When Tarka awoke he saw a small eye quizzing him from among the
ash-sprays. He stretched up his head and sniffed, and at the movement
the eye disappeared. Ticking cries sounded from the middle of the
tangle.
Hearing them, an ackymal that had been searching the stream-side
hawthorn boughs for green caterpillars flittered to the islet and
chittered beside the crackey. The ackymal had a mate in a stump
hole, brooding over a family of thirteen in a nest of moss and
feathers, and the crackey had a mate and a family of eight in a ball
of grasses hidden in the side of a haystack. Both nests were hundreds
of wing-flutters away, yet when the hens, both shorter than a man's
finger is long, heard the cries of their song-folk, they left their
young and hastened to join them. Their scolding was a summons to all
small birds. Blackbirds flew in from the fields and let out shrill
ringing cries which jerked their tails as they perched above the
otters. Soon many small birds were gathered in the trees of the islet,
and their mingled cries brought six larger birds, who sloped up one
behind the other. They were among birds what the Irish are among men,
always ready in a merry and audacious life to go where there is trouble
and not infrequently to be the cause of it. Raising their crests and
contracting their light blue eyes, the six jays screamed with the
noises of tearing linen.
The cubs lay still, but the otter lifted up her head. She had met jays
before, and knew that men sometimes go where the pretty crows are
nagging. For half an hour she was anxious, ready to take her cubs into
the friendly water immediately the jay cries became shorter; which
would mean the coming of the greatest enemy, man.
The birds became hungry. The crackeys and ackymals and ruddocks--Devon
names for wrens and tomtits and robins--flew away when the otters
neither heeded nor harmed them. The jays remained; but when a
sparrowhawk dashed into the trees in search of a pigeon, they departed
and mobbed the hawk, helped by a pair of carrion crows.
Again the spirit of the green place was tranquil, with peaceful doves
cooing in the noonday's rest. All the long day the sun swung over the
islet until the hilltops were fiery. Shadows lifted from the waters
and moved up the trunks of trees. They faded in evelight. The pool
darkened. Over the fields flew a white owl, one of hundreds which like
great blunt-headed moths were quartering the pastures and tilth of all
the lands served by the Two Rivers. It fanned above the vole-runs,
where the craneflies rose in flight from flower and bent. The reeling
song of a nightjar on a gatepost ran through the ground mist not high
enough to hide the flowers of ragged robin and the hardening seeds of
the flowering rush. The pigeons settled at the tops of the ashpoles,
and ceased their clapping and flapping of wings.
A drop of water splashed, another and another. The otter had withdrawn
her head from the river, wherein she had been harkening for stir of
fin or wave of tail. Filling her lungs with new air, she slipped into
the water and swam to the other end of the islet, where a scour had
been formed by the flood-rains of the last southwesterly wind. Here
the grown family of the moorhen was paddling. When almost under them,
the otter saw the legs and the images of legs joined to them, black
in silhouette against the less dark surface. She seized one of the
moorhens and drew it under, releasing it to bite it in her jaws, and
carried it back to her cubs, swimming with her nose, whiskers, eyes,
and part of the dead fowl out of the water. The cubs were waiting,
and seeing that she had food, they ran to her and pulled it out of her
mouth, tearing away feathers and mewing with their pads on the dead
bird. When the otter returned to the scour the moorhens were gone, so
she dived and sought fish.
Late at night she returned with the cubs to the wood, and whistled for
the lost one. She did not know it was dead; she knew only her longing
for it. Her whistles went far in the still night, as she ran with nose
to the ground, stopping to whine when her grief became acute. The cock
on the apple bough heard her and crew to the dog in the kennel, who
barked to its master. Hearing the bark, the otter took her cubs away;
and at the end of the night, when they reached the big river, the lost
cub was forgotten.
They hunted and ragrowstered for many days under the high wooded hills,
below which the river wound and coiled like a serpent. When the moon
hung like a gold fishbone in the dusk--the fourth he had seen--Tarka
could swim thirty yards under water before he needed to put out his
nose to breathe. In one of their haunts, the smaller cub caught a big
trout driven upwater by the bitch, and as she dragged the flapping
fish on the stones, Tarka seized it above the tail. She snapped at his
head, dropping her bite to do so, and he dragged it away. She bit it
through the red-spotted back, and they tugged, wrenching the fish into
pieces which they ate held in pads and munching with their heads on one
side, whereas before they had usually swallowed without chewing. At any
threat of piracy one whipped round to eat facing another direction;
very soon all the trout was gone except a scriddick, or fragment, of
the tail.
There was no more yinny-yikkering when they had fed, for then was the
time for play. When Tarka had drunk some water, he snapped playfully
at the cub's head, and inviting her by his manner to catch him, romped
through the shallow into the pool. Sometimes he swam with only his hind
legs, as his mother did when she was not close upon a fish, but when
his sister was so near to his rudder that she could touch the tip of
it, he used all four webs and swerved by a swish of his rudder which
swung him round in his own length. In one of his turns she caught
him and they rolled in the water, pretending to bite each other, and
kicking as kittens do. And so it was that Old Nog, the wisest heron of
the Two Rivers, heard the noise of bubbles breaking on the water as he
alighted by the pool side. He watched, prepared to jump-and-flap if
there were danger. He saw a swirl on the water, and the roll of two
dark sleek bodies. He waited. They rolled nearer. With neck and beak
held low--a two-pointed horn spear on a shaft hidden by long narrow
feathers--he waded into water over his knee joints. While he paused for
a plunge of the spear, which had pierced and held many a rat and eel,
the bitch's head arose a yard from him, and at her sharp cry the cubs
fell apart and swam under. The heron, with a harsh squawk of anger and
alarm, jumped into the air and beat away slowly, with legs stretched
out behind him and neck tucked between his lean shoulders. _Kaack!_
cried Old Nog, as he flew to his next fishing place.
For several nights after feeding, the cubs went down to a mill-pool to
ragrowster, always with the mother, who delighted in playing tricks
upon them. Once she whistled the food-cry, and they ran in excitement
to her, only to find a large leaf laid on a stone. It was fun, and they
chased her. The pool, placid after a dry month, was made turbid by the
fragments of leaf, stick, and stone stirred from the weedy bottom. She
let them catch her, and enjoyed the rage of her little cubs who snarled
so fierce and bit so hard, but could not hurt her.
Early one morning the south-westerly wind arose from off the Atlantic,
and brought fast low clouds over the land. A blown grey rain hid
the trees on the slopes of the valley. At night the young moon was
like a luminous grub spinning a cocoon around itself in the sky. The
river pushed to the sea with the fresh, or brown flood-water, and at
nightfall their holt, rising three feet under a waterside alder, was
filled. The otters rode down on the fresh, over the spillway of the
Dark weir, where branches were fixed amid long claws of water. They
spread their legs and floated. The noise of the great waters filled
Tarka with joy. A log rolled in front of him, and he scrambled on it,
to jump off again with happy cries. He pretended that froth was fish,
and turned over on his back, trying to clutch it. The river swilled him
along, while he whistled in happiness. A memory of big fish was moved
in the otter's mind by the smell of the fresh, and she was taking her
cubs down to river-bend above Canal Bridge, where she and her mate had
killed salmon and peal before the cubs were born.
During the journey the clouds were blown to the north-east, over the
high and cold moorland, and when the otters had drifted under Rothern
Bridge the moon was shining bright in a dark blue sky. Bubbles glinted
around Tarka's head, where the water, hurrying too fast over shoals,
tumbled back upon itself. Round a bend the river began to slow and
deepen--it was dammed half a mile below by a concrete weir built
diagonally from bank to bank. This was the head of the weir-pool. The
otters drifted on, round another bend until they came to where the
smooth and thundering fall-over of the bubble-whitened water slanted
across the river, broken near the left bank by the plunge of breakers
down the fish-pass. A mist hung over the river. An icicle stood in the
moonlight below the fish-pass, a silver spark for an eye.
Below the fish-pass the water rushed in a foamy spate. Above, it slid
black and polished. Presently out of the lower whiteness a silvery
flicker shook and vanished. The silver spark vanished and glinted
lower. Old Nog, peering below the pass, was so excited that he nearly
fell over the three long green toes of each foot, in his haste to
overlook more of the water. A second fish tried to leap the weir: with
sideways flaps of tail it struggled up the spillway, but the claws of
the water pulled it back. The moon in its first bright quarter was
smitten into a myriad shimmerings by the lower turmoil. Suddenly, it
seemed, the shimmerings were drawn together into a larger quartered
moon, which rose out of the water in a silvery curve, and fell into the
pool above, soundlessly in the immense roar of the fall.
The otters were lying in an uvver, or hollow, near the right bank, away
from the tug of the cascade plunging down the fish-pass. The water in
the uvver turned quietly. On its surface revolved a wheel of sticks,
riveted by bubbles. The otters turned with it, hanging rudders down in
the current. When the salmon leapt the weir, the bitch became rigid and
her nostrils widened; but before the burst of the splash had dropped
back, she had become supple again. The back of her sleek head gleamed
and was gone. The cubs followed her, naturally so swift that a human
observer might have wondered what cry or signal had been made by the
otter.
They swam by the bank until the pull of the water grew less, when the
mother turned into midstream and sought the salmon by working upwater
from bank to bank through the gloomy and tumultuous spate. The current
forced them to swim with the webs of four feet. Tarka swam on her left
flank and the other cub on her right. Sometimes he was flung sideways,
or spun in another whirling wheel. He was swimming out of one when the
bitch either scented the fish or saw the swift ream of its dorsal fin,
for she turned and swam with the current, leaving them behind. Tarka
turned after her, and was pursuing with all his strength when a narrow
fish, larger than any he had ever seen, swished past him. A few moments
afterwards the otter followed, but Tarka had to rise to breathe, and
when he swam down again he was alone. He knew that hunted fish usually
went upwater, so he swam against the current, swinging from side to
side as he had learned by imitating his mother.
When, after several minutes, he could find neither mother nor sister,
he climbed on the bank, where wet vegetation and sticks loading the
lower branches of nut trees showed how quickly the fresh had risen,
and was falling. Plashes of water covered the grassy depressions of
the meadow, where moorhens were feeding; and Tarka was returning from
an unsuccessful pattering after the birds when he heard his mother's
whistle. She had been swept down the fish-pass and hurled against the
concrete rim of the middle trough, where the water had pounded her
until she had been flung out on the straight rush and left, gasping
and coughing, on rocky shillets heaped against the lower bank by old
floods. She was savage in failure, and took her cubs over the plashy
meadow to a wood to find rabbits. In this wood she had never heard the
_iclack_ of a sprung gin, so she had no fear. But the rabbits told
their fear by thumping their hindlegs, and those which did not bolt
into the open ran to their buries and sat there quivering, with ears
laid over shoulders. The otters followed them to where they crouched,
inert in terror, their faces pressed into the earth where the tunnels
stopped. Twelve were dragged out squealing, and killed; three being
skinned by the bitch. While they were feeding, a harsh chattering came
from one of the holes, with two pricks of greenish light. Here stood
Stikkersee, the weasel, who was in a rage because the water-fitches
were in his wood. Stikkersee was about half as long as the otter's
rudder, but he was not afraid of her. He came within a yard of her nose
and raved so persistently at the smell of so much blood that she turned
away from the little beast's racket and went back to the river.
When the moon had come to its full round shine, Tarka was hunting his
own food in the pools and necks of the clear water running round the
bend above Canal Bridge, which rod-and-line men declare to be the best
fishing stretch of the Two Rivers. One August night, after play under
the oaken fender that took the leat away from the pool, he had left
his mother but a short while and was running along the bank, when a
raucous cry in the darkness made him halt. His paw was raised. His
nostrils twitched. The cry had come from the meadow, where tufts of
rush-grass and sedge were left uncropped by cattle. It was followed by
others--slurred and throaty notes which rose slowly into the air and
ended in a sweet and liquid cry. The curlews, which were feeding with
their young flown from the moors where they were born, were disturbed
by something, and had cried the alarm. Tarka had heard curlews crying
during many nights, but never before in such a way. He heard thuds in
the ground; and from the river the warning whistle of his mother.
Remembering what had come with the ground thuds before, when the air of
the hollow tree had shaken to the baying of hounds, Tarka ran swiftly
to water. The otter had left the river and was standing on the bank,
sniffing the night wind. A cloud like the seal of an otter drifted
across the moon. Tarka slipped into the river, but returned to his
mother, being curious. The alarm cries of the curlews had ceased, and
other notes fell from the sky. In the riverside sedges two warblers
began to speak to one another. They mixed hastily the notes of song and
alarm, with the gentle under-song voice used only to their mates when
brooding in the cradles woven to the green flags.
A low sound of a human voice came to Tarka, and a hound-like taint
which raised the hair of his neck. Immediately the mother yikkered a
threat, and with her cubs ran down the bank and hid among the sedges.
Clouds hid the shine of the moon.
On the bank, dark against the sky, appeared the figures of men, and a
long-legged lurcher dog. The men scrambled down to the river's verge.
There was a moment of quiet, when the trilling cries of the flying
curlews rose above the water-murmurs and the wind in the trees.
A scratching noise and the flickering of a small light. It went out.
Another match was struck and shielded by a hand, until it spread into a
lurid flame, overcasting with ruddy glow the dim shades of trees across
the water. The flare lit the faces of two men. One held a pitchfork
with gleaming prongs. They stood still and watchful. Then a youthful
voice ten yards higher up the river said:
"Fine li'l brown dog going through the daggers, Shiner! Wish I'd took
hold of 'n."
Neither of the men answered. They were staring intently at the water.
Slowly the torchbearer raised an arm and pointed. The spear was poised,
to quiver over the man's head, while a ream skated over the pool.
A hoarse voice whispered "Now!" and the fork was plunged into the pool.
A curved flash of fire scattered its ripple. The torch-bearer threw
down his torch and waded into the water, followed by the young man, who
had run down the bank when he had seen the jumping salmon. They were
groping for the fish, guided by the agitated spear-shaft, when the man
yelled that one of the prangs had gone through his hand. He held it
up, dripping blood, and cursing that the top of one of his fingers was
knocked off.
The man on the bank picked up the torch--oily rags tied to a stick--and
held it as far out as he could over the water without filling his
boots. The youth cried out that he had got a grip on the sow's gills
and that he couldn't hold it much longer. Before the man could get to
him, he had dropped the fish, yelling that he had been bitten in the
leg by the little brown dog.
On the moonlit bank, beside the black-and-red smoking rags, they tried
to bind their wounds; and the uninjured man was bending down to pick
up his empty sack when the lurcher dog began to growl. Its snarls
increased; it ran forward; it yelped with pain and ran back past them,
followed by two yellow, glowing eyes.
"Fine li'l brown dog you zee'd in the daggers," growled the poacher
called Shiner, who had lost a finger-joint. "Us may as well keep whoam
when they sort o' dogs be about!"