At sunset, as he was crossing a shoal to deep water under an old ash
tree, he stopped at the taint of hounds lying on the scour pitted by
their feet. Quietly he turned back to the water to swim sunken in the
current, rising only to take in air. Round two bends he drifted, then
landed and harkened. Ran up the bank, uncertain. Rose on hind feet,
dripping and anxious. A dwarf owl making a peacock-like yowling in the
woods beyond the meadow, the squeak of mice, the dry cough of an ewe.
He ran back to the river, and after eating fish, he played with a rope
of water twisting and untwisting out of a drain, trying to catch it
between his paws and bite it as it plattered on his face and chest.
An otter-path lay across the next bend, and he followed it to the
middle of the field, where he hesitated. Strange smells lay in the dew.
He scraped at a place in the grass where paper had been rammed by a
pole, near orange peel covered by a loose tuft. He walked on, nose to
ground, and smelt man, where hobnailed boots had pressed the turf and
crushed cigarette-ends. He turned back, and would have gone straight to
water if he had not heard the cry of a bitch-otter at the far end of
the path. _Hu-ee-ee-ic!_ he answered, and ran along to find her. Near
the middle of the meadow he stopped as though he had trod on a gin. The
taint of hounds lay thick with the scent of otter. Grasses were smeared
with blood and spittle. His hair rose on his back. He blew through open
mouth, swung his head about as though looking for hounds, and was gone,
silent as his low moon shadow.
The river flowed darkly to the bend, where it broke shallow over
shillets that scattered the moonlight. Tarka saw a movement at the tail
of the shoal, where an otter was listening. She ran to him and licked
his face, then she mewed, and ran on alone by the riverside. Tarka
followed her. She was draggled and miserable. She caught a trout and
called him, but when he reached her she yikkered and started to eat
it herself. She mewed again, and ran into the water. And following
her, Tarka returned to the scour opposite the ash-tree holt where that
morning the hounds had plunged and bayed. All the way upstream she had
been calling, and searching under banks, and on the beds of pools.
At length she crawled on the scour with something in her mouth, and
dropped it on the stones. She licked it from head to tail, and mewing
again, sank back into the water and returned with another, which she
laid with the first-found. Perhaps she could not count beyond two;
perhaps White-tip had not known in her terror how many cubs she had
dropped in the water, when the terrier had driven her out of her holt.
The Master had seen them, sinking in the pool, lit by a sun-shaft;
and hounds were whipped off. They drew on up the river, and found the
dog-otter, her mate, and killed him three hours later as he tried to
cross a meadow to the wooded hillside.
The old dog and White-tip had wandered together since Tarka had been
driven from her in the autumn. Her first litter had been born in
January, when the river had frozen, and one day White-tip, returning to
the holt, had found them gone. She had called them, seeking everywhere,
and in pain, but she had found none to suckle, for a badger walking
on the ice had dug them out with his long black claws and eaten them.
White-tip's grief had been so keen that soon it had grown less; and she
had lain with her mate in the bracken of Ferny Hill.
And now White-tip was grieving again. For two nights, as she travelled
down the river with Tarka, she would cease hunting, and run aimlessly
on the banks, whining and searching. During the third night she left
him and returned to the ash-tree holt, wherein she had been making
ready a couch of reeds and grasses. Into the holt she carried a stone,
laying it on the couch, and licking it, until a sudden cry called
her outside again. She traced the cry to a stone on the shallow, and
brought it in her mouth to the holt; soon the couch was filled with wet
stones.
Tarka travelled on alone. As the river grew older, so the meadows and
cornfields beyond its banks stretched a wider green over the age-long
silt filling the valley's groin. Foxgloves claimed the hillsides
wherever the oakwoods were felled, storing in their leaves the green
power to raise red-purple spires to the midsummer sky. Seen by day
from the hilltops, the river lay in its course like a viper broken
by a buzzard's beak and claws, marked with brown on its twisted and
bluish-white coils. Twin burnished lines were set by the river,
touching its banks, straitly leaving it to its windings, and crossing
it on stone bridges topped by tarred iron girders. Under the girders
jackdaws were building their nests of sticks and sheep's wool and
paper picked up in the early morning from cottage gardens. The rolling
thunder over their heads did not disturb them, for, like the otters,
they had grown to the noise of trains in the valley.
Below one bridge the river slowed into a wide pool, where the waters
of a smaller south-flowing river meditated before turning north with
big brother Taw. Tarka was cruising over the bed of the Junction Pool
when the moon, shaking and distorted by eddies above, was cut by dark
and narrow slips. A down-stroke of his strong rudder and a push off a
rock by his hind-legs swung him up for the chase of shoaling fish. They
darted away in a zigzag, turning together, up and down and across the
pool. Tarka pursued one until he caught it but as he was swimming to
the bank he saw another, and followed it with the fish in his mouth. He
snicked it as it darted back past his shoulder. Strokes of the heavy
tapering rudder, over two inches wide at its base and thirteen inches
long, that could stun a fish by its blow, enabled him to turn his body
in water almost as quickly as on land.
He shook the fish out of his
mouth as soon as he had killed them, for now he was hunting for sport.
The dace glinted about the water, the slayer often leaping after a fish
that threw itself into the air and jumped as it hit water again. A
stain began to move in the water, and a plaice flapped off the bottom
and swam in what it thought was the beginning of a flood, when worms
came swirling into the Junction Pool. This sea-fish had lived a strange
and lonely life in fresh water ever since it had been swallowed in the
estuary by a heron and ejected alive from the crop a quarter of an hour
afterwards when the bird, flying up the valley, had been shot by a
water-bailiff.
The shape of an otter loomed in the water, and the plaice swam down
again in a rapid, waving slant, perceived by a one-eyed eel that was
lying with its tail inside a bullock's skull wedged in a cleft of
rock. Thrust through the eel's blank eyesocket was the rusty barbed
point of a hook, the shank of which stuck out of its mouth--a hook
almost straightened before the line had broken. Tarka swam up behind
the eel on its blind side, and opened his mouth wide to bite across the
back.
The eel was longer than Tarka. It lashed its tail round his neck and
bit on to his nose, when gripped below the paired fins. Bubbles were
blown in two strings, one of them fine as charlock seeds, for the
hook-shank was rammed up the otter's left nostril. Then the strings
ceased, and stray bubbles arose, for the eel was throttling the otter.
Tarka clawed it with his paws, but the small claws were worn by many
weeks' scratching for trout in granite hides, and the eel's skin was
slippery. Flattened on the pool's bed, the plaice watched the struggle
of its two enemies.
Tarka knocked it with his paws, and scraped himself against stones
and rocks, so that he could be free to swim up and eat it. For three
minutes, until his breath was gone, he tried to shake off the eel. Then
he kicked heavily and slowly up to the surface and tried to climb out
by the nearest land--a sheer bank. Its head in the air, the eel lifted
its bite on the otter's bleeding nose and sank away down. Immediately
Tarka sprang half out of the water and with a _plop!_ like a round
stone went after it, catching it below the vent. The eel lashed again,
and Tarka unbit. He swam under and bit it at the back of the neck,
and again released it. The eel tried to wobble down to the bullock's
skull, but Tarka dragged it back; and so he played with it, always
avoiding the bite of its big jaws. At length it grew feeble, and he
took it to a shallow, where, after walking round it and pretending it
was not there, he ate what he wanted of the tail-end.
When he had washed his face he went back into the pool, harrying the
dace until many score of the silvery fishes floated away on their
sides. He harried them until the moon sank under the hill and he grew
tired of his sport. Then spreading his legs, he drifted away out of the
pool, past an island that divided the river--a narrow island, shaped
like an otter, with a rudder of mud carved at its lower end by the
swift waters. Alders and willows grew on the island, many broken by
uprooted trees lugged down by floods.
Two hours later Tarka was hungry again, and eating a two-pound trout,
fat with easy feeding on mullyheads, taken under the third railway
bridge after the Junction Pool. Below the bridge, on the right bank,
the river passed part of its old course, now dry save for green-scummed
pools, left by March risings, among the shillets. The law of life was
also the law of water--everlasting change. It had carved this deserted
bed through the centuries, raised it with shillets, and turned away
to a newer course. Brambles, thorns, elderberry bushes, nettles, and
briars grew entangled along the silent waterway. It was the haunt
of grass snakes, frogs, mice, and a wild sandy ram-cat without any
paws. For the first three years of its life the cat had been lean,
feeding on rats in and around a corn-mill and answering to the name
of Shaggery. During its fourth year it had gone wild in the woods and
grown fat on rabbits, until caught in a gin. It limped back to the mill
and became tame again, but when the pad had rotted away and the stump
had healed, it had lain rough in the woods. It was caught a second
time, losing its other paw. For two years it had lived in the old
river-bed, prowling forth at night and living on frogs, mice, beetles,
and carrion fish left by otters on the banks and shoals. It moved by
bounding hops from its hindlegs, like a rabbit. Its claws had drawn
up above the ends of the short stumps, useful for a hugging hold on
its prey, but a hindrance in washing its face. Sometimes otter-hounds,
tearing their way through the undergrowth, had owned the scent of this
cat, whose hiding-place was in a deep rabbit bury under a thorn brake.
Tarka ran over its scent, and followed it along the old riverbed.
The cat was sitting on a boulder, from which it had been watching a
vole-run below. Tarka stopped, surprised as the cat. Shaggery's ears
flattened, its body increased into a loop of agitated fur, and it let
out such a waul that Tarka's back began to twitch. The cry was loud,
and slowly champed through teeth. It sank to a low grinding threat when
Tarka stood up to sniff what was wauling at him. He steadied himself
by touching the stone on which it stood, and the ram-cat made a noise
like one Tarka had heard before, when a pailful of hot embers had been
shot over the village quay by the estuary. He fled, remembering a burn.
Alone again, the ram-cat lowered body on stumps, and lifted ears to
listen for voles.
When the next night White-tip followed Tarka's trail along the dry bed,
Shaggery was sitting above the bury, in an old mossy-damp magpie's
nest. Again the waul and the grinding of teeth, again the spitting
hiss, and again an otter hurrying back to water.
Tarka had gone under the last bridge above the tide, and the sun was
rising when he crept out by a mud glidder and curled himself in a bed
of green flags. Water ran clear and shallow on its rocky bed below the
mud. Swallows flew to and fro over the river channel, winding deeper
and broader through the meadows. All things were warmed in the sun. The
grass and dock-leaves under the tide-wall was greenish-grey with salt
and silt dried on blade and stalk and leaf, after the sluggard tide's
lapse. Seaweed, black and brittle, lay below the wall with scriddicks
of old rush-tops and sticks among white flowers of scurvy-grass. The
sun moved above the oakwood that sloped from the rocky bank across
the river; the leaves of lower branches were blenched, and weed-hung.
A hot, broken glitter, like a flight of silver birds, played lightly
on the green flags where Tarka was lying. One brilliant beak of light
slipped round a flag and pecked at his eye until he awoke, and yawned,
and turned on his back. His nostrils lazily tested the wind that
sometimes trembled the tips of the flags. It was a clean wind, and he
lay content.
Three buzzards sailed over the river, one above the other, like
the stars in Orion's Belt; the top bird moving with steady wings,
the lower bird circling, and the lowest veering on broad vanes,
cleaver-shaped, heavily with rolling sweeps into the lingering wind
that eddied about the top of oak trees. The tree-trunks were dark; only
from the high young branches had the sun struck colour, yellow and pale
green.
A lustrous blue line was drawn against the dark forest of trunks as
a kingfisher sped down-river. The buzzards drifted away south, their
wings narrowing with a gold glister, and shrank into the sun.
_Peet!_ The short, shrill cry came from a silver point drawing a
ruddy line over the mud. With a fish in its beak the kingfisher sped
upriver to its young in a sandy bank above the Mouse Hole Pool.
Martins twittered along the river-bank, and hovered about the heads
of bullocks, taking crisp-winged flies from their muzzles and between
their horns. Tarka yawned, and dozed again.
A dark cloud arose over the crest of the oakwood, and the greenery of
young leaves faded. Rain beat on the flags. A million million drops in
the river leapt to meet the drops fresh-risen from the Atlantic. The
cloud passed, and again the meadow was hot and bright. The swallows
flew up the river, quitting at the coils its glitter and yellow
kingcups, and fleeing on across the green meadow to the road by the
bridge. Here, in the hollows of the broken road surface, was to be
found after rain a greyish mud that set harder than the browny mud of
the salty scourings in the river. Only by the bridge was this mud
to be found, for the road sloped up and down over the river, and the
slopes were not tarred, lest the feet of horses slip. The aerial masons
were about to build their nests on the rafters of shippen and barn;
they flew in pairs, singing their sun-songs.
Beside the bridge grew an elderberry tree, straight and sturdy as a
young oak in a park; one of the few soft-cored elderberry trees in
the country of the Two Rivers that had not grown up a cripple of the
winds. Its leaves partly hid a motor-car, in whose closed body, shut
away from the wind and the sun of the English spring, sat some men and
women. They were awaiting hounds before moving to the parapet of the
bridge, and perhaps, if a kill seemed certain and early, to the meadow
over the low wooden fence. Other motor-cars stopped on the bridge. The
swallows swooping over the stonework saw the sunlight browned by the
smoke of engines, and dived back again over the grass. The baying of
hounds above the bridge became louder, for the otter had swam through
the lower stickle, and was travelling downstream.
The hunted otter was White-tip. She had been chased for nearly three
hours. Always the cries and tongues and legs had followed her, up the
pools and down the pools, from holt to holding, from holding to shallow.
_Tally Ho!_
She saw faces and waving arms above the bridge, but she did not turn
back.
* * * * *
Light-laden drops rolled down the green flags as their points drew
down the sky. Tarka lay still, watching. They rustled and broke with
soft sappy noises. White-tip was pressing through the bed of flags.
Her mouth was open. Tarka, who had been listening for half an hour to
the distant cries of men and hounds, stared at the movement. A sudden
clamour ran down the river, loud and startling, for Deadlock had found
White-tip's deep seals in the mud, where she had crept out of the water.
The two otters ran through the flags and slid down the mud to the river
again. Tarka spread himself in the shallow flow, moving with light
touches of claws just over the rocks and stones of the bed. He moved
slowly, as an eel moves, as smooth as the water, and with sinuous ease.
Sometimes he crept out at the edge of the mud, walked a few yards,
and slipped back into the water again. Hounds were crushing the flags
around his bed, and throwing their tongues along his line.
He swam through a long pool at his fastest pace, putting up his
nostrils every fifty yards to breathe, and down again immediately. He
left the oakwood behind him, and came to a narrow gut draining the
water of a small marshy valley, where bullocks were grazing. The gut
lay under trees above a rocky bank. Its other bank was mud. Seaweed
hung on the roots of trees six feet above his head. Tarka walked up
the gut, as far as the first channer in its glidder, partly hid by the
broad strongly keeled leaves of river sedge. He followed it into the
marsh, and climbing out, ran along a path trodden by cattle, through
a gate and down to a lower marsh, hidden from the opposite bank by a
tide-wall. The tongue of Deadlock spoke across the river, and Tarka
slipped into another gut. He trod through brown mud to a black ooze,
in which he moved like an eel. The drain led under the tide-wall to
the glidder above the river. It led into darkness, with light coming
through the chinks of a circular wooden trap, that kept the tides back
from the land. He sniffed at a chink, and waited in the ooze.
For two hours Tarka lay behind the wooden trap, while the noises of
hunting moved away into remoteness. Slowly the sound of the low running
river was stilled into slack water. Tricklings, the lap and slanting
wash of ripple-ends, a turning drift of froth and sticks below the
mud--the sea was moving up again. A heron alighted at the bottom of the
muddy glidder, and stalked gravely into water to his knees. Flukes were
rising off the silt, seeking food. The heron bent down and peered. He
stepped forward on one foot, and speared with a swift plunge. Then he
stared up the river. A thin-drawn thread of sound in the air, looped
to another and another and another; loosed as four gossamers floating
by in the wind. It was the re-call to hounds. In the after-quiet
the heron stalked to his spearing again. The murky water twired by
the knee-joints of his thin green legs. Splash, flicker, and shaken
drops--he swallowed fluke after fluke; but when twenty yards beyond the
trap he straightened up his neck, stood on his toes, jumped hurriedly
out of the water, and flapped away, pulling up his shanks after him
and tucking his long neck and head between his shoulders. He had seen
the heads of men.
Smells of the lower river, riding up with the young tide into the Mouse
Hole Pit, had overspread the wishy washy otter-scent, and the pack
was being taken back to kennels. The horn-like voice of the huntsman,
as he talked to hounds by name, came to the otter through the chinks
of the sodden elm-wood trap. They trotted on the opposite bank, happy
at the huntsman's heels, led home by aged Harper, who had taught them
all to mark an otter. Flews to flews with him was Deadlock, and at his
stern, Bluemaid, old before her time, worn-out by swimming. Then came
Pitiful, who worked hard and alone; whenever it was possible to go
wrong, Pitiful went wrong; it was Pitiful who, whenever they passed by
the dry river-bed, led them on the trail of Shaggery the ram-cat; if
a hound were missing, it was always Pitiful. Near her was Captain, a
black-and-tan rough dog, who looked like a lurcher; the huntsman did
not take Captain to important meets, for Captain's voice was like a
knife whose edge is turned. He did not throw his tongue, he screamed;
and sometimes in his excitement he babbled, flinging water-lies
about. Bite'm the terrier hurried among them, sometimes sniffing in
tufts, hoping to find a rat to shake; and following Bite'm, like an
easy-going, big, heavy boy led by a sharp little quick-eyed tacker,
came Rufus, who cared more for a nest of fieldmice than for a joint or
rib of rank otter. After Rufus on the tide-wall ran Dewdrop, whose
long fawn-coloured hair was curly with wet. Her ears hung long and
loose.
Often while the trophies were being taken by the huntsman those
ears would flap between blue-stocking'd legs, and teeth would slyly
nip through wool, as though it were brown fur of the worry. By the
Wharfdale bitch--for Dewdrop was the only true otter-hound in the
pack--ran Playboy and Actor, whose dingy-white shapes were so alike
that only the huntsman could name them truly. Behind them came Render
and Fencer, who always tore at roots of a holt with their teeth;
Hemlock, with one eye blind, the dark pupil grey-veined with the scar
of a black-thorn prick; Hurricane, the ancient Irish staghound with
the filed canines; Barbrook and Bellman, Boisterous and Chorister,
Coraline, Sailoress, Waterwitch, and Armlet, who always stood apart
from the pack during holt-marking and bayed moodily like a lighthouse
siren. Then came Sandboy, who fought other hounds at the worry, and
Grinder and Darnel--hounds who had chased the fox. They trotted on
the tide-wall between the short, quick-stepping huntsman and the
long-legged whip and kennel-boy, whose long loose striding had been
formed in early years by crossing ploughlands on his way to school.
Twenty paces behind the pack walked the Master, with two members of
the Hunt. He was saying that it had been a great day, only lacking a
kill to complete it, when old Harper stopped and lifted his muzzle.
The air on the water, colder than the land air, was brimming over the
sea-wall, and Harper had smelled an otter. Deadlock moved into the
air-stream, threw up his head, whimpered, and ran down the grassy bank
to the broken turf above the glidder. Sterns were waved like feathers.
Deadlock leapt into the river, followed by half the pack. Pitiful
started patiently to work the water-line of the mud, and Captain
babbled in excitement as he lapped and swam.
The water was three feet deep. Hounds scrambled up the glidder, some
slipping down, drawing long claw-lines on the harder clay beneath. They
whimpered and scratched before the round wooden trap, and Armlet bayed
them on from the bank above. Terrier Bite'm pushed his small eager
body between their flanks, under their legs, whining and yelping. Five
men waded the river, testing a footway with taps of iron-shod poles
before them. Thinking that the otter they had hunted for more than
five hours was hiding inside, and that the tired hounds would have no
chance to kill even an exhausted otter in the rising water, the pack
was not withdrawn when Bite'm was taken to the open end of the drain,
where Tarka's deep seals in the lower ooze showed like big blackberries
crushed in the mud. Bite'm was given a pat on his ribs and gently
shoved into the dark hole. He crept in, quick and shivering.
The ooze sucked at Tarka's webs as he turned away from the
light-striped lid of the drain. His heart beat as fast as water-drops
drip without dribbling. The hanging sodden door went _sug-plog-sug_ as
paws struck it. He looked up and down, round and up again, for a way
of escape. He crawled in the ooze, away from the immense din, and saw
an enemy coming towards him an instant before he smelled it. _Is-is-iz!_
They met and joined and twisted into shapes smoothed by ooze. The
terrier got a grip on the otter's rudder and hung on to it. Tarka
bit and bit and bit, quick as a striking viper, in cheek, shoulder,
flank, nose, and ear. Noises of bumping and squelching and snarling and
tissing became louder when the trap was lifted and light showed the
red and black shaking shapes. The otter's rudder, near the opening,
was seized and pulled by a hand. Another hand gripped the terrier's
scruff. The long black smooth shape was lugged out of the drain, the
terrier fixed to it. Hounds were leaping and clamouring up at the men.
A hand held Bite'm's tail-stump, another hand squeezed, trying to make
him unclench. Tarka writhed and contorted as he hung by his rudder; his
back became a bow, suddenly bending up, and his teeth made a row of
holes in a hand. The jerk made his rudder slip, and he dropped among
boots, to squirm between legs and away down the glidder. He pulled
Bite'm with him.
Hounds trod on him, snarling and thrusting. Tarka was hidden under
their heads, picked up and thrown sideways, then dropped and picked up
and shaken. Eight jaws held him at one time in the midst of a deep
sullen growling. He was hid in the plunging of white and brown and
black bodies. He bit Deadlock through the flews, and again in the nose,
as he was lifted on other muzzles, Bite'm still joined to the base
of his rudder. The pack bore him down to the tide, where the worry
broke up. Heads were lifted again, and tongues thrown. Hounds stooped
to water; some swam after Captain, who was cutting the air with his
knife-edge voice.
But Tarka was gone, and so was Bite'm. The terrier came to the surface
a minute later, forty yards away, and swam inshore, spluttering and
gasping, the short hairs of the otter's rudder still between his teeth.