The trees of the riverside wept their last dry tears, and the mud in
the tidehead pool made them heavy and black; and after a fresh, when
salmon came over the bar, beginning their long journey to spawn in the
gravel where the rivers ran young and bright, broken black fragments
were strewn on the banks and ridges of the wide estuary. In November
the poplars were like bedraggled gull-feathers stuck in the ground,
except for one or two or three leaves which fluttered on their tops
throughout the gales of November.
One evening, when the ebb-tide was leaning the channel buoys to the
west and the gulls were flying silent and low over the sea to the
darkening cliffs of the headland, Tarka and Greymuzzle set out on a
journey. They had followed the salmon up the river, and Greymuzzle had
returned for a purpose. The bright eye of the lighthouse, standing like
a bleached bone at the edge of the sandhills, blinked in the clear air.
The otters were carried down amidst swirls and topplings of waves in
the wake of a ketch, while the mumble of the bar grew in their ears.
Beyond the ragged horizon of grey breakers the day had gone, clouded
and dull, leaving a purplish pallor on the cold sea.
The waves slid and rose under the masted ship, pushing the white surge
of the bar from her bows. A crest rolled under her keel and she pitched
into a trough. On the left a mist arose off a bank of grey boulders,
on which a destroyer lay broken and sea-scattered. It had lain there
for years, in bits like beetle fragments in a gorse-spider's grey
web-tunnel. One of the great seas that drive the flying spume over
the potwallopers' grazing marsh had thrown it up on the Pebble Ridge.
During the day Tarka and Greymuzzle had slept under the rusty plates,
curled warm on the wave-worn boulders rolled there by the seas along
Hercules Promontory.
Two hours after midnight the otters had swum five miles along the
shallow coast and had reached the cave of the headland, which
Greymuzzle had remembered when she had felt her young kick inside her.
The tide left deep pools among the rocks, which the otters searched
for blennies and gobies, and other little fish which lurked under the
seaweed. They caught prawns, which were eaten tail first, but the heads
were never swallowed. With their teeth they tore mussels off the rocks,
and holding them in their paws, they cracked them and licked out the
fish. While Greymuzzle was digging out a sand-eel, Tarka explored a
deep pool where dwelt a one-clawed lobster. It was hiding two yards
under a rock, at the end of a cleft too narrow to swim up. Four times
he tried to hook it out with his forepad, the claws of which were worn
down with sand-scratching, and in his eagerness to get at it he tore
seaweed with his teeth. The lobster had been disturbed many times in
its life, for nearly every man of the villages of Cryde and Ham had
tried to dislodge it with long sticks to which they had lashed hooks.
The lobster had lost so many claws that after nine had been wrenched
off, its brain refused to grow any more. Its chief enemy was an old
man named Muggy, who went to the pool every Sunday morning at low
spring-tide with a rabbit skin and entrails, which he threw into the
water to lure it forth from the cleft. The lobster was too cunning, and
so it lived.
The otters rested by day on a ledge in the cave under the headland.
Here dwelt Jarrk the seal, who climbed a slab below them by shuffles
and flapping jumps. Sometimes Tarka swam in the pools of the cave,
rolling on his back to bite the drops of iron-water which dripped from
the rocky roof, but only when Jarrk was away in the sea, hunting the
conger where the rocks of Bag Leap ripped foam out of the tide.
The greatest conger of Bag Leap, who was Garbargee, had never been
caught, for whenever it saw Jarrk the seal, its enemy, it hid far
down in the crab-green water, in a hole in the rocks of the deepest
pool, where lay shell-crusted cannon and gear of H. M. sloop _Weazel_
wrecked there a century before. When no seal was about, Garbargee hung
out of the hole and stared, unblinkingly, for fish, which it pursued
and swallowed. One morning as Tarka, hungry after a stormy night, was
searching in the thong-weed five fathoms under the glimmering surface,
something flashed above him, and looking up, he saw a narrow head
with a long hooked preying beak and two large webs ready to thrust in
chase of fish. This was Oylegrin the shag, whose oily greenish-black
feathers reflected light. The smooth narrow head flickered as Oylegrin
shifted his gaze, and a pollack below mistook the flicker for a smaller
surface-swimming fish. The pollack turned to rise and take it, and
the shag saw the gleam of its side at the same time as Tarka saw it.
Oylegrin tipped up and kicked rapidly downwards, faster than an otter
could swim. Its tight feathers glinted and gleamed as it pursued the
pollack. Garbargee also saw the pollack and uncurled a muscular tail
from its hold on a jut of rock. The conger was longer than a man is
tall, and thicker through the body than Tarka. It weighed ninety
pounds. It waved above the weedy timbers, and as it passed over, crabs
hid in the mouths of cannon.
Bird, animal, and fish made a chasing arrowhead whose tip was the
glinting pollack; conger the flexible shaft, otter and shag the barbs.
Oylegrin swam with long neck stretched out, hooked beak ready to grip,
while it thrust with webbed feet farther from the bubbles which ran
out of its gullet. The pollack turned near Tarka, who swung up and
followed it. Oylegrin braked and swerved with fourteen short, stiff
tail-feathers and one upturned web. The pollack turned down a sheer
rock hung with thong-weed, but, meeting Tarka, turned up again and was
caught by Oylegrin.
The chasing arrow-head buckled against the rock, in a tangle of thongs
and ribbons and bubbles shaking upwards. The giant conger had bitten
the shag through the neck. Wings flapped, a grating, muffled cry broke
out of a bottle of air. Tarka's mouth opened wide, but his teeth could
not pierce the conger's skin. The gloom darkened, for an opaqueness was
spreading where there had been movement.
Now Jarrk the seal, who had been searching round the base of the rock,
saw an otter rising to the surface, and was swinging up towards him
when he saw a conger eel wave out the opaqueness, which was Oylegrin's
blood staining the green gloom. Garbargee held the shag in its jaws.
The undersea cloud was scattered by the swirls of flippers as the seal
chased the conger. Garbargee dropped the shag, and the cleft of rock
received its grey tenant. Jarrk swung up with a bend of his smooth
body, and lay under the surface with only his head out, drinking fresh
air, and looking at Tarka six yards away. _Wuff, wuff_, said Jarrk,
playfully. _Iss iss_, cried Tarka in alarm. The pollack escaped and
soon afterwards was feeding with other fish on the crab-nibbled corpse
of the shag.
It was not often that the otters went fishing in daylight; usually
they lay in the warm noonday sun on the sand of a cove behind the Long
Rock--a spur of which was the plucking perch of Chakchek, the One-eyed,
the peregrine falcon. One morning Chakchek half-closed his wings and
cut down at Tarka, crying _aik-aik-aik!_ and swishing past his head. It
was the cream-breasted tiercel's cry of anger. He was a swift flyer,
and soon mounted to where his mate waited at her pitch in the sky above
the precipice, scanning the lower airs for rock-dove, oystercatcher,
finch, or guillemot. When they had swept away down the north side of
the headland, Kronk the raven croaked thrice, deeply, and took the air
to twirl with his mate in the windy uptrends.
Near Sandy Cove was the Cormorants' Rock, where five cormorants
squatted during most of the daylit hours, digesting their cropfuls of
fishes. Each cormorant, as it arrived with steady black flight, would
pass the rock about fifty yards, swing round and fly back into the
wind, alighting uneasily among its brethren, some of whom had the tails
of fishes sticking out of their gullets. They held out their wings and
worked their shoulders to ease the fish down into their crops. The top
of Cormorants' Rock, where they sat, was above the highest wave.
Bag Leap was a sunken reef stretching about half a mile from the point,
over which the tides raced. Here the currents brought many seals, which
had followed salmon up the Severn Sea, on their return home to Lundy
Island. With them was a grey seal, a stranger who had come down from
the north. For several days the seals fished off the Leap, while Jarrk
roared among them and joined in their favourite game of chasing the
smallest seal, who was not black and yellowish-brown like themselves,
but a rare silvery-white. They would swim round the rocks looking for
her, sometimes remaining under water for nearly a quarter of an hour.
Once when Tarka was searching for a bass in four fathoms he met Jarrk
face to face, and the shock made him blow a big bubble. He turned and
kicked up to the light, while Jarrk swum round him in a spiral. Jarrk
was always gentle, for he had never had an enemy to shock him into
fear, and when Tarka tissed and yikkered at him, the scymitar-shaped
lip-bristles of his broad muzzle twitched, his upper lip lifted off his
lower jaw, he showed his yellow teeth, and barked. _Wuff, wuff_, said
Jarrk, jovially. _Ic-yang_, yikkered Tarka. The seal snorted; then his
back, stretched and gleaming, rolled under like a barrel.
When the seals left Bag Leap for the seventeen-mile swim to their
island home, one remained with Jarrk. She was the stranger grey
seal, and often while the other seals had been romping, she had been
exploring the far dark end of the cave behind the Long Rock, where
was a beach of boulders. Greymuzzle explored the beach for the same
purpose, and sometimes otter and seal passed by each other in the
pools. On one high-tide the seal swam into the cave, and did not return
with the ebb. For three days she hid herself, and then she flapped down
the sand and splashed into the sea, very hungry.
Many times during the rise and fall of tides the bitch-otter ran into
the cave, and on the morning of the grey seal's return to the sea
she swam round the Long Rock and crawled out of the surge among the
limpet-studded rocks of Bag Hole. Three hundred and ten feet above
her, perched on the swarded lip of a sand-coloured cliff, Kronk the
raven watched her running round and over boulders. She reached the
base of the precipice, and scrambled up a slide of scree, which had
clattered down during the rains of autumn. Gulls wove and interwove in
flight below the raven, floating past their roosts in the face of the
cliff. The scree had fallen from under the Wreckers' Path, made during
centuries by the cautious feet of men and women descending after storms
to gather what the sea had thrown on the boulders of the Hole. It was
not much wider than one of the sheep-paths on the headland. Greymuzzle
ran along it, and turning a corner by a lichened boulder, disappeared
from the sight of Kronk. She had climbed here alone several times
during the previous night.
Less than a minute afterwards the raven jumped leisurely over the edge,
and opening his wings, rose on the wind, and turning, swept back over
his perching place, over snares pegged by rabbit-runs in the grass,
and to a shillet wall a hundred yards from the precipice. One of the
brass snares Kronk was watching. It had been drawn tight about the neck
of a rabbit since early morning; the rabbit had died after two hours of
jumping and wheezing. It was cold; its fleas were swarming in agitation
over its longer hairs. Kronk was waiting for a meal off the rabbit,
but he did not like to go near it until he knew for certain that the
trapper, whom he had watched setting the snare the afternoon before,
had not tilled a gin beside it specially for Kronk. The raven knew all
about the methods of trappers, and the gins and snares they tilled.
Several times Kronk had sailed with the wind over the snared rabbit;
he sailed without checking by tail or wing, lest the trapper be spying
upon him. In every other act of his life he was as cautious, having
learned many things about man in more than a hundred years of flying.
The raven was waiting for Mewliboy, the cowardly soaring buzzard hawk,
to espy the rabbit; and when Mewliboy had ripped it open with one
stroke of his hooked beak, the raven intended to call _krok-krok-krok_
rapidly, and so summon his mate to help him deal with the buzzard, if
he were not trapped. And if he had sprung a hidden gin, then it would
be safe for Kronk. So the raven reasoned.
Greymuzzle came to the end of Wreckers' Path, and climbed up springy
clumps of sea-thrift, among gull-feathers and mussel-shells and
fish-bones, and ran along another path to the top of the precipice. She
looked left and right, often pausing to sniff the air. She picked up a
feather, ran with it a few yards, and dropped it again. She cast round
over the sward, peering into rabbit-holes and pulling out dry stalks of
thrift that the wind had blown there. Kronk watched her running, swift
and low, along the narrow wandering lines pressed in the sward by the
feet of rabbits; he saw her stop by the snared rabbit, bite on to its
neck, and watched her tugging at it. _Crr-crr!_ said Kronk to himself.
He jumped off the wall, which was covered with dry lichens dissolving
the stones with acids, and circling above Greymuzzle, croaked a long,
harsh note, meant to call the gulls. He dived at Greymuzzle, repeating
the harsh cry, and very soon nearly fifty herring gulls were screaming
about her. Alarmed by the noise, she ran back the way she had come;
the gulls followed, and Kronk had the rabbit to himself. Seeing him,
the gulls returned, screaming and flying as near to him as they dared.
Kronk pecked and pulled at his ease, knowing that the gulls would give
the alarm should a man come round either the south or the north side of
the wall, which hid approach.
Greymuzzle was slipping down the scree at the end of Wreckers' Path,
carrying a brown dry tussock of sea-thrift in her mouth, when the
remote crying of gulls became loud above the cliff. _Quoc-quoc-quoac!_
many were muttering in anger. Several hundred wheeled and floated above
the otter. She heard a soughing of wings, and looking up, saw the beak
and eyes of the raven growing larger as he plunged towards her. He had
taken nine long hops away from the rabbit, and the tenth had taken him
over the precipice edge as a man, walking fast, had taken his ninth
stride round the northern wall, three hundred yards off. Kronk opened
his wings when half-way down the cliff and sailed without a wing-beat
round the Point.
Mewing and scolding, the gulls floated higher in the wind, and hearing
them, the grey seal, who had been lolling beyond the break of rollers,
swam out twenty yards and turned to watch the top of the cliff. She
knew that the tossing flight and the cries of _quoc-quoc-quoac!_ meant
the presence of man.
Greymuzzle swam round the Long Rock with the mat of roots in her mouth,
and crawled out of the sandy surge. Tarka was lying on his back,
playing with a smooth green flat pebble of glass that he had carried
from the bed of a pool. When he saw her, he turned on his pads--neither
bone nor muscle showed in action--and ran to see what she carried.
Greymuzzle lifted her burden out of his playful way, but he jostled
her, wanting to take it, and knowing nothing of her purpose. He bit off
three rootlets, and at the mouth of the cave he ran back to his glass
pebble.
The seal watched with bleary eyes the man climbing down, and his
spaniel dog sitting three-quarters of the way down the path, frightened
to follow its master farther. Tarka played with his pebble, hidden
behind the orange-lichen and towering wall of the Long Rock. In a
scattered and unled flock the gulls drifted above the cliff. Over them
Kronk the raven, most powerful and black, cleaved the air on outspread
wings; sometimes he twirled on his back, recovering immediately. He
was practising the upward or impaling lunge of beak that he had learned
from his father one hundred and thirteen years before. High above the
raven a small dark star twinkled and swept in its orbit, twinkled and
poised on its pitch. Chakchek the One-eyed, slate-blue pinioned and
cream-breasted, was aloft. _Crr-crr_, said Kronk, as sea and greensward
turned up and over and upright again. _Crr-crr-crr_, as the man
disappeared around the Long Rock, and Kronk sailed downwind to be over
him.
A thousand feet below the raven, Tarka tapped his pebble of glass,
green and dim as the light seen through the hollow waves rearing for
their fall on the sand. The noise of waves, continuous and roaring
on the rocks at low tide, was swelled by the echo beaten back by the
cliff, and Tarka saw the man climbing round the Long Rock before he
heard him. The man, jumping from boulder to boulder, did not see Tarka,
but when he reached the sand he saw the trails of two otters. One trail
led into the cave straitly, with regular five-toed prints, except where
the track swerved from the impetuous and uneven trail of a galloping
otter. Three rootlets of sea-thrift were dropped on the spurred sand.
The strait trail led on; the other turned back to the wetted grey
pebbles, where lay crab-shells, corks, fish-tails, and a piece of glass.
The man followed the strait tracks into the cave, into twilight,
clambering over ice-cold rocks, and shining a light on the pools
wherein drops glistened and struck loud in the stillness. He moved
slowly, with glances over his shoulder at the diminishing circle of
daylight. The roof of the cave was red and brown with the iron in the
rock. Sometimes his foothold wobbled on a stone that in the motion of
tides had worn a cup for itself. A hundred yards from its mouth the
cave turned to the left, shutting darkness and sea-whispers together.
The man went on, bending down to find his way by the light he carried.
The pools became shallower, without life or weed; the roof lower and
dry. A wailing cry ran along the walls. Holding the electric torch
before him, he saw four pricks of light that moved, vanished, and
appeared again, one pair above the other. The wail went past him again,
like the cry of a hungry infant. On the grey boulder at his feet the
wan light showed a black mark, as of tar on bitten fish-bones--the
spraints of an otter.
In five minutes he had walked another fifty yards into the cave. The
pale yellow eyes shifted noiselessly in front of him. The toe of his
boot kicked something that clattered on the stones, and looking down,
he saw a bone; and near it, other bones, skulls, and shrunken hides.
He picked up a jawbone, with grinder teeth, cuspless and oblique, set
along it. Many seals had died in the cavern.
Again the wailing, not far away. The boulders sloped upwards, and
pressed one against another by his feet, made a noise of _pob-pobble_
that rang solidly and echoed down the cave and up again. Before him
something white was stirring. Picking it up, he stroked the soft,
warm hair of a baby seal, putting his finger in its mouth to stop
the wailing. While he was nursing it, he heard the hollow echo of a
plunging splash, a grumbling noise like _uch, uch!_ and a slapping as
of the palms of great hands on flat rocks. Turning his torch down into
the gloom, he saw two dull red orbs, and heard the angry bleat of a
mother seal.
He carried the white calf to the inner wall of the cave and laid it
down; then hurried to the other wall, where ledges formed natural
steps. On the top ledge an otter was crouching. By the shape of the
head he knew it was a bitch-otter; an old otter, with grey and grizzled
hairs on its muzzle. He climbed as high as he dared, and saw that it
had made a couch of dry seaweed and grasses and thrift. He peered into
the couch. The otter moved to and fro on the narrow ledge, tissing. He
could see no cubs; nor did she appear to be in whelp.
_Uch, uch!_ gasped the seal, exhausted and aching after her anguished
journey over the boulders of the cavern. She had hurried by pressing
the palms of her flippers on the ground and lifting her body forward
by short jumps, moving fast as a walking man. She reached her cub and
caressed it with her tongue, making sounds over it between sobbing
and bleating. Then she turned her back to the man, and flung sand and
pebbles at him with quick scooping strokes of her flippers. The man
took from his pocket a wooden whistle, made from an elderberry stick,
and played several soft notes upon it. The seal looked at him, enjoying
the rude music. She lay still and happy with her calf, whose head was
turned on one side as it sucked through the side of its mouth. The man
played on, moving nearer to the seal. Slowly he bent down to stroke its
head, and the seal licked his hand.