Tarka the Otter

Chapter One

immity 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 underwings, 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

n 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 one of 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 earmark 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

he 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 umbels, 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. Iggiwick, 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

arka 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

hen 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 chittered 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 tomtits 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 evelight. 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 gatepost 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.