THE Last YEAR

Chapter Eleven

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

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

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

He slept curled in the moss until the last sun-whitened wisps of clouds trailed away into space above the northern slope of the hill, and the plashes took light and colour. The sun awoke him and he heard the twit of a bird—a little drab pipit alone in the fen with the otter. It watched anxiously as the otter warmed the dingy, yellow-white fur of his belly in the sun and rolled to scratch his ears with a sprig of heather. The pipit had seen no enemy like Tarka before, and when the rolling otter fell off his bed and splashed into the water below, the bird flew out of the heather in straight upward flight, twittering as it dropped, fluttering wings that seemed too feeble to carry it higher than its first weak ascent. Up it mounted, to fall back again, until it turned with the wind and slanted down quickly into the heather. Again the wilderness was to wandering air and water, until webbed feet began to patter in the black soft peat, past wan yellow tussocks of withered grasses, and clumps of rushes dying downwards from their brown tips.

Running in the plashes, treading the spider-like tufts of red-rusty cotton grass, he came to a deeper and wider channer fringed with rushes. Down a crumbling sog of peat and into the still brown-clear water. He swam its winding length, seeking eels under the ooze which arose behind him in a swirl of heath fragments, dark and up scattered by the kicks of his hind-legs. A minute’s swimming and the channer widened into a shallow pit above whose broken banks the heather grew, on sprigs dispread and blasted under the sky. Some still bore the bells of old summer, that made a fine sibilance in the wry wind-music of the moor.

Tarka ran past a heap of turves, set around the base of a post marking Cranmere tarn, now empty, whither his ancestors had wandered for thousands of years. A fox had been walking there during the night, seeking the oval black beetles which, with moths, pipits, wheatears, and sometimes a snipe, were the only food it found in and around the fen. As Tarka ran out of the tarn a bird passed swiftly over his head, gliding on down-curving dark wings and crying go-beck, go-beck, go-beck! when it saw him—one of the few grouse which lived and bred on the lower slopes under the wind. The bird had flown from a hut circle to the south, where seeds of gromwell were to be found. The gromwell had grown from a single seed carried from the lower tilled slopes of the moor on the fleece of a sheep, to which it had hooked itself. Gromwell seeds were the favourite food of the grouse around the source of the Two Rivers.

Tarka watched the bird until it glided below the hill, when he ran on again, finding nothing in the plashes moving only with images of sky and clouds and birds of solitude. Then the sun took the water, breaking brilliant and hot in every plash; the otter galloped with instant joy and sank in bog to his belly. He dragged himself on to a tussock of grass, rolled, shook himself, and set off again, roaming around the fen until he heard again the cry of running water. The cry came out of a hollow, whose sides were scarred by the sliding of broken hummocks—the faint cry of a river new-born. Through a winding channel in the turf, no wider than the otter and hidden by grasses growing over it, the little thread hastened, seeking its valley to the sea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tarka had eaten half the rabbit when a strong scent made him look round again. He saw in the low opening several greenish dots, that stared and swung about and stared again. He went on eating. Delicate sniffs, sudden rustles and paddings, scratchings, a quick sneeze—he peered for another way out, wanting to be alone. He found a crack and explored it with his nose, before beginning to scrape. He sucked in the scent of fitch, for Swagdagger’s mate had her nest of young beyond the crack.

She had been hunting a rabbit three hundred yards away when Swagdagger had climbed the stone, and as soon as she heard the call, she galloped back. Other fitches had run to the summons of Swagdagger. Sharp-toothed, blood-thirsty, and without fear, they ran up and down by the opening, sniffing the delicious scent of fresh-slain rabbit, weaving quick bodies and lifting their small heads to sniff, sniff, sniff. The noises of teeth at work made a furious stir in the assembling tribe. The older dog-fitch yakkered with rage, as he wove in and out of the swift and impatient throng.

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Twelve

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

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

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

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

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

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

Below one bridge the river slowed into a wide pool, where the waters of a smaller south-flowing river meditated before turning north with big brother Taw. Tarka was cruising over the bed of the Junction Pool when the moon, shaking and distorted by eddies above, was cut by dark and narrow slips. A down-stroke of his strong rudder and a push off a rock by his hind-legs swung him up for the chase of shoaling fish. They darted away in a zigzag, turning together, up and down and across the pool. Tarka pursued one until he caught it but as he was swimming to the bank he saw another, and followed it with the fish in his mouth. He snicked it as it darted back past his shoulder. Strokes of the heavy tapering rudder, over two inches wide at its base and thirteen inches long, that could stun a fish by its blow, enabled him to turn his body in water almost as quickly as on land.

He shook the fish out of his mouth as soon as he had killed them, for now he was hunting for sport. The dace glinted about the water, the slayer often leaping after a fish that threw itself into the air and jumped as it hit water again. A stain began to move in the water, and a plaice flapped off the bottom and swam in what it thought was the beginning of a flood, when worms came swirling into the Junction Pool. This sea-fish had lived a strange and lonely life in fresh water ever since it had been swallowed in the estuary by a heron and ejected alive from the crop a quarter of an hour afterwards when the bird, flying up the valley, had been shot by a water-bailiff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tally Ho!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Thirteen

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

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

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

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

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

At the next bridge, under which a dwarf owl nested, he left the track and went to water again. Working down the river, crossing from side to side and searching for fish under stones and in deep holes, he left the grassy sloping tide-walls behind and passed by boats resting on a ridge of gravel above a long road-bridge. Swimming with a fluke to the riverside, he could find no bank. The water lapped a stone wall. He swam under an arch of the bridge and ate the fish on a ledge of sand raised over an old galvanized-iron bath thrown away into the river. Below the bridge was a railway bridge, supported by round iron piers sunk into the gravel. A wave washed against the base of the pier near the right side of the river as he swam round it, hoping to find mussels clinging there. The sea was returning again. It poured over the ridges of sand, making a sound with every stone and shell and shillet tumbling before its eager spread. Hu-ee-ic! Tarka chopped at the froth, the new smarting of his wounds unheeded. Hu-ee-ic! The salt wave was of the sea, and the sea was the friend of otters.

As he was swimming down in a turbulent pool, Tarka saw a big fish turn before him. He raced after it. His hind legs pushed forward under his body for the full double-thrust, and the arch of his back opened the big bite of Deadlock that had nearly touched the spine. He bled, but felt no pain in the joy of hunting a big fish. The mullet—one of many that had come up from the estuary, feeding in the muddy collar of the tide’s head—nearly dashed into the stone wall of the quay in its terror. It saved itself by a leap that took it a yard into the air, and falling back, it sped swiftly down the river. Tarka followed it to where it had leapt, stood head and shoulders out of the water, while he looked round, before rolling under again. He swam up the base of the wall and turned back by the railway bridge, swimming three double-thrusts to the left, then three to the right, while watching for the glint of scales. He followed the wall until he came to an opening in the quay where the tide was rushing. Another fish turned in the turbid swirling water before him, and darted up the pill. Tarka swam up the narrow way, but seeing nothing, swung back into the wide river. He swam across the tide to the opposite bank by a shipyard, then returned along the piers of the bridge, searching by the stone sterlings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hu-ee-ic!

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

Hu-ee-ic!

Only his echo replied, and he wandered on.

Chapter Fourteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Fifteen

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

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

Go’r’n leave it! Leave it! Go’r’n leave it! Deadlock! Harper! Go’r’n leave it!

Tarka heard the horn and the low opening became lighter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let hounds hunt him! Don’t help hounds or they’ll chop him!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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