He was awakened by the tremendous baying of hounds. He saw feet
splashing in the shallow water, a row of noses, and many flacking
tongues. The entrance was too small for any head to enter. He crouched
a yard away, against the cold rock. The noise hurt the fine drums of
his ears.
Hob-nailed boots scraped on the brown shillets of the water-bed, and
iron-tipped hunting poles tapped the rocks.
_Go'r'n leave it! Leave it! Go'r'n leave it! Deadlock! Harper! Go'r'n
leave it!_
Tarka heard the horn and the low opening became lighter.
_Go'r'n leave it! Captain! Deadlock! Go'r'n leave it!_ The horn twanged
fainter as the pack was taken away. Then a pole was thrust into the
holt and prodded about blindly. It slid out again. Tarka saw boots and
hands and the face of a terrier. A voice whispered, _Leu in there,
Sammy, leu in there!_ The small ragged brown animal crept out of the
hands. Sammy smelled Tarka, saw him, and began to sidle towards him.
_Waugh-waugh-waugh-wa-waugh._ As the otter did not move, the terrier
crept nearer to him, yapping with head stretched forward.
After a minute Tarka could bear the irritating noises no more. Tissing,
with open mouth, he moved past the terrier, whose snarly yapping
changed to a high-pitched yelping. The men on the opposite bank stood
silent and still. They saw Tarka's head in sunlight, which came through
the trees behind them and turned the brown shillets a warm yellow. The
water ran clear and cold. Tarka saw three men in blue coats; they did
not move and he slipped into the water. It did not cover his back, and
he returned to the bankside roots. He moved in the shadows and under
the ferns at his ordinary travelling pace. One of three watching men
declared that an otter had no sense of fear.
No hound spoke but the reason of the silence was not considered by
Tarka, who could not reason such things. He had been awakened with a
shock, he had been tormented by a noise, he had left a dangerous place,
and he was escaping from human enemies. As he walked upstream, with
raised head, his senses of smell, sight, and hearing were alert for his
greatest enemies, the hounds.
The stream being narrow and shallow, the otter was given four minutes'
law. Four minutes after Tarka had left he heard behind him the short
and long notes of the horn, and the huntsman crying amidst the tongues
of hounds, _Ol-ol-ol-ol-ol-ol-over! Get on to 'm! Ol-ol-ol-ol-over!_ as
the pack returned in full cry to the water. Hounds splashed into the
water around the rock, wedging themselves at its opening and breaking
into couples and half-couples, leaping through the water after the wet
and shivering terrier, throwing their tongues and dipping their noses
to the wash of scent coming down.
Deadlock plunged at the lead, with Coraline, Sailoress, Captain, and
Playboy. They passed the terrier, and Deadlock was so eager that he
knocked him down. Sammy picked up his shivery body and followed.
Tarka sank all but his nostrils in a pool and waited. He lay in the
sunlit water like a brown log slanting to the stones on which his
rudder rested. The huntsman saw him. Tarka lifted his whiskered head
out of the water, and stared at the huntsman. Hounds were speaking
just below. From the pool the stream flowed for six feet down the
smooth slide up which he had crept. When Deadlock jumped into the
pool and lapped the scent lying on the water, Tarka put down his head
with hardly a ripple, and like a skin of brown oil moved under the
hound's belly. Soundlessly he emerged, and the sun glistened on his
water-sleeked coat as he walked down on the algae-smeared rock. He
seemed to walk under their muzzles slowly, and to be treading on their
feet.
_Let hounds hunt him! Don't help hounds or they'll chop him!_
The pack was confused. Every hound owned the scent, which was like a
tangled line, the end of which was sought for unravelling. But soon
Deadlock pushed through the pack and told the way the otter had gone.
As Tarka was running over shillets, with water scarcely deep enough to
cover his rudder, Deadlock saw him and with stiff stern ran straight
at him. Tarka quitted the water. The dead twigs and leaves at the
hedge-bottom crackled and rustled as he pushed through to the meadow.
While he was running over the grass, he could hear the voice of
Deadlock raging as the bigger black-and-white hound struggled through
the hazel twigs and brambles and honeysuckle bines. He crossed fifty
yards of meadow, climbed the bank, and ran down again on to a tarred
road. The surface burned his pads, but he ran on, and even when an
immense crimson creature bore down upon him he did not go back into the
meadow across which hounds were streaming. With a series of shudders
the crimson creature slowed to a standstill, while human figures rose
out of it, and pointed. He ran under the motor-coach, and came out into
brown sunshine, hearing above the shouts of men the clamour of hounds
trying to scramble up the high bank and pulling each other down in
their eagerness.
He ran in the shade of the ditch, among bits of newspaper, banana and
orange skins, cigarette ends and crushed chocolate boxes. A long yellow
creature grew bigger and bigger before him, and women rose out of it
and peered down at him as he passed it. With smarting eyes he ran two
hundred yards of the road, which for him was a place of choking stinks
and hurtful noises. Pausing in the ditch, he harkened to the clamour
changing its tone as hounds leaped down into the road. He ran on for
another two hundred yards, then climbed the bank, pushed through dusty
leaves and grasses and briars that would hold him, and down the sloping
meadow to the stream. He splashed into the water and swam until rocks
and boulders rose before him. He climbed and walked over them. His
rudder drawn on mosses and lichens left a strong scent behind him.
Deadlock, racing over the green shadowed grassland, threw his tongue
before the pack.
In the water, through shallow and pool, his pace was steady, but not
hurried; he moved faster than the stream; he insinuated himself from
slide to pool, from pool to boulder, leaving his scent in the wet marks
of his pads and rudder.
People were running through the meadow, and in the near distance arose
the notes of the horn and hoarse cries. Hounds' tongues broke out
united and firm, and Tarka knew that they had reached the stream. The
sun-laden water of the pools was spun into eddies by the thrusts of
his webbed hind legs. He passed through shadow and dapple, through
runnel and plash. The water sparkled amber in the sunbeams, and
his brown sleek pelt glistened whenever his back made ripples. His
movements in water were unhurried, like an eel's. The hounds came
nearer.
The stream after a bend flowed near the roadway, where more motor-cars
were drawn up. Some men and women, holding notched poles, were watching
from the cars--sportsmen on wheels.
Beggars' Roost Bridge was below. With hounds so near Tarka was heedless
of the men that leaned over the stone parapet, watching for him. They
shouted, waved hats, and cheered the hounds. There were ducks above
the bridge, quacking loudly as they left the stream and waddled to the
yard, and when Tarka came to where they had been, he left the water
and ran after them. They beat their wings as they tried to fly from
him, but he reached the file and scattered them, running through them
and disappearing. Nearer and nearer came Deadlock, with Captain and
Waterwitch leading the pack. Huntsman, whippers-in, and field were left
behind, struggling through hedges and over banks.
Hounds were bewildered when they reached the yard. They ran with noses
to ground in puzzled excitement. Captain's shrill voice told that Tarka
had gone under a gate. Waterwitch followed the wet seals in the dust,
but turned off along a track of larger webs. The line was tangled
again. Deadlock threw his belving tongue. Other hounds followed, but
the scent led only to a duck that beat its wings and quacked in terror
before them. A man with a rake drove them off, shouting and threatening
to strike them. Dewdrop spoke across the yard and the hounds galloped
to her, but the line led to a gate which they tried to leap, hurling
themselves up and falling from the top bar. A duck had gone under the
gate, but not Tarka.
All scent was gone. Hounds rolled in the dust or trotted up to men and
women, sniffing their pockets for food. Rufus found a rabbit skin and
ate it; Render fought with Sandboy--but not seriously, as they feared
each other; Deadlock went off alone. And hounds were waiting for a lead
when the sweating huntsman, grey pot-hat pushed back from his red brow,
ran up with the two whippers-in and called them into a pack again. The
thick scent of the Muscovy ducks had checked the hunt.
Tarka had run through a drain back to the stream, and now he rested in
the water that carried him every moment nearer to the murmurous glooms
of the glen below. He saw the coloured blur of a kingfisher perching on
a twig as it eyed the water for beetle or loach. The kingfisher saw him
moving under the surface, as his shadow broke the net of ripple shadows
that drifted in meshes of pale gold on the stony bed beneath him.
While he was walking past the roots of a willow under the bank, he
heard the yapping of the terrier. Sammy had crept through the drain,
and was looking out at the end, covered with black filth, and eagerly
telling his big friends to follow him downstream. As he yapped,
Deadlock threw his tongue. The stallion hound was below the drain, and
had re-found the line where Tarka had last touched the shillets. Tarka
saw him, ten yards away, and slipping back into the water, swam with
all webs down the current, pushing from his nose a ream whose shadow
beneath was an arrow of gold pointing down to the sea.
Again he quitted the water and ran on land to wear away his scent. He
had gone twenty yards when Deadlock scrambled up the bank with Render
and Sandboy, breathing the scent which was as high as their muzzles.
Tarka reached the waterside trees again a length ahead of Deadlock,
and fell into the water like a sodden log. Deadlock leapt after him
and snapped at his head; but the water was friendly to the otter, who
rolled in smooth and graceful movement away from the jaws, a straight
bite of which would have crushed his skull.
Here sunlight was shut out by the oaks, and the roar of the first fall
was beating back from the leaves. The current ran faster, narrowing
into a race with twirls and hollows marking the sunken rocks. The roar
grew louder in a drifting spray. Tarka and Deadlock were carried to
where a broad sunbeam came down through a break in the foliage and lit
the mist above the fall. Tarka went over in the heavy white folds of
the torrent and Deadlock was hurled over after him. They were lost in
the churn and pressure of the pool until a small brown head appeared
and gazed for its enemy in the broken honeycomb of foam. A black and
white body uprolled beside it, and the head of the hound was thrust up
as he tried to tread away from the current that would draw him under.
Tarka was master of whirlpools; they were his playthings. He rocked
in the surge with delight; then high above he heard the note of the
horn. He yielded himself to the water and let it take him away down the
gorge into a pool where rocks were piled above. He searched under the
dripping ferny clitter for a hiding-place.
Under water he saw two legs, joined to two wavering and inverted
images of legs, and above them the blurred shapes of a man's head and
shoulders. He turned away from the fisherman into the current again,
and as he breathed he heard the horn again. On the road above the glen
the pack was trotting between huntsman and whippers-in, and before them
men were running with poles at the trail, hurrying down the hill to the
bridge, to make a stickle to stop Tarka reaching the sea.
Tarka left Deadlock far behind. The hound was feeble and bruised and
breathing harshly, his head battered and his sight dazed, but still
following. Tarka passed another fisherman, and by chance the tiny
feathered hook lodged in his ear. The reel spun against the check,
_re-re-re_ continuously, until all the silken line had run through the
snake-rings of the rod, which bent into a circle, and whipped back
straight again as the gut trace snapped.
Tarka saw the bridge, the figure of a man below it, and a row of faces
above. He heard shouts. The man standing on a rock took off his hat,
scooped the air, and holla'd to the huntsman, who was running and
slipping with the pack on the loose stones of the steep red road. Tarka
walked out of the last pool above the bridge, ran over a mossy rock,
merged with the water again, and pushed through the legs of the man.
_Tally-ho!_
Tarka had gone under the bridge when Harper splashed into the water.
The pack poured through the gap between the end of the parapet and the
hillside earth, and their tongues rang under the bridge and down the
walls of the houses built on the rock above the river.
Among rotting
motor tyres, broken bottles, tins, pails, shoes, and other castaway
rubbish lying in the bright water, hounds made their plunging leaps.
Once Tarka turned back; often he was splashed and trodden on. The
stream was seldom deep enough to cover him, and always shallow enough
for the hounds to move at double his speed. Sometimes he was under the
pack, and then, while hounds were massing for the worry his small head
would look out beside a rock ten yards below them.
Between boulders and rocks crusted with shell-fish and shaggy with
seaweed, past worm-channered posts that marked the fairway for fishing
boats at high water, the pack hunted the otter. Off each post a gull
launched itself, cackling angrily as it looked down at the animals.
Tarka reached the sea. He walked slowly into the surge of a wavelet,
and sank away from the chop of old Harper's jaws, just as Deadlock ran
through the pack. Hounds swam beyond the line of waves, while people
stood at the sea-lap and watched the huntsman wading to his waist. It
was said that the otter was dead-beat, and probably floating stiffly in
the shallow water. After a few minutes the huntsman shook his head, and
withdrew the horn from his waistcoat. He filled his lungs and stopped
his breath and was tightening his lips for the four long notes of the
call-off, when a brown head with hard dark eyes was thrust out of the
water a yard from Deadlock. Tarka stared into the hound's face and
cried _Ic-yang!_
The head sank. Swimming under Deadlock, Tarka bit on to the loose skin
of the flews and pulled the hound's head under water. Deadlock tried to
twist round and crush the otter's skull in his jaws, but he struggled
vainly. Bubbles blew out of his mouth. Soon he was choking. The hounds
did not know what was happening. Deadlock's hind legs kicked the air
weakly. The huntsman waded out and pulled him inshore, but Tarka
loosened his bite only when he needed new air in his lungs; and then he
swam under and gripped Deadlock again. Only when hounds were upon him
did Tarka let go. He vanished in a wave.
* * * * *
Long after the water had been emptied out of Deadlock's lungs, and the
pack had trotted off for the long uphill climb to the railway station,
the gulls were flying over something in the sea beyond the mouth of
the little estuary. Sometimes one dropped its yellow webs to alight on
the water; always it flew up again into the restless, wailing throng,
startled by the snaps of white teeth. A cargo steamer was passing up
the Severn Sea, leaving a long smudge of smoke on the horizon, where
a low line of clouds billowed over the coast of Wales. The regular
thumps of its screw in the windless blue calm were borne to where Tarka
lay, drowsy and content, but watching the pale yellow eyes of the
nearest bird. At last the gulls grew tired of seeing only his eyes, and
flew back to their posts; and turning on his back, Tarka yawned and
stretched himself, and floated at his ease.