Tarka the Otter (continued 3)

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.