Tarka was rolling on his back in the beams of the sun one morning,
when he heard the distant note of the hunting horn and soon afterwards
the tongues of hounds. The bitch listened, and when the baying became
louder, she pressed through the reeds with the cubs and took to the
bramble undergrowth beyond the north bank of the pond. A south wind
was blowing. She ran down the wind, the cubs following just behind
her. When she stopped to listen, she also licked her neck; and a human
observer might have thought that this act showed her to have no fear of
being hunted.
The heart of the otter was beating quickly; and whenever she stopped to
listen, her aroused nervous force was as a burden, only to be eased by
movement.
Now the hounds were hunting Marland Jimmy, who was swimming about
the pond and looking at them from among the reeds. When he was tired
of swimming backwards and forwards under water, he crept out through
brambles and ran across a few acres of boggy moorland to the stream. He
was fat and, for an otter, slow on his broad pads. Hounds were after
him when he was half-way across the rushy tract, where lichens and
mosses held a distinct scent of him. The old otter reached the stream
and went down with the water until he came to a drainpipe, where he had
often sheltered. Soon the tongue of Deadlock boomed up the pipe, but he
lodged there in safety. Then a terrier named Bite'm crept to within a
foot of him and yapped in his face. His hearing having dulled with the
years, the otter was not disturbed by these noises; nor was he alarmed
by the thuds of an iron bar over his head. Bite'm was called back and
another terrier yapped away at him until it, too, was recalled. Voices
of men quietened; and after a few minutes the sounds came down the
length of pipe behind him, followed by a disgusting smell. Marland
Jimmy endured the smell and more thumpings above him; and when, an
hour later, he crept out into bright light, the water passed away from
him with a coloured smear on its surface. The old otter licked the
greyish-yellow fur of his belly, and nibbled the smarting skin between
his toes, all the rest of the afternoon, but the smell of paraffin
stayed on him.
The bitch and cubs were safe, for although hounds drew down the brook,
finding and carrying their line to a wood, the hunt was stopped by a
keeper. Young pheasants were in the wood, and gins were tilled for
their enemies. Hanging from the branch of a tree in this preserve were
the corpses of many vairs and fitches, some green, others hairless and
dry, some with brown blood clotting broken paws and noses. All showed
their teeth in death, as in life. With them were bundles of claws and
beaks and feathers, which once had been dwarf owls, kestrels, magpies,
sparrowhawks, and buzzards. The hues and sheens of plumage were gone,
and their eyes' light; soon they would drop to the earth, and flowers
dream out of their dust.
The brook was a haunt of dippers, whose cries were sudden as the cries
of water-and-stones; speedy little brown birds, white-breasted, who in
flight were like drab kingfishers. A tawny owl perching against the
trunk of a larch tree also saw the otters coming up the stream, and
its eyes, soft with light as the dark blue sloe is soft with bloom,
watched them until they crept into a rocky cleft below a fall, where
royal ferns cast their great shadows and water-violets were cooled by
dripping mosses.
After sunset a swarm of cockchafers whirred and flipped about the top
of the larch, and the owl, hungry after huddling still for fifteen
hours, flapped up through the maze of cone-knotted twigs and caught
two in its feet. It ate them in the air, bending to take them in
its beak; and when it had caught and swallowed a dozen, it let out a
quavering hoot to its mate--for the tawny owls liked to be near each
other in their hunting--and, perched on a low branch of another tree,
listened and watched for a young rabbit. After a few moments, its head
was tilted sharply downward: the otter and the cubs were going through
the wood.
At midnight the western sky was pale blue and hollow like a
mussel-shell on a seashore. The light lingered on the hill-line, where
trees were dark. Under the summer stars a hundred swifts were screaming
as they played away the night, two miles above the earth; in fine
weather they kept on the wing for many days and nights together, never
roosting. Their puny screams were heard by Tarka as he rubbed his neck
against the grassy mound of an ants' nest.
While he was enjoying the feeling, a loud chakkering noise came down
from the wood. The otters swung round. Four heads pointed towards the
trees. The bitch ceased to nibble her fur; the other cubs forgot their
play with the head of a corncrake. The noise, distinct in the dewfall,
was met by other cries as harsh and angry.
When the curious otters reached the wood, other noises were mingled
with the chakkering. Green points of light glinted in the undergrowth
about them, like moonlight in dewdrops, for many vairs were watching
a fight of the two dog-fitches on the woodland path. Running along
the bank of a ditch beside the path, the fitches had met at the mouth
of a drainpipe, out of which strayed a hunger-making smell. The pipe,
covered with grass sods, lay beside an oak-log felled for a path across
the ditch. Both ways had been made by the keeper; one for himself, and
the other for fitches and vairs, whose liking for pipes and covered
ways he knew. There were many such ways in the wood, and to make them
more attractive, the keeper had placed the flesh and entrails of dead
rabbits inside the pipes.
Each dog-fitch was trying to break the other's neck by a bite behind
the ear. They rolled and snapped and scratched with their long claws,
their black-tipped tails twitching with rage.
Every stoat and weasel which heard them ran to watch the fight on the
pathway made by the hob-nailed boots of the keeper. Tawny and dwarf
owls peered down from branches of oak trees, while from afar a fox
listened, and prowled on again. A crow awoke in an ivy-thick holly,
muttered _aa-aa!_, and laid its beak among its neck-feathers once
more. Tarka circled round the stoats with the other cubs, mewing and
yikkering with excitement; and then he smelled the rabbit flesh inside
the drainpipe. The youngest cub also smelled it. She was quicker than
Tarka, and her head and shoulders were inside one end when he ran in at
the other. He had bared his teeth to snatch the flesh when there was a
hard snap, a knock of iron on the pipe, a blow on the side of his head,
and a loud whimpering and tissing from the cub.
Immediately the bitch was by her, running round outside the pipe in her
anguish. She panted and blew as she had in the hollow tree when her
mate was being worried by hounds, she ran up the ditch and mewed to the
cub to follow, she returned and licked its rudder. The green points of
light flicked out together.
Disturbed by the clatter in the drainpipe, a pheasant crew in the
covert, and a cock defied the pheasant from its roost among hens in an
apple tree by the keeper's cottage below the wood. The bitch scraped at
the sods covering the pipe, blowing and gasping anew when a retriever
started to bark. She ran away, whistling the cubs to follow her, but
returned to the cry of the cub, who had fallen out of the pipe and was
dangling by its rudder.
The barking changed to an eager whine when a door of the cottage opened
and a man's voice spoke. Sounds came up distinctly from the combe
below. While the otter tore with her teeth at the chain, the spring,
and the closed jaws of the gin, Tarka and the other cub ran among the
oak-saplings, rustling the buff leaves of an old year and breaking the
stalks of seeded bluebells whose caps dropped round black seeds on the
earth. There were faggots of hazel wands just inside the wood, cut and
drying for a thatcher, who would split them and make spears for binding
the reed of cottage roofs. They burrowed under the faggot, driving out
a vair that had been sucking the blood of an aerymouse or pipistrelle
bat. The small weasel made a loud _kak-kak-kak_ of rage at them and
vanished with the limp aerymouse in its mouth. A loud barking was
coming from the field, with the yikkering of the otter. Tarka heard the
yelp of the retriever, but the sound that followed made him tiss, for
it was the shout of a man.
When the keeper, hurrying up the field, was within twenty yards of
the wood's edge, the otter left the chain she had been breaking her
teeth on and ran away. The retriever rushed at the cub to worry it,
but the ferocity of the unfamiliar beast made it hesitate. The otter
remained standing by her cub even when the keeper was pushing through
the undergrowth. Thinking that a fox or badger was in the gin, he
went forward to kill it with a blow of the holly staff he carried. He
was peering forward when the retriever, a young animal, ran to him
snarling! something flung itself violently against his legs--the otter
weighed fifteen pounds--and nearly bit through the leather of his boot
at the ankle. He struck at it, but hit only earth. He hurried back to
the cottage for his gun, calling the retriever to heel, lest it be
injured.
The struggles of the cub pulled the iron peg out of the ground, and
it was able to drag itself out of the ditch and slowly away among the
saplings. The bitch whistled to Tarka and the other cub, who ran out
from under the faggot and followed her. The mother ran on with them a
little way, then returned to the cub that followed so slowly with the
gin ripping brambles and clanking against stones and roots. Pheasants
in the covert crew from their roosting branches; blackbirds flew
from the hollies with wild alarms; wrens and robins complained in the
brambles. Hedgehogs rolled themselves into spiny balls, and voles
crouched by the withered mosses under the oaks.
Behind the otters came the noise of the keeper crashing through
undergrowth, and the retriever's feet pattering near them.
_Wough-wough-wough!_ to its master. Blood ran down the face of the
otter where the wounded cub had bitten her as she was trying to free
the gin which gripped its rudder. The cub threw itself up and down,
writhing and blowing, and not knowing what had happened; it snapped at
its mother's paws, at her ears, at her nose, at her neck. The otter
left it to fight the pestering retriever, her eyes yellow and gem-like.
When the keeper came up the cub was gasping with the weight of the iron
it had dragged over a hundred yards. He fired at the noise in front of
him and the noise ceased. Into the darkness of the wood he fired the
second barrel; and listened. He heard stray pellets rattling in the
distance and the dragging of the gin as the retriever tried to lift it.
At dawn the crow that slept in the ivy-grown holly saw a new corpse
hanging among the fitches and vairs which had run into one end of a
drainpipe, but never run out again. The crow said _aa-aa!_ and flying
to the gallows tree, picked out its eyes.
* * * * *
When daylight came the otter and her cubs were far from the wood,
having arrived at new water, deep and dark and slow moving. They swam
to an islet where rose sallows and ashpoles, and swaying at the trees'
tops were rafts of twigs roughly pleached, being the nests of wild
pigeons. The male birds were awake, and cooing to their mates, when
the otter walked out of the water. Green sedges grew by the upper end
of the islet, where sticks and roots of winter floods were lodged, and
through them the otters crept. The mother trod down a place in the
middle and bit off sedges for a couch, and afterwards, hearing a watery
croak near her, she sank silently into the pool. Her head emerged by
the nest of a moor-hen which flew clumsily away from off six eggs,
brown like the curling tips of sedge and speckled with dark blotches.
These were carried back, one by one, to the cubs, who cracked them and
sucked the yolks, afterwards playing with the shells. Sometimes Tarka
whimpered and stopped play, for the bruise on his head was aching. Then
the mother licked it, and washed him all over, and he fell asleep; and
the sun had risen when she had cleaned herself and nibbled the lead
pellets out of her coat.
Time flowed with the sunlight of the still green place. The summer
drake-flies, whose wings were as the most delicate transparent leaves,
hatched from their cases on the water and danced over the shadowed
surface. Scarlet and blue and emerald dragonflies caught them with
rustle and click of bright whirring wings. It was peaceful for the
otters in the backwater, ring-rippled with the rises of fish, a waving
mirror of trees and the sky, of grey doves among green ash-sprays, of
voles nibbling sweet roots on the banks. The moorhen paddling with her
first brood croaked from under an arch of stream-side hawthorn, where
the sun-shafts slanting into the pool lit the old year's leaf-dust
drifting like smoke under water. The otter heard every wild sound as
she lay unsleeping, thinking of her lost one. The cubs breathed softly,
but sometimes their nostrils worked and their legs moved, as though
they were running.