Yellow from ash and elm and willow, buff from oak, rusty brown from the
chestnut, scarlet from bramble--the waters bore away the first coloured
leaves of the year. Beeches preserved their tawny form in rain and
hail, but yielded more and more to the winds. Sandmartins and warblers
deserted their old haunts; kingfishers and herons remained. The reeds
sighed in the songless days, the flags curled as they withered, and
their brittle tops were broken by the rains.
Eels began to pass down to the sea. They were the females, travelling
from ponds and lakes, from dykes and ditches and drains, from the hill
streams of Dartmoor where the Two Rivers had their ancient source. The
eyes of the eels grew larger as they were swept down in the turbid
waters, as they writhed over wet grass, along cart ruts and drains.
These eels were urged seawards by a common desire--to meet the smaller
males in the estuary, where each female would attract four; and after
the meeting each female would swallow her four and begin a journey to
where the shallow bed of the ocean broke off and dropped deep to its
grave. Here among hulks rotting in seaweed, where strange fish carrying
lights moved in the heaviest darkness, the eels of the world laid their
eggs, and here they died, far under the floating weed of the Sargasso
Sea whence as transparent, flat, ribbon-shaped creatures, they had set
out for the inland waters. After journeying for three years the elvers
had reached the mouths of rivers and passed up to ponds and ditches,
where those that were not killed by man, otter, heron, gull, waterfowl,
cormorant, kingfisher, dwarf owl and pike, lived and grew until desire
and instinct moved them to seek the eels' birthplace in the grave of
the Atlantic.
The eels of the Two Rivers were devourers of the spawn and fry of
salmon and trout, and the otters were devourers of eels. Tarka stood
on the shillets of the shallow stream while they twisted and moved
past his legs. At first he ate a small portion of each capture near
the tail, but when his hunger was gone he picked them up, bit them,
and dropped them again. The more he killed the more he wanted to kill,
and he chopped them until his jaws were tired. It was slimy sport, and
afterwards he washed for nearly half an hour, quatting on a mossy rock.
While the eels were migrating the otters found their food easily,
as there was no hunting to be done. They followed the eels down the
river, eating them tail-first as far as the vent, and leaving the head
and paired fins. They played away most of the night. The mother took
her cubs to a steep sloping bank of clay which had been worn in past
winters by many otters sliding down it. Nine feet below was a pot-hole
with seven bubbles turning in the centre with a stick, and as Tarka
slid down headfirst he meant to seize the stick and play with it. When
he looked up through the water it was gone, and many other bubbles
rode there, a silver cluster about the blurred image of another otter.
Hearing the strokes of an otter's rudder he looked in the direction
of the sound, and saw a strange cub, with the stick in its mouth,
travelling under the foamy current. Tarka followed the dim form until
he reached a barrier made by an uprooted pollard willow and broken
branches lodged in the stream. He climbed on the trunk, shaking water
from his ears and eyes, and ran back with jubilant whistles to the
slide. There he saw the cub, the stick still in its mouth, standing
with a grown otter. Tarka yikkered, and ran back to the water. The
grown otter mewed to him, ran after him, licked his face, and purred
in his ear. He tissed at her, and whistled to his mother, who came to
him, but did not drive the stranger or the cub away.
The stranger had been the mother of many litters long before Tarka's
mother had been born. Her fur was grizzled on pate and shoulders, and
her muzzle was grey. Her canine teeth were long and yellow, and she had
lost three of her incisors. She knew every river and stream that flowed
north into the Severn Sea. She had roamed the high cold moors of three
counties, and had been hunted by four packs of otter hounds. Her name
was Greymuzzle.
She played with the otters at the slide, and remained with them when
the low clouds became rosy in the east. That day all five hovered on
Leaning Willow Island, and she curled beside Tarka, and washed his
fur, treating him as though he were her own cub. Then she washed the
other cub, who had a white-tipped rudder. Greymuzzle had met White-tip
wandering alone three weeks before, and had remained with her ever
since. There was friendship and sympathy between the two grown otters,
for they never yikkered or tissed at each other. Indeed, although
Tarka's mother did not remember Greymuzzle, the old otter had played
with her and her cub brothers all one night in one of the duckponds
near the estuary.
The rain was blown in grey drifts down the valley, and the river
flooded the martin holes that riddled the sandy banks. Trees and
branches and dead animals bumped towards the sea. So heavy the
autumnal fresh that the otters could not see to hunt in the river. They
travelled up the valley on land, feeding on little voles turned out of
their drowned homes, and on rabbits which they caught in a warren in
a wood where the corpses of herons, kingfishers, red-throated divers,
cormorants and shags were nailed to an oak tree. Some had been shot,
others trapped, the cormorants and shags were beheaded, for the Two
Rivers' Board of Conservators paid one shilling for every head. The
wings of the kingfishers were cut off their tiny bodies, for some women
in towns were willing to pay money for the bright feathers, which
they wore as ornaments on their hats.
After another gale the nests of old summer began to show in the woods
above the winding river. Very beautiful were the wild cherry trees at
the fall of their vermilion leaves. The gales of the October equinox
stripped them off the branches and whirled them away. The otters went
down again on another fresh, sometimes leaving the water to cross bends
of marshy ground and fields, following trackless paths which otters
had run along before fields were ploughed; before wild men hunted them
for their skins with spears of fire-hardened wood. These paths were
older than the fields, for the fields were once the river's wider
bed, in the mud of which the heavy rudders had whilom dragged. They
floated under Halfpenny Bridge, and lay by day in the reeds of the old
canal bed. A dog disturbed them, and the next night they travelled
inland, and sought a resting place in the hillside earth of badgers.
The white-arrowed faces of the Brocks only peered and sniffed at them.
A few dawns previously a fox had crept into the same earth among the
hillside pines, but the badgers had turned him out, as he stank, and
his habits were displeasing to their tidy ways. Had the fox crept there
during the day, and his wheezing told them that he was being hunted
by hounds, he would not have been bitten and driven out, but given
shelter, for man was their common enemy.
The Brocks allowed the otters to sleep in one of their ovens--as
countrymen call the chambers connecting the tunnels, for they were
the size and shape of the cloam ovens wherein some Devon farmwives
still baked bread. The otters were clean, and washed themselves before
sleeping, and so the badgers were agreeable. At fall of night they left
the earth together, Tarka keeping close to his mother, for the size
and appearance of the old boar who had been snoring during the day on
his bed of bitten grass and moss in the next oven made him uneasy.
The badgers waddled down their paths trodden through the spindleberry
shrubs and blackthorns, but the otters made their own way among the
brambles to the sloping top of the hill. They ran along a row of
sheep-nibbled rape to the skyline, crossed a road, and pushed through
the hedge-banks of many small fields. Travelling down a pasture, and
through a wood of oak and holly, they came to a pill, or creek, whose
banks were fissured by guts and broken by tidal waters. White-tip
suddenly galloped away over the mud, for she recognized the Lancarse
pill which carried the stream coming down the valley from the Twin-Ash
Holt, where she had been born. It was low tide, and the water ran below
glidders, or steep muddy slopes. They spread their legs and the water
took them under a road-bridge to the river, which ran through a wide
and shallow pool crossed by black round iron pillars of the Railway
Bridge--the Pool of the Six Herons. Whenever Tarka crawled out to catch
one of the little birds feeding by the water-line, his feet sank into
mud and his belly dragged. Alarmed by the otters the birds arose with
cries which seemed to awake echoes far down the river. These were the
cries of ring plover and golden plover, of curlew, whimbrel, snipe, and
redshank, and all the way down into a dim starlit distance the cries
were borne and repeated.
The brown water rocked them down, and as they were drifting in a wide
curve Tarka saw something which filled him with fear. The constellation
of the Plough, which had been before them, was now on their left, with
its starry share touching the tops of the trees far away. The stars
were friendly, being of the night and the water, but these strange
lights were many times the size of the morning star. They stretched in
a twinkling line across the river, throwing a haze above them, like the
dawn which the otters of the Two Rivers know as a warning.
Neither of the older otters was afraid, so Tarka swam without diving.
The lights made the three cubs uneasy. As they drifted nearer, rumbling
sounds came on the night breeze which had arisen two hours since with
the flowing of the tide over the estuary bar.
Soon the sweep of the fresh lessened, for the tide was pressing against
the river. A wavelet lifted Tarka and passed behind him, another
curled like a long razor-fish shell and broke over him. He shook the
water from his whiskers, and licked his lips, liking the strange
taste. He lapped and drank. The forerunning press of the young tide
lifted him up and down, and chopped with playful foam at his pate. On
every ribbed shoal and mudbank the wavelets were lapping the stones
and rocks, lapsing with faint trickling sounds, and leaving domes of
froth which trembled and broke in the wind. As the otters swam down
with stronger strokes the mudbanks changed to sandy shoals, and air
bubbles out of ragworms' holes shook up in the shallow water through
which they paddled. Long dark shapes rode on the water, swinging round
slowly in the tide, and the wavelets went flip flup against them. Tarka
was afraid of the salmon boats, but the old otters ignored them. The
lamplights on the bridge were now very large and bright, and had ceased
to twinkle. They passed more boats at their moorings. The rumbling
noises of traffic on the bridge were loud, and figures were seen. In
front, twenty-four arches, of different shapes and sizes, bore the long
bridge. Greymuzzle dived, and the four followed her.
She had caught the scent of men and dogs blowing from the bridge, two
hundred yards in front. Under water Tarka swam until he could swim no
more, and rising quietly to vent, he turned his head to see if any
danger were near, and swam on. He rose to breathe nine times before
reaching the bridge, and the eighth rising brought him under one of the
arches. He swam hard against the tide pouring between two piers.
This was the first time Tarka passed under the ancient Long Bridge,
which the monks built across their ford two centuries before the
galleons were laid down in the shipyards below to fight the Spanish
Armada. When the otters had passed under the bridge they had to swim
hard, keeping near the right bank of the river to avoid the main flow
of the tide. Flukes were caught in the estuary that night by the otters
diving to deep water; they were not easy to find, for the dabs and
plaice lay flat on the sand when they saw the dark shapes above them,
and their sandy-speckled backs hid them. The otters raked the bottom
with their paws, driving up the fish which they seized and took on the
bank to eat.
In the nights that followed Tarka learned to eat crabs, cracking them
with his teeth. With the other otters he sought the shellfish among the
rocks below the stone quay of a fishing village at the meeting place
of the Two Rivers, where often at night they were disturbed by the
pailfuls of rubbish flung over by the natives. Once a pailful of hot
ashes came down, burning both Tarka and White-tip.
By day the otters slept in the reeds of a duck-pond which they reached
by drifting with the tide up the other horn of the estuary, and turning
into the Branton pill, where ketches and gravel barges were moored.
At dawn they left the salt water and ran over the eastern sea-wall
to the duckpond shaped like a ram's horns. In the brackish waters of
the duckpond the otters took mullet which had been washed in when the
sea-wall had broken years before, and rainbow trout put there by the
owner. Old Nog fished these waters, and at night many kinds of wildfowl
flapped and quacked besides the reeds; mallard, wigeon, teal, coot,
dabchick, and strays of the duck family--shoveller, pochard, and golden
eye.
On the fourth night of the otters' arrival at the Ram's-horn duckpond
the swallows which settled among the reed-maces at sunset did not
sleep. They twittered among themselves when the first stars gleamed
in the water, for they had received a sign to leave the green meadows
they loved so well. They talked in their under-song voices--which men
seldom hear, they are so soft and sweet--while clinging to the unburst
heads of the reed-maces. They talked of white-and-grey seas, of winds
that fling away the stroke of wings, of great thunder-shocks in the
sunwhitened clouds under, of wild rains and hunger and fatigue to come
before they saw again the sparkles in the foam of the African strand.
But none talked of the friends who would fall in the sea, or be slain
in France and Spain and Italy, or break their necks against the glass
of lighthouses, for the forktailed birds of summer had no thoughts of
these things, or of death. They were joyous and pure in spirit, and
alien to the ways of man.
During the day Tarka had been watching them, being curious. He had
watched them sweeping above him with a windy rush of wings that
darkened the sky, and had listened to their sharp cries as they dipped
and splashed in the wind-ruffled water. As he was stretching himself
before leaving his couch at sunset they flew like a great sigh up to
the stars. _Krark! Krark! Krark!_ cried Old Nog, standing grave and
still in the shallow water at the pond's edge. It was the last English
voice many of them would hear, the blue winged ones of summer, who had
begun the weary migration from the land of thatched homesteads and
old cob linhays.
Some days after the swallows had gone, Tarka heard a
strange flute-like whistle while playing in the Ram's-horn duckpond.
The five otters ceased their play and listened. The whistle came again,
and Tarka's mother answered. The answering whistle was keen and loud.
The bitch swam towards it, followed by Greymuzzle and White-tip. The
whistle made Tarka cry in rage, _Ic-yang_, and when a dog-cub has cried
thus he is no more a cub, but a dog-otter.
The night before, the otters had fished in the estuary by the sea-weedy
hurdles and posts of a silted-up salmon weir, where in former times
salmon were left penned by the tide. They had returned to the duckpond
across fields and dykes, along an otter route, and on their trail an
old dog-otter had followed.
Now he had trailed them to the duckpond, a big, flat-headed,
full-thighed dog with great whiskers, more than double the weight of
Tarka. He frightened the crier of _Ic-yang_, who crouched tissing
with his sister when the stranger sniffed at her nose and then licked
it. This action caused Tarka's mother to behave in a curious manner.
Turning fiercely on the cub, she rolled her over, bit her, and chased
her under water. Many bubbles were blown up. Tarka dived to see why
this strange thing had happened, but the dog turned in a swirl of water
to snap at his head. Tarka was so scared that he swam to the bank and
crawled out among the dry thistles.
Here, while the water ran from his fur, he whistled to his mother.
He saw her swimming with her head out of water, with the strange dog
behind pretending to bite her. She was heedless of her cubs' cries, and
dived with the dog in play. For hours Tarka ran on the grassy bank of
the duckpond, following his mother as she played in the water. Once the
dog rose to the surface with a mullet in his mouth, which he did not
trouble to kill before leaving it to float on its side. Tarka whistled
again and again, and at last the big dog left the water and chased the
small dog for whistling to his mate.
Tarka ran away. He crossed over the sea-wall, and worked up the stony
bed of the pill, catching the flukes and green crabs which were feeding
at the mouth of an open sewer. He met White-tip and Greymuzzle, and
together they returned to the duckpond when the wildfowl flighted
over. He was swimming round one bend of the ram's horn when the big
dog heard the strokes of his hindlegs and swam after him again. Tarka
dived and twisted, and although he was bitten twice in the neck and
once through the paw, he was not caught. His mother's training had made
him swift and strong. He quitted the water and was pursued through
grassy tufts and thistles and bunches of frayed flags to the sea-wall,
where the big dog turned and whistled to his mate. Hearing another
whistle--it was really an echo of his own--he galloped in rage back
to the duckpond. Then Tarka whistled, and the dog returned to kill
him. Tarka went up and over the sea-wall at his greatest speed, across
the mud and stones of the pill and to the western sea-wall, where he
stopped. He cried _Ic-yang!_ several times, but if the dog had returned
in answer to the challenge, it is doubtful whether Tarka would have
waited to drink the blood of his enemy.
Already his mother had forgotten, and perhaps would never again
remember, that she had loved a cub called Tarka.