Swimming towards the sunset Tarka found a cleft in the high curved red
cliff, and on the crest of a wave rode into the cavern beyond. The
broken wave slapped against the dark end as he climbed to a ledge far
above the lipping of the swell, and curled himself on cold stone. He
awoke when the gulls and cormorants were flying over the sea, silent as
dusk, to their roosts in the cliff.
The straight wavelets of the rising tide were moving across the rock
pools below the cleft, where under green and purple laver-weed crabs
and prawns were stirring to feed. The weed, so placid before, was
kicked and entangled by the searching otter. The crab he climbed out
with was bitter, and leaving it, he swam into deep water.
A herring shoal was coming up with the evening tide, followed by a herd
of porpoises, which when breathing showed shiny black hides through
the waves. Fishermen called them errin-ogs. Once these warm-blooded
mammals had ears and hair and paws, but now their ear-holes were small
as thorn-pricks, and their five-toed paws were changed into flippers.
Their forefathers, who had come from the same family as the forefathers
of otters and seals, had taken early to water, shaping themselves for
a sea-life while yet the seals were running on land. Their young, born
under water, needed no mother's back to raise them to the air of life,
for ancestral habit had become instinct.
An old boar porpoise flung himself out of a trough near Tarka and fell
with a clapping splash on its back, to shake off the barnacle-like
parasites boring into its blubber. Near the boar swam a sow porpoise,
suckling her little one, who, towed along on its back, breathed during
every rise and roll of its mother. Tarka caught his first herring and
ate it on a rock, liking the taste, but when he swam out for more, the
under-seas were vacant.
For a week he slept in the disused lime-kiln on the greensward above
the Heddon water, that lost itself in a ridge of boulders above the
tide wash. While he was exploring the fresh water a storm broke over
the moor, and the roaring coloured spate returned him to the sea. He
went westwards, under the towering cliffs and waterfalls in whose ferny
sides he liked to rest by day. Once he was awakened by a dreadful
mumbling in the wind far above him. As he lifted his head he heard a
whishing noise, as of falcons in swoop. Flakes of scree clattered and
hurtled past him; then a stag, and three staghounds. The bodies smashed
on the rocks, and were of silence again. Soon the cries of seabirds and
daws were echoing out of the cliffs. Ravens flew down, and buzzards,
and the air was filled with black and white and brown wings, with deep
croaking, wailing, and shrill screaming. They jostled and fought for an
hour, when a motor-boat, holding a red-coated figure, came round the
eastern sheer and drove them into flight. The gulls mobbed Tarka when
they saw him slipping down from his resting ledge, but he found the sea
and sank away from them. That night, quatting on a rock and eating a
conger, the west wind brought him the scent of White-tip.
At dawn he was swimming under the sea-feet of the Great Hangman; and he
followed the trail until sunrise was shimmering down the level sea and
filling with aerial gold the clouds over the Welsh hills.
* * * * *
At dusk the shore-rats on Wild Pear Beach, searching the weed-strewn
tide-line, paused and squealed together when their sharp noses took
the musky scent of water-weasels. They ran off chittering as terrible
shapes galloped among them. A rat was picked up and killed in a swift
bite. The cub did not want it for food; he killed it in fun. He ran
into the sea after White-tip, who had been taking care of them since
their mother had been trapped under the waterfall.
Six hours later Tarka ran up Wild Pear Beach and his thin, hard cries
pierced the slop and wash of waves on the loose, worn, shaley strand.
He followed the trail over the weeds to the otters' sleeping place
under a rock, and down again to the sea. In a pool off Briery Cave he
scented otter again, for at the bottom of the pool lay a wicker pot,
holding something that turned slowly as the ribbons of the thong-weed
lifted and dropped in the water. The long blue feelers of a lobster
were feeling through the wickerwork; it was gorged, and trying to get
out from the otter cub it had been eating. The cub had found no way out
of the cage it had entered at high tide, intending to eat the lobster.
_Hu-ee-ic!_ Tarka did not know the dead. Nothing answered, and he swam
away, among green phosphoric specks that glinted at every wave-lop.
Autumn's little summer, when day and night were equal, and only the
woodlark sang his wistful falling song over the bracken, was ruined
by the gales that tore wave and leaf, and broke the sea into roar and
spray, and hung white ropes over the rocks. Fog hid cliff-tops and
stars as Tarka travelled westwards. One night, as he was drinking fresh
water from a pool below a cascade, he was startled by immense whooping
bellows that bounded from the walls of mist and rebounded afar, to
return in duller echoes as though phantom hounds were baying the
darkness. Tarka slipped into a pool and hid under lifting seaweed; but
the sounds were regular and harmless, and afterwards he did not heed
them. On a rock below the white-walled tower of Bull Point lighthouse,
whose twin sirens were sending a warning to sailors far out beyond the
dreadful rocks, Tarka found again the trail of White-tip, and whistled
with joy.
Travelling under the screes, where rusted plates of wrecked ships
lay in pools, he came to the end of the land. Day was beginning. The
tide, moving northwards across Morte Bay from Bag Leap, was ripped and
whitened by rocks which stood out of the hollows of the grey sea. One
rock was tall above the reef--the Morte Stone--and on the top pinnacle
stood a big black bird, with the tails of mullet sticking out of its
gullet. Its dripping wings were held out to ease its tight crop. The
bird was Phalacrocorax Carbo, called the Isle of Wight Parson by
fishermen, and it sat uneasily on the Morte Stone during most of the
hours of daylight, swaying with a load of fishes.
Tired and buffeted by the long Atlantic rollers, Tarka turned back
under the Morte Stone, and swam to land. He climbed a slope strewn
with broken thrift-roots and grey shards of rock, to a path set on
its seaward verge by a fence of iron posts and cables. Salt winds had
gnawed the iron to rusty splinters. The heather above the path was
tougher than the iron, but its sprigs were barer than its own roots.
Over the crest of the Morte, heather grew in low bushes, out of the
wind's way. There were green places where among grass cropped by sheep
grew mushrooms mottled like owls' plumage. The sky above the crest was
reddening, and he found a sleeping place under a broken cromlech, the
burial place of an ancient man, whose bones were grass and heather and
dust in the sun.
Tarka slept warm all day. At sunset he ran down to the sea. He worked
south through the currents that scoured shelly coves and swept round
lesser rocks into the wide Morte Bay. Long waves, breaking near the
shallows, left foam behind them in the shapes of dusky-white seals.
Bass were swimming in the breakers, taking sand-eels risen in the sandy
surge. A high-flying gull saw a fish flapping in the shallows, with
ribbon weed across its head. The gull glided down, and the ribbon weed
arose on low legs tugging at the five-pound fish, and dragged it on to
firm, wet sand. _Hak-hak!_ cried the gull, angrily. _Tu-lip, tulip!_
the ring-plover arose and flickered away in a flock. Other gulls flew
over, and dropped down. Tarka feasted among the noise of wings and
angry cries. When he was full, he lapped fresh water trickling over the
sand in a broad and shallow bed. _Hu-ee-ic!_ He galloped up the sand,
nose between paws. He ran up into the sandhills, where his passing
sowed round orange-red seeds from the split dry pods of the stinking
iris. Over a lonely road, among old stalks of ragwort and teasel, and
up a steep bank to the incult hill, pushing among bracken, furze, and
brambles, following the way of White-tip. He found the head of a
rabbit which she had caught, and played with it, whistling as he rolled
it with his paws.
Already larks were ceasing to sing. When he reached the top of Pickwell
down, eastern clouds were ruddy and Hoaroak Hill, seventeen miles away
as the falcon glides, was as a shadow lying under the sky. He descended
to a gulley in the hills, a dry watercourse marked by furze bushes,
and thorns, and hollies, growing down to sandhills by the sea. The
gulley lay south-west; the trees lay over to the north-east, bitter and
dwarfed by salt and wind. Under a holly bush, bearer of ruined blossoms
and spineless leaves, whose limbs were tortured by ivy thicker in trunk
than its own, the otter crawled into a bury widened by many generations
of rabbits, and lay down in the darkness.
The wind rushed up the gulley, moving stiffly the blackthorns
which squeaked as they rubbed against each other. Dry branches of
elderberries rattled and scraped as though bemoaning their poverty.
Gulls veered from hilltop to hilltop, calling the flock standing far
below on the sands that gleamed with the dull sky. The dark base of the
headland lying out in the Atlantic was flecked along its length with
the white of breaking waves. The sea's roar came with blown spray up
the gulley. Tarka slept.
He awoke before noon, hearing voices of men. Mist was drifting between
the hills. He lay still until a man spoke at the day-dim opening of
the bury. An animal moved down the tunnel, whose smell immediately
disturbed him. He remembered it. The animal's eyes glowed pink, and
a bell tinkled round its neck. Tarka crawled farther into the bury
and ran out of another hole, that was watched by a spaniel sitting,
shivering and wet, behind a man with a gun on the bank above. The
spaniel jumped back when it saw Tarka, who ran down the gulley,
hastening when he heard a bark, a shout, and two bangs of the gun.
Twigs showered upon him, and he ran on, hidden by the thorny brake.
Two men clambered down the banks, but only the spaniel followed him,
barking with excitement, but not daring to go near him. It returned to
its master's whistle. Tarka hid under a blackberry bush lower down, and
slept among the brambles until darkness, when he left the shelter and
climbed up the hillside.
He ran under a gate to a field beyond, but crossing a rabbit's line,
he followed it through hawthorns wind-bent over the stone bank to the
waste land again. The rabbit was crouching under the wind in a tussock,
and one bite killed it. After the meal Tarka drank rainwater in a
sheep's skull, which lay among rusty ploughshares, old iron pots,
tins, and skeletons of sheep--some broken up by cattle dogs, and all
picked clean by crows and ravens. Tarka played with a shoulder-blade
because White-tip had touched it in passing. He ran at it and bit the
cold bone as though it were White-tip. He played with many things that
night as he ran across field and bank.
Following the trail, he came to a pond in a boggy field below a hill.
Moorhens hid in terror when he swam among them. He caught and played
with an eel, which was found dead next morning on the bank, beside the
seals pressed in the mud by his clawed feet, and the hair-marks of his
rolling back. _Hu-ee-ic!_ Tarka ran under a culvert that carried a
trickle to a smaller pond in the garden of a rectory. _Hu-ee-ic!_ while
clouds broke the light of the moon.
He climbed round the hatch of the pond, sniffing the tarred wood,
and crept under a gap in the wall which ended the garden. The stream
flowed below a churchyard wall and by a thatched cottage, where a man,
a dog, and a cat were sitting before a fire of elm brands on the open
hearth. The wind blew the scent of the otter under the door, and the
cat fumed and growled, standing with fluffed back and twitching tail
beside her basket of kittens. The otter was scraping shillets by a flat
stone under a fall by the road, where farmers' daughters crouch to
wash chitterlings for the making of hogs'-pudding. An eel lived under
the kneeling stone, fat with pig-scrap. Its tail was just beyond the
otter's teeth. White-tip had tried to catch it the night before.
_Hu-ee-ic!_
The cottage door was pulled open, the spaniel rushed out barking. A
white owl lifted itself off the lopped bough of one of the churchyard
elms, crying _skirr-rr_. An otter's tiss of anger came from out of the
culvert under the road. Striking a match the man saw, on the scour of
red mud, the two-toed seal, identical with the seal that led down to
the sea after the Ice Winter.
Tarka was gone down the narrow covered way of the culvert, amid
darkness and the babble of water. The stream ran under a farmhouse, and
through an orchard, under another culvert and past a cottage garden to
the water meadow below. Wood owls hunting far down in the valley heard
the keen cries of Tarka.
_Hu-ee-ic!_
Often the trail was lost, for the otters had left their seals on bank
and scour before the rain had pitted and blurred them.
Tarka followed the stream. At the beginning of Cryde village the water
was penned above the curve of the road, the pond being kept back by a
grassy bank where stood a hawthorn clipped like a toadstool. Swimming
round the edge among flags and the roots of thorns and sycamores, he
saw a head looking at him from the water, and from the head strayed a
joyous breath. He swam to it--a snag of elm-branch stuck in the mud.
White-tip had rubbed against it when swimming by. Tarka bit it before
swimming round the pond again, to sniff the wood of the penstock. He
climbed out and ran along the bank, by the still mossy wooden wheel
of the mill. They heard his shrill cry in the inn below. A cattle dog
barked, and Tarka ran up a narrow lane which led to the top of a hill.
In hoof-mudded patches he found the trail again, for the otters had run
the same way when alarmed by the same dog. The trail took him under a
gate and into a field, over a bank where straight stalks of mulleins
were black in moonlight, to land that had forgotten the plough, a
prickly place for an otter's webs. Sea-wind had broken all the
bracken's stalks. Suddenly he heard the mumbling roar of surf and saw
the lighthouse across the Burrows. He galloped joyfully down a field of
arrish, or stubble. He travelled so swiftly that soon he stood on the
edge of sandy cliffs, where spray blew as wind. He found a way down to
the pools by a ledge where grew plants of great sea stock, whose leaves
were crumbling in autumn sleep.
The trail led over the sandhills with their thin stabbing marram
grasses, and to the mossy pans behind them, where grew privet bushes
and blunt-head club-rushes. The way was strewn with rabbit skulls and
empty snail shells. Tarka crossed the marsh of Horsey Island--where
grew Russian thistles, sprung from a single seed blown from the estuary
off a Baltic timber ship years before--until he came to the sea-wall,
and below the wall, to the mouth of the Branton pill. The tide took him
slowly in a patch of froth which the meeting waters had beaten up, the
gossip of the Two Rivers. He ran over the eastern sea-wall, and along
the otter path to the Ram's-horn pond.
_Hu-ee-ic!_
He swam to the wooden bridge by the boathouse, and to the withies on
the islet.
_Hu-ee-ic!_
He hunted the brackish waters until the stars were dimmed by dawn,
when he pressed through the reeds by a way he had trodden before, but
forgotten, and slept on an old couch where lay bones, and a little
skull.