When the bees' feet shake the bells of the heather, and the ruddy
strings of the sap-stealing dodder are twined about the green spikes
of the furze, it is summertime on the commons. Exmoor is the high
country of the winds, which are to the falcons and the hawks: clothed
by whortleberry bushes and lichens and ferns and mossed trees in the
goyals, which are to the foxes, the badgers, and the red deer: served
by rain-clouds and drained by rock-clittered streams, which are to the
otters.
The moor knew the sun before it was bright, when it rolled red and
ragged through the vapours of creation, not blindingly rayed like
one of its own dandelions. The soil of the moor is of its own dead,
and scanty; the rains return to the lower ground, to the pasture and
cornfields of the valleys, which are under the wind, and the haunts of
men.
The moor is to the deer, the badgers, the foxes, the otters, the
falcons, and the hawks, pitiless despoilers of rooted and blooded
things which man has collected and set apart for himself; so they are
killed. Olden war against greater despoilers began to end with the
discoveries of iron and gunpowder; the sabre-toothed tigers, the bears,
the wolves, all are gone, and the fragments of their bones lie on
the rock of the original creation, under the lichens and grasses and
mosses, or in the museums of towns. Once hunted himself, then hunting
for necessity, man now hunts in the leisure of his time; but in nearly
all those who through necessity of life till fields, herd beasts, and
keep fowls, these remaining wildings of the moors have enemies who care
nothing for their survival. The farmers would exterminate nearly every
wild bird and animal of prey, were it not for the landowners, among
whom are some who care for the wildings because they are sprung from
the same land of England, and who would be unhappy if they thought the
country would know them no more. For the animal they hunt to kill in
its season, or those other animals or birds they cause to be destroyed
for the continuance of their pleasure in sport--which they believe to
be natural--they have no pity; and since they lack this incipient human
instinct, they misunderstood and deride it in others. Pity acts through
the imagination, the higher light of the world, and imagination arises
from the world of things, as a rainbow from the sun. A rainbow may be
beautiful and heavenly, but it will not grow corn for bread.
Within the moor is the Forest, a region high and treeless, where sedge
grasses grow on the slopes to the sky. In early summer the wild spirit
of the hills is heard in the voices of curlews. The birds fly up from
solitary places, above their beloved and little ones, and float the
wind in a sweet uprising music. Slowly on spread and hollow wings they
sink, and their cries are trilling and cadent, until they touch earth
and lift their wings above their heads, and poising, loose the last
notes from their throats, like gold bubbles rising into the sky again.
Tall and solemn, with long hooped beaks, they stalk to their nestlings
standing in wonder beside the tussocks. The mother-bird feeds her
singer, and his three children cry to him. There are usually but three,
because the carrion crows rob the curlews of the first egg laid in each
nest. Only when they find the broken empty shell do the curlews watch
the crows, black and slinking, up the hillside.
Soon the curlew lifts his wings and runs from his young, thrilling with
open beak; his wings flap, and up he flies to fetch song from heaven to
the wilderness again.
A tarn lies under two hills, draining water from a tussock-linked
tract of bog called The Chains. The tarn is deep and brown and still,
reflecting rushes and reeds at its sides, the sedges of the hills, and
the sky over them. The northern end of the tarn is morass, trodden
by deer and ponies. Water trickles away under its southern bank, and
hurries in its narrow course by falls, runnels, pools and cascades. One
afternoon Tarka climbed out of the rillet's bed, scarcely wider than
himself, and looked through green hart's-tongue ferns at the combe up
which he had travelled. Nothing moved below him except water. He walked
up the hill, and saw the tarn below him. He heard the dry croaking of
frogs, and ran down the bank that dammed the dark peat-water. A yard
down the slope he stopped.
A hen-raven, black from bristled beak to toes, hopped along the edge
of the tarn when she saw him. Tarka heard small plopping sounds and
saw ripples in the water, where bull-frogs had dived off the bank. The
raven took three hops to a pile of dead frogs, then stopped, crouched
down, poked out her head with flattened feathers, and gazed at Tarka.
Her small eyes flickered with the whitish-grey membranes of the third
eyelids. The raven was not afraid of an otter.
She had been fishing for frogs by dapping the water with her beak.
Hearing the noises, the bull-frogs swam to the surface and turned with
bulging eyes towards the dapping. The raven made a dry and brittle
croak. When the frogs heard it, the skin swelled under their necks,
and they croaked a challenge, mistaking the noises for the struggle of
a choking female. They swam within a few inches of the raven's beak.
One, perhaps two, would leap out of the water, and then the raven
opened her beak and caught one, perhaps two. She was very quick. She
hopped with them to her pile, spiked them through the head, and walked
quietly to another fishing place. She could carry eight or nine frogs
in her craw at once to her nest of young in a rocky clitter near the
head of the river Exe. When loaded, she flew with gaping beak.
Tarka lifted his head and worked his nostrils. The steadfast glance
of the small eyes along the black beak pointed at him. He smelled the
frogs, took three quaddling steps towards the raven, and stopped again.
The raven did not move, and he did not like her eyes. He turned away.
She hopped after him, and nipped the tip of his rudder as he slipped
into the tarn.
_Krok-krok-krok!_ said the raven, cocking an eye at the sky. Tarka lay
in the water and watched her picking up frog after frog and pouching
them, before she jumped off the bank and flew over the eastern hill.
When she returned, her mate was with her. They soared above the tarn.
Sometimes the cock raven shut his wings, rolled sideways, and twirled
on open wings again. _Krok-krok!_ he said to the hen, seeing below the
form of the swimming otter, darker than the dark tarn. The raven opened
his beak wide, set his wings for descent, and croaked _kron-n-n-n-n-k_
during the slow, dipping swoop, in the curve of a scythe, from one
green-lined margin to the other. Then he tumbled and twirled,
alighting on the slope of the hill, and walked down to the water to
catch frogs.
Several times each day the two ravens flew to the tarn. The cockbird
talked to Tarka whenever he saw him, and pestered him when he was
sunning himself on the bank. He would hop to within a few feet of him,
with a frog in his beak, and drop it just to windward of Tarka's nose.
Once, when Tarka was playing with a frog and had turned his back on it
for a moment, the raven picked it up and threw it to one side. Bird and
otter played together, but they never touched one another. The raven,
who was one of the three hundred sons of Kronk, would drop a stick into
the tarn and Tarka would swim after it, bringing it to the bank and
rolling with it between his paws. Occasionally the raven slyly pinched
his rudder, and Tarka would run at him, tissing through his teeth. With
flaps and hops the raven dodged him, flying up out of his way only when
driven to water.
Day after day Tarka slept in the rushes in the morass at the north
end of the tarn. Unless he was tired after the nightly prowl, the
_kron-n-n-n-k_ of the zooming raven would always wake him, and he
would either run along the bank or swim by the reeds to play with the
bird. One morning five ravens flew over the tarn, the hen leading
three smaller ravens in line and the father behind them--a black
constellation of Orion. They lit on the turf of the dam. The youngsters
sat on the bank and watched their mother dapping for frogs. Tarka ran
along the bank, amid guttural squawks and cronks, to play with them,
but the parents stabbed at him with their beaks, beating wings in his
face, and hustling him back to water. They flew over him when he bobbed
for breath, and worried him so persistently that he never again went
near a raven.
When the wind had blown the seeds of the cotton grass and the sedge
drooped tawny under the sun, the curlews flew away to the seashore and
the rivers. Little jerky flights of pipits crossed over the hollow
in the hills, their twittering passed on, and the tarn lay silent as
the sky. One afternoon in early September the silence stirred, and
along the tawny hillcrest moved something like a leafless top of an
oak-branch. It became a stag hastening with tongue a-loll to the wooded
valleys of the south. Silence settled on the moor until the hill-line
was broken by a long and silent file of staghounds running down from
The Chains on the line of a deer. Tarka stood on his bed of rushes
and watched them until they loped into the sky. When he had settled
again, a blackcock hurtled down the western hill and flew over the
tarn, followed by a grey hen with her two heath poults. Two horsemen
in redcoats slanted down the side of the hill; and after them came a
young farmer riding bare-back a stallion with blown mane and flying
tail. Then came a grey hunter, carrying a man with a face nearly as red
as his coat. Others followed, singly, and at long intervals, on weary
horses.
That evening Tarka quitted the tarn, and journeyed over The Chains to
water that hastened in a bright thread out of the bog. It entered a
narrow goyal, and the moon was hid by the hill before him. After a mile
the water turned north, under the hill whose worn grey feet it had
broken for its bed. The goyal widened by the Hoar Oak, whose splintered
stump, black as its shadow with the moon behind, glistered with the
tracks of slugs. Near the Hoar Oak stood a sapling, caged from the
teeth and horns of deer, a little tree by the grave of its father.
And Tarka went down the Hoar Oak Water which, under ridge and common,
shattered the moon into shards and lost them under the trees which grew
together in the lower valley. Its voice passed from leaf to leaf, up
through the woods where badgers were seeking mice and black slugs, and
to the night over the autumn hills.
Where two waters met, to seek the sea together, Tarka walked over the
trail of otters, and recognizing the scent of White-tip, he followed up
the water the otters had travelled. Near the end of the night, while
he was swimming in a pool scooped in the rock below a fall, he saw an
otter-shape before him. It moved slowly with the sway of water, its
head lolled on a stone. It had been drowned some hours. The whistles of
otters playing at the fall, during the previous night, had been heard
by the water-owner, who had set a gin under the wash of the fall, on a
sunken ledge of rock where otters touched after the joyful pounding of
the plunge. The otters had come back again.
Iron in the water sinks, and however long cubs call her, a bitch otter
cannot swim with three legs forever.
Tarka heard the clink of the chain as the swollen body rolled; and his
bubbles blown of fear rose behind him.
At sunrise he had crossed two miles of woods and fields--stubble
with lines of sheaves, stacked in sixes and tied in fours, fields
of mangel and sweet turnip, where partridges crouched, and pasture
given over to sheep--and found other water below Beggars' Roost hill.
Ducks were paddling by a farm as he walked upstream, passing under a
bridge, by which grew a monkey-tree with leaves as sharp as magpies'
beaks. Cottages by the waterside and a mill were left behind, and he
came to quiet meadows where only robins were singing. He crossed from
side to side, looking for a place to hide during the sunlight. Half a
mile above the mill he found a rock in the left bank of the stream,
with a wide opening half under water. Hazels grew on the bank above.
Their leaves took on the golden-green of spring in the beams of the low
autumn sun as Tarka crept under the rock.