
apart in its horny jaws. Her father watched it as it settled on the
snag, rose up, circled, and lit on the water, it seemed. Tarka sneezed
again, and the dragonfly flew away. A grunt of satisfaction from the
old man, a brown hand and wrist holding aloft a hat, a slow intaken
breath, and,

_Tally Ho!_

Tarka dived when the hounds came down, and the chain showed where he
had swum. Many saw his dark sleek form as he walked by the edge of a
grassy islet by the twelve trees. The hounds ran to him, and Tarka
turned and faced them, squatting on his short hindlegs, his paws close
against his round and sturdy chest. He bit Render in the nose, making
his teeth meet. In an instant he drew back, tissing, and bit Deadlock
in the flews. The narrow lower jaw snapped again and again, until the
press of hounds hid him from sight.

He squirmed away through legs and under bellies, biting and writhing
a way to the water; and the chain drew out on the surface of the pool
while hounds were still seeking him on the stones where he had sat and
faced them.

_Leu-on, then! Leu-on! Ov-ov-ov-ov-over!_

Tarka's pace was slow, and his dives were short. In the water by the
Peal Rock he lay, glancing at the faces along the banks, across the
river, and in the river. His small dark eyes showed no feeling. He
turned away from the human faces, to watch the coming of hounds. He
was calm and fearless and fatigued. When they were his length away,
he swung under, showing the middle of his smooth back level with the
surface, and swimming past their legs. He saw the huntsman's legs
before him joined to the image of legs, and above the inverted image a
flattened and uncertain head and shoulders. Up and down he swam, slower
and slower.

At the beginning of the ninth hour an immense fatigue came over him,
greater than his fatigue when in the long hard winter he had lived for
over a month on seaweed and shellfish in the estuary. He was swimming
up from the lower stickle when the water seemed to thicken at each
thrust of his webs. He ceased to swim, and drifted backwards. Barbrook
touched his neck as he dived. He reappeared two poles' length away, and
lay still, looking at the huntsman wading nearer.

For ten minutes he rested, between dives of a few yards only, and then
he rolled from Deadlock's bite and went downstream. He swam with his
last strength, for upon him had come the penultimate desire of the
hunted otter, the desire that comes when water ceases to be a refuge,
the desire to tread again the land-tracks of his ancestors. He crawled
half up the bank, but turned back at the thudding of many feet, and
swam down to the stickle. The sideway ply of a pole in a turmoil of
water struck him on the head. He pushed past the iron point, but it was
brought down on his shoulder, to hold him against the shillets. Hounds
were fifteen yards away, urged on by hat and horn and the yarring
cheers of the whippers-in. Thrice Tarka's teeth clicked on the iron
pressing his shoulder as he strove against the weight of the sportsman
trying to lift him back. A second pole was brought down from the other
flank, crossing with the first. The wooden pincers held him; he twisted
like an eel and bit into a leg. With furious strength he writhed from
the crossed poles, and through the stickle, as Deadlock bore down
upon him and pulled him back by the rudder. Amidst the harsh cries of
men and women and the heavy tongues of hounds Tarka was overborne by
the pack. The Master looked at his watch--eight hours and forty-five
minutes from the find in the Dark Pool. Then the screeching, yarring
yell of one of the honorary whips:

_Yaa-aa-ee-io! Leu-in on 'im! Yaa-ee-oo!_

for again Tarka had escaped from the worry, and had merged into the
narrow stream of water that hurried to Leaning Willow Island.

Below the island the river widened, smooth with the sky. Tarka swam
down slowly, bleeding from many wounds. Sometimes he paddled with three
legs, sometimes with one, in the water darkening so strangely before
his eyes. Not always did he hear the hounds baying around him. At the
beginning of the tenth hour he passed the banks faced with stone to
keep the sea from the village, and drifted into deeper water, whereon
sticks and froth were floating. Hounds were called off by the horn, for
the tide was at flood.

But as they were about to leave, Tarka was seen again, moving with
the tide, his mouth open. The flow took him near the bank; he kicked
feebly, and rolled over.

_Tally Ho!_

Deadlock saw the small brown head, and threw his tongue in triumph as
he jumped down the bank. He seized it, and lifted the otter high, flung
him about, and fell into the water with him. They saw the broken head
look up beside Deadlock, heard the cry of _Ic-yang!_ as Tarka bit into
his throat, and then the hound was sinking with the otter into the deep
water. Oak-leaves, black and rotting in the mud of the unseen bed,
arose and swirled and sank again. And the tide slowed still, and began
to move back, and they waited and watched, until the body of Deadlock
arose, drowned and heavy, and floated away amidst the froth on the
waters.

They pulled the body out of the river and carried it to the bank,
laying it on the grass, and looking down at the dead hound in sad
wonder. And while they stood there silently, a great bubble rose out
of the depths, and broke, and as they watched, another bubble shook to
the surface, and broke; and there was a third bubble in the sea-going
waters, and nothing more.




HERE ENDS TARKA THE OTTER BY HENRY WILLIAMSON, BEGUN IN JUNE 1923 AND
FINISHED IN FEBRUARY 1927 IN THE VILLAGE OF HAM IN DEVON.




Transcriber's note

The Table of Contents from the printed edition was removed and an
expanded one was made for this edition.

Italic elements were replaced with _ in the txt version.

Page numbers were removed from the txt version.



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75899 ***