The shock-headed flowers of the yellow goat's beard, or
John-go-to-bed-at-noon, had been closed six hours when a grey wagtail
skipped airily over the sky-gleams of the brook, flitting from stone to
stone whereon it perched with dancing tail and feet. In the light of
the sun more gold than at noon the drakeflies were straying low over
the clear water, and the bird fluttered above its perch on a mossy
stone, and took one. The water reflected the colour of its breast,
paler than king-cups. It did not fly, it skipped through the air,
calling blithely _chissik chiss-ik_, until it came to the verge of a
pool by a riven sycamore. On a sandy scour it ran, leaving tracks
of fragile feet and dipping as it took in its beak the flies which
were crawling there. It skipped to the ripple line and sipped a drop,
holding up its head to drink. Two sips had been taken when it flew up
in alarm, and from a branch of the sycamore peered below.
The brook swirled fast by the farther bank; under the sycamore it moved
dark and deep. From the water a nose had appeared and the sight of it
had alarmed the wagtail. Two dark eyes and a small brown head fierce
with whiskers rose up and looked around. Seeing no enemy, the otter
swam to the shore and walked out on the sand, her rudder dripping wet
behind her. She stopped, sniffing and listening, before running forward
and examining all entrances under the bared roots of the sycamore
tree in the steep bank. The otter knew the holt, for she had slept
there during her own cubhood, when her mother had left the river and
followed the brook to get to the White Clay Pits.
The wagtail was still watching when the otter came out of the holt
again. It flew away as she whistled. Two heads moved across the pool
and a third behind, slightly larger, for Tarka followed his sisters.
The cubs crawled into the holt, leaving seals, or marks of five toes
and running pad, in the sand with the prints of the wagtail.
The sycamore was riven and burnt by lightning, yet sap still gave it
a few leaves for summer. Its old trunk was beloved by two mouse-like
birds which crept up the whitest tinder and held themselves by their
spread tails as they looked in the cracks for woodlice and spiders.
Every spring this pair of treecreepers made a nest between the trunk
and the loose bark, of twigs, tinderwood, dry grasses, and feathers.
Here burred the bumblebees to their homes in the crannies, and when
the first frosts stiffened the grasses they tucked their heads under
their forelegs and slept, if they did not die, until the primroses came
again. Here, when the trees were nearly bare, waddled Iggiwick, the
grunting vuz-peg, or hedgehog, with a coat of the tree's dry leaves,
black-patched with autumn's falling-mark, and on the earth he curled
and closed meek eyes and dozed into a long rest. The tree was the
friend of all, and it had one human friend, who as a child had seen
it first when trailing in summer after her father hunting the otters
of the brook. She had imagined that the old charred sycamore was a
giant with many legs, who had been burnt in a fire and had rushed to
the bank to cool himself, and that its roots, bared by floods, were
thin legs bent at wooden knees and fixed in the water. The brook was
determined to drown the giant, who was burrowing his toes for a hold.
The maid grew tall and beautiful, but still the old giant sat cooling
his thirteen legs, and every June, when she passed by with her father,
following the otter hounds, he wore a fresh green wig.
Many otters had slept in the cave behind the roots; some had died
there, and the floods of the brook had taken their bones away.
Mother and cubs curled up together against the dry earth of the holt's
end, five feet away from the water. The cubs fell into a deep sleep,
torn with dreams wherein an immense black face showed its long fangs.
Tarka slept with his small paws on the neck of his mother, and her paw
held him there. They snuggled warm in the holt, but the bitch did not
sleep.
At dimmity, when day and night hunters see each other between the two
lights, she heard the blackbirds scolding the wood owls; and when the
blackbirds were silent, roosting in thorn or ivy with puffed feathers,
she heard a badger drinking and grunting as he swallowed. The owls'
bubbling quaver settled into the regular hunting calls; then the
otter yawned and slept.
She awoke when the wood owl had made a score
of journeys with mice to its nestlings in the old eyrie of a trapped
buzzard, when the badger had walked many miles from its earth in the
oakwood. She was hungry. Leaving her cubs asleep, she crept out of the
holt. At the water edge she listened nearly a minute. Then she turned
and climbed the bank, running into the meadow where cows snuffled at
her as she stood on her hind legs. Hearing no danger sound, she went
down to the river, entered quietly and swam across to the shallows.
She walked through a matted and floating growth of water-crowsfoot,
and came to summer plants growing out of stones--figwort, angelica,
water-hemlock. Returning through the jungle with a crackling of sappy
hollow stems and the breaking of rank florets and 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.