Bogs and hummocks of the Great Kneeset were dimmed and occluded; the
hill was higher than the clouds. In drifts and hollows of silence
the vapour passed, moving with the muffled wind over water plashes
colourless in reflection. Sometimes a colder waft brought the sound of
slow trickling; here in the fen five rivers began, in peat darker than
the otter that had followed one up to its source.
Broken humps, rounded with grey moss and standing out of a maze of
channers, made the southern crest of the hill. In the main chamber,
below banks of crumbling peat, lay water dark-stained and almost
stagnant. The otter walked out and lifted his head, sniffing and
looking around him. Drops from his rudder dripped into the water and
the stirred fragments of peat drifted slowly as they settled. The
river's life began without sound, in the darkness of peat that was
heather grown in ancient sunlight; but on the slope of the hill, among
the green rushes, the river ran bright in spirit, finding the granite
that made its first song.
Tarka climbed up one of the humps of grey club moss and trod in its
centre a bed soft and warm, yet cool for the paw thrust among the long,
tight-growing fronds. The moss grew on and over a bush of heather,
whose springy stems yielded to his curled body. He had travelled from
the estuary, sleeping by day in riverside holts and marshes and feeding
at night; remembering nothing, because the moor was unfamiliar to his
nose and ears and eyes. When his paw ached, he licked it. It had been
a happy journey up the river swollen with snow water, hunting fish and
playing with sticks and stones, while mating owls called through the
darkness of valleys.
He slept curled in the moss until the last sun-whitened wisps of clouds
trailed away into space above the northern slope of the hill, and the
plashes took light and colour. The sun awoke him and he heard the twit
of a bird--a little drab pipit alone in the fen with the otter. It
watched anxiously as the otter warmed the dingy, yellow-white fur of
his belly in the sun and rolled to scratch his ears with a sprig of
heather. The pipit had seen no enemy like Tarka before, and when the
rolling otter fell off his bed and splashed into the water below, the
bird flew out of the heather in straight upward flight, twittering as
it dropped, fluttering wings that seemed too feeble to carry it higher
than its first weak ascent. Up it mounted, to fall back again, until it
turned with the wind and slanted down quickly into the heather. Again
the wilderness was to wandering air and water, until webbed feet began
to patter in the black soft peat, past wan yellow tussocks of withered
grasses, and clumps of rushes dying downwards from their brown tips.
Running in the plashes, treading the spider-like tufts of red-rusty
cotton grass, he came to a deeper and wider channer fringed with
rushes. Down a crumbling sog of peat and into the still brown-clear
water. He swam its winding length, seeking eels under the ooze which
arose behind him in a swirl of heath fragments, dark and up scattered
by the kicks of his hind-legs. A minute's swimming and the channer
widened into a shallow pit above whose broken banks the heather grew,
on sprigs dispread and blasted under the sky. Some still bore the bells
of old summer, that made a fine sibilance in the wry wind-music of the
moor.
Tarka ran past a heap of turves, set around the base of a post marking
Cranmere tarn, now empty, whither his ancestors had wandered for
thousands of years. A fox had been walking there during the night,
seeking the oval black beetles which, with moths, pipits, wheatears,
and sometimes a snipe, were the only food it found in and around the
fen. As Tarka ran out of the tarn a bird passed swiftly over his head,
gliding on down-curving dark wings and crying _go-beck, go-beck,
go-beck!_ when it saw him--one of the few grouse which lived and bred
on the lower slopes under the wind. The bird had flown from a hut
circle to the south, where seeds of gromwell were to be found. The
gromwell had grown from a single seed carried from the lower tilled
slopes of the moor on the fleece of a sheep, to which it had hooked
itself. Gromwell seeds were the favourite food of the grouse around the
source of the Two Rivers.
Tarka watched the bird until it glided below the hill, when he ran on
again, finding nothing in the plashes moving only with images of sky
and clouds and birds of solitude. Then the sun took the water, breaking
brilliant and hot in every plash; the otter galloped with instant joy
and sank in bog to his belly. He dragged himself on to a tussock of
grass, rolled, shook himself, and set off again, roaming around the fen
until he heard again the cry of running water. The cry came out of a
hollow, whose sides were scarred by the sliding of broken hummocks--the
faint cry of a river new-born. Through a winding channel in the turf,
no wider than the otter and hidden by grasses growing over it, the
little thread hastened, seeking its valley to the sea.
It fell over its first cascade and cast its first bubbles; and through
a groove between hills it found a marsh where a green moss grew with
rushes. Beyond the marsh, it ran strong and bright over its bed of
granite gravel, everywhere glinting and singing. Over and under and
past boulders of granite, splashing upon mosses whose browny-red seeds
on the tall stalks were like bitterns standing with beaks upheld.
Lichens grew on other boulders: silver with black undersides, and
curled like strange pelts curing: grey-green in the shapes of trees
and plants: bones with scarlet knuckles: horns of moose: shells and
seaweeds. The lichens fastened to the granite were as the fantastic and
brittle miniatures of strange and forgotten things of the moor.
By pools and waterfalls and rillets the river Taw grew, flowing under
steep hills that towered high above. It washed the roots of its first
tree, a willow thin and sparse of bloom, a soft tree wildered in that
place of rocks and rain and harsh grey harrying winds. A black-faced
sheep stood by the tree, cropping the sweet grass; and when a strange,
small, flashing, frightening head looked out just below its feet,
the sheep stamped and bounded away up the hill to its lamb asleep by
a sun-hot boulder. Tarka had caught a trout, the first in a mile of
river; he ate it, drank, and slipped away with the water.
He caught sixteen fish in an hour, the biggest being three ounces in
weight; and then he climbed upon a slab of granite and dozed in the
sunlight. High above him a small bird was flying in sharp, irregular
flight, mounting high to swoop towards the marsh. Every time it swooped
it opened its tail against the rush of air, so that the feathers made
a sound between the bleat of a kid and a dove's cooing. Its mate was
flying near it. They were snipes, who had chosen for nesting-place a
rush-clump in the marsh, and Tarka had disturbed them. He lay still in
sleep, and they forgot that he was there, and flew down to find worms
by pushing their long bills into the juggymire. When the sun sank
behind the high tors, Tarka awoke and went down with the river. A small
bullock, with long, black, shaggy hair, was drinking by a gravelly
ford, and smelling the otter, it snorted and plunged away, alarming the
grazing herd.
At night the stars were shorn of their flashes and burning dully
through the cold vapour which drifted down from the hills. Everything
was moistened--sprigs and faded bells of heather, young ruddy shoots
of whortle-berry, mosses, lichens, grasses, rushes, boulders, trees.
Songlight rose grey and silent. When the sun, like an immense
dandelion, looked over the light-smitten height of Cosdon Beacon,
Tarka was returning along a lynch, or rough trackway, to the river.
The grasses, the heather, the lichens, the whortle-berry bushes, the
mosses, the boulders--everything in front of the otter vanished as
though drowned or dissolved in a luminous strange sea. The icy casings
of leaves and grasses and blades and sprigs were glowing and hid in a
mist of sun-fire. Moorfolk call this morning glory the Ammil.
The brimming light gladdened Tarka, and he rolled for several minutes,
playing with a shining ball he found in the grass--the old dropping of
a wild pony. Afterwards, running down to the water, he found a holt
under a rock. It was cold and wet inside, and Tarka always slept dry
when he could. He ran out again, liking the sun, and settled on a flat
rock in the warming rays.
The rock was embedded below a fall, its lower part green with mosses
hanging in the splashes. The mosses dripped and glistened. Tarka washed
himself, the water-sounds unheard; he would have heard silence if the
river had dried suddenly. The green weeds waved in the clear water with
a calmer motion than the tail-fanning of idle fish. And then a sturdy,
dark-brown bird, with white throat and breast, lit on a stone down the
stream, and pausing a moment, jumped down into the water. The dipper
walked on the river bed, seeking beetles and shrimps and caddis-grubs.
When its beak was crammed, it walked out of a shallow, flew up in a
coloured rain of drops, and following the turns of the river, checked
fluttering by the rock whereon Tarka lay. It thrust its beak into
the moss, six inches above the tumbling water. Rapid notes, as of
water-and-stones sharpened to music in a singing bird's throat-strings,
came out of the moss, a greeting by the dipper's mate, who was brooding
on five white eggs in her wet nest. When she had swallowed the food,
the water-ousel flew away upstream, low over the water, following the
bends of the river. As he flew he sang, sipping his song from the
stones and the water.
The shadows moved, and the bright green weeds of morning waved darkly
in the river. Many times the water-ousels flew to and from the nest,
but they did not see Tarka, he slept so still in the rocky cup above
them.
Tarka gave chase to a rabbit during the next night, bolting it from
a hillside clitter of rocks in a hollow at the head of a cleave.
Near the clitter a tall stone reared head, shoulders, and body above
the rocks embedded there, in the outline of a sea-lion, smooth and
curved. The rabbit ran as far as a hole in the north-western base of
the stone sea-lion, but turned back in terror as it smelt the dreaded
smell of a fitch, or stoat. The rabbit's wits went from it in a thin
squealing; its will to run away was gripped in the base of its spine
by a feeling of sickly fascination. Its squeals caused an excited
chakkering near it, and almost immediately the fitch had it by the
side of the neck, and was dragging it into the hole. The fitch, whose
name was Swagdagger, was about to kill it when Tarka ran through the
opening. Swagdagger loosened his bite to threaten the strange big
invader, flicking his black-tipped tail and glaring at Tarka. One
kick of the rabbit's hindlegs, so powerful for running, could have
broken Swagdagger's neck; but it crouched still, its nervous force
oozing away. Tarka ran at it. Swagdagger faced him with an angry
chakker, and was nipped in the shoulder. The fitch ran out through
the opening, but turned outside and gibbered in fury. Tarka looked
once at the green points that were the fitch's eyes, and went on
with his work. Swagdagger went away, to climb a granite stone, and
chakker into the night. The moon was rising, dim in the mist, and the
harsh notes echoed about the grey stillness of the granite clitter.
_Kak-h'kak-kak_, he rattled, throwing his call one way, then another.
He was summoning the stoats of Belstone Cleave.
Tarka had eaten half the rabbit when a strong scent made him look
round again. He saw in the low opening several greenish dots, that
stared and swung about and stared again. He went on eating. Delicate
sniffs, sudden rustles and paddings, scratchings, a quick sneeze--he
peered for another way out, wanting to be alone. He found a crack
and explored it with his nose, before beginning to scrape. He sucked
in the scent of fitch, for Swagdagger's mate had her nest of young
beyond the crack.
She had been hunting a rabbit three hundred yards away when Swagdagger
had climbed the stone, and as soon as she heard the call, she
galloped back. Other fitches had run to the summons of Swagdagger.
Sharp-toothed, blood-thirsty, and without fear, they ran up and
down by the opening, sniffing the delicious scent of fresh-slain
rabbit, weaving quick bodies and lifting their small heads to sniff,
sniff, sniff. The noises of teeth at work made a furious stir in the
assembling tribe. The older dog-fitch yakkered with rage, as he wove in
and out of the swift and impatient throng.
The little angry fitches in the cranny, beyond the nose of Tarka,
heard the cry of their mother and spat at the enemy--all moving things
unknown were enemies to the little fitches. She ran through the fitches
outside in the moonlight and into the cave, jumping in her twisty way
for a bite behind the otter's ear. Tarka shook her and tried to kill
her, but she ran at him again, and with her ran Swagdagger and all the
fitches who had come at his alarm. Tarka trod on stoats; he was pricked
all over by the teeth of stoats; he chopped one through the ribs and
back, but its biting did not cease; he chopped it again, trying to hold
it by his forepaws, but though broken, it was alive and angry, and bit
through the skin of his throat and hung there, as long as his rudder.
He pushed through fitches into the moonlight, and the fitches followed
him, including the four young ones who were excited and eager for play.
The pack chased him, throwing their sharp tongues, all the rugged way
down to the river, into which Tarka jumped with a splash. Three of
them fell in after him, but they did not like the water and crawled
out spitting and sneezing, tough and lithe and sinuous as bines of
honeysuckle. Unable to find the otter, the dog-fitches started a fight
among themselves.
As Swagdagger's mate went up the hill again with her young running
behind her, she met a badger, who was going to drink in the river. The
grey waddler, animate granite, whose head was heavier than her whole
body, lumbered out of the way. He sought no unnecessary trouble with
fitches, and he had eaten up the rabbit under the Seal Stone.
* * * * *
The river hurried round the base of the cleave, on whose slopes stunted
trees grew, amid rocks, and scree that in falling had smashed the
trunks and torn out the roots of willows, thorns, and hollies. It
wandered away from the moor, a proper river, with bridges, brooks,
islands, and mills.
Soon the oaks above the river would break into leaf. Magpies had
topped their nests with thorns, and buzzards were soaring long after
owl-light. Kingfishers and dippers had hatched their eggs--there was a
dipper's nest, hanging dishevelled like a beard of moss, under nearly
every stone bridge spanning the river. The innocent white flowers of
the savage blackthorn had withered brown and shaken into the wind. Lent
lilies--the wild daffodils of the woods and meads--clasped with their
blooms, shrivelled and loving, the seeds of winter's hope. Already
the celandines were old thoughts of the spring, their leaves hid by
rising docks and nettles and flowering dog's foot mercury. Badger
cubs had been taught to use the latrines outside the tunnels. It was
mid-April, swallow-time in the West Country. Otter cubs romped in a
big stick-heap resting on the nose of an island above a bridge, eager
to play with the moon on the water. Their mother, who was Tarka's
sister, attacked him when he looked on them in the stick-heap, and bit
him in the shoulder, for she was most anxious, and did not remember her
brother cub.
Though the birds scolded, the foxes snarled, and his own kind drove him
away, Tarka had many friends, whom he played with and forgot--sticks,
stones, water-weeds, slain fish, and once an empty cocoa-tin, a bright
and curious thing that talked strangely as it moved over the shallows,
but sank into the pool beyond, sent up three bubbles, and would play no
more.