All day the wind shook the rusty reed-daggers at the sky, and the
maceheads were never still. Before sunset the couch was empty. The
purple-ruddy beams stained the grass and the thistles of the meadow,
and the tiles of the cattle-shippen under the sea-wall were the hue of
the sky. Westward the marshman's cottage, the linhays, the trees, the
hedges, the low ragged line of the Burrows, were vanishing in a mist of
fire.
The tide was ebbing, the glidders grey, with ruddy tricklings. In the
salt turf below the sea-wall great cracks wandered with the fire of the
sky. Ring-plover and little stints ran by the guts, and their slender
peering images quenched the flame in the water. Bunches of war-weed on
each sodden perch dripped their last drops among the froth and spinning
holes of the gliding tide. The mooring buoys rolled and returned, each
keg gathering froth that the current sucked away under its lowest
stave. By an old broken wicker crab-pot, only its rib-tops up, a small
head showed without a ripple, moving with the water. Men were walking
on the deck of a ketch below; other men were sitting at oars in a boat
under the black hull waiting for their mates. A dog began to bark, then
it whimpered, until it was pushed over the gunwale. It met the water in
a reddish splash.
Men climbed down to the boat, oars were dipped, and the dog swam
astern, breathing gruffly and whining. The otter head, drifting nearer,
sank when a man pointed with his pipe-stem. Fifty yards below, by the
chain sagging and lifting from the bows of the riding ship, the head
looked up again beside the broken wickerwork. "Artter," said the man
who had pointed, and forgot it. They were going to drink beer in the
Plough Inn.
Their voices became faint as they walked on the wall. Flocks of
ring-plover and little stint flickered and twisted over the mud and
the water. A late crow left the saltings, as a sedge-owl swept on long
wings over the drooping yellow grass of the wall, and slunk away across
the water.
Where the pill merged into the estuary the mud was scoured, leaving
sand and gravel. Below the stone setts and pobbles of the wall's apron,
whose cracks held the little ruddy winter leaves of the sea-beet, was
an islet of flat stones, apart from the wall by a narrowing channel
where water rushed. On the stone stood Old Nog, watching for shapes of
fish. The broken crab-pot bumped and lurched along the channel, and the
heron straightened his neck when he saw a fish jump out of its crown.
He peered in the dusky water, where weeds moved darkly, and saw the
fish darting before a tapered shadow. It was green and yellow, with a
streamer flying from its back. Old Nog snicked the gemmeous dragonet
from before the otter's nose, shook it free of his beak, caught it in a
jerk that pushed it into his gullet, and swallowed it while the otter
was still searching.
Tarka saw a blur of movement above, and swam on under water to the wide
sea.
Colour faded; the waves broke grey. Across the marsh a shining fly
had lit on the white bone of the lighthouse. A bird flew in hooped
flight up the estuary, wheeled below the islet, and began feeding.
It saw Tarka, and out of its beak, hooped as its wings in downward
gliding, fell a croak, which slurred upwards to a whistle, and broke
in a sweet trill as it flew away. Other curlews on the sandbanks heard
the warning, and to the far shore the wan air was beautiful with their
cries.
Rows of hurdles, black and weed-hung, stood out of the water farther
down the estuary. They were staked on three sides of a pool, while
every rising tide flooded over the tops of the fences. It was an
old salmon weir. The hurdles had been torn away so many times by
the dredging anchors of gravel barges and ketches, whose crews were
friendly with poor net-fishermen, that the owner had let the weir fall
ruinous. Herons fished from the hurdles, and at low tide crows picked
shellfish off the stakes, and flying with them to the islet, dropped
them on the stones.
At half tide Old Nog flew to the seventh hurdle up from the western
row, where, unless gorged or in love or disturbed by man, he perched
awhile during every ebb-tide. He stood swaying and sinuating his neck;
the grip of his toes was not so strong as it had been in his early
tree-top life. While he was trying to stand still, before jumping to
the rim of the sandbank awash below him, a salmon leapt in the lagoon,
gleaming and curved, and fell back with a thwack on the water. Old Nog
screamed, and fell off the hurdle. Three heads looked up, and dipped
again. Old Nog walked along under the hurdles, watching the water. The
salmon was many times Old Nog's own weight, but it was a fish, and Old
Nog was a fisher.
Tarka was drifting past the weir when he heard the whistle of White-tip
beyond the hurdles. His head and shoulders were out of the water; he
listened.
_Hu-ee-ic!_
White-tip answered him. Her cry was like wet fingers drawn over a pane
of glass. Tarka's cry was deeper, more rounded, and musical. He ran
across the strip of wet sand, clambered over the hurdles, and down to
the lagoon. He touched water, and a ripple spread out from where he
had disappeared. His seals in the sand crumbled as they welled water.
_Ka-ak!_ Old Nog ejected the gemmeous dragonet in his excitement, for
the salmon had leapt again, a glimmering curve. The teeth of White-tip
clicked at its tail. Three otter heads bobbed, flat as corks of a
salmon net. They vanished before the double splash fell.
The salmon passed through the cubs, cutting the water. They turned
together. Tarka drove between them and slowed to their pace, keeping
line. Then White-tip, who was faster than Tarka, overhauled them, and
the old otters took the wings. The line swung out and in as each otter
swam in zigzag. The eager cubs swam in each other's way. Once more
the salmon rushed back against the current, straining through the top
hurdles, where the water was deeper and safer. Tarka met it; and the
thresh of its turning tail beat up splinters of water. The line of
otters forced it into the shallow by the lower hurdles. They swam upon
it, resting in two feet of water, but it escaped past one of the cubs.
Soon the tide dropped back from the top row of hurdles and the water
was cleared of sand. A race poured steadily through a gap in the
sandbank, spreading wider as it drained the lagoon. In the penned and
slack upper water the salmon was lying, its fins and tail so still that
shrimps rose out of their hiding-places in the sand beside it. While
it rested in the water, its gills opening and closing, a dark squat
thing was walking on the sand towards it, using its fins as feet. It
was the shape of an immense tadpole, covered with tatters of skin like
weed. Its head was as broad as a barrel, gaping with a mouth almost
as wide. Its jaws were filled with bands of long pointed teeth, which
it depressed in the cavern of its mouth when it came near the salmon.
Out of the middle of its head rose three stalks, the first of which
bore a lappet, which it waved like a bait as it crept forward. It was
a sea-devil, called rod-and-line fish by fishermen. During the spring
tide it had left the deep water beyond the bar where usually it lived,
and moving up the estuary, had been trapped in the hurdle weir.
It crept forward so slowly that the salmon did not know it for an
enemy. The close-set eyes behind the enormous bony lips were fixed on
the salmon. Chains of bubbles loomed beyond, with otter-shapes; the
salmon swirled off the sand, into the cavern of jaws; the teeth rose in
spikes and the jaws shut.
Thrice the old otters worked round and across the dwindling lagoon in
search of the fish, and then they forgot it, and went down with the
tide. Stars shone over the estuary, the cries of wading birds were
wandering as the air. The otters drifted down, passing the cottage
glimmering white on the sea-wall, passing the beached hulk of the
hospital ship, silent and dark, but for a solitary candle in a port
hole. The tide took them to the spit of gravel, crowned by sandhills
bound with marram grasses, called Crow Island, and here they left the
water for a ragrowster. While the cubs were rolling and biting, Tarka
and White-tip played the game of searching and pretending not to find.
They galloped up the sandhills to slide to the hollows again. They
picked up sticks, empty shells of skate's eggs, old bones and feathers
of sea-birds, corks from the jetsam of the high tide, and tossed with
them in their paws. They hid in the spines of the tussocks, and jumped
out at each other.
The lighthouse beams shone on the wet sands down by the water, and
across the Pool the lights of the village lay like wind-blown embers.
_Craa-leek, cur-lee-eek!_ The curlews saw them as they swam the shallow
water to the top of the Shrarshook. White-tip and Tarka ate mussels
down by the black-and-white Pulley buoy, and the cubs followed them to
the pools of the lower ridge.
Salmon, feverish to spawn in the fresh waters of their birth, were
"running" up the fairway, and with the flow came a seal, who tore a
single bite from the belly of each fish it caught, and left it to chase
others. Tarka brought one of the wounded fish to the rocks, and the
otters scratched away scales in their haste to eat its pink flesh. They
sliced from the shoulders, dropping pieces to feel the curd squeezed
from the corners of their mouths. Tarka and White-tip ate quietly, but
the cubs yinnered and snarled. Their faces were silvery with scales
when they left the strewn bones. Being clean little beasts they washed
chins and whiskers and ears, and afterwards sought water to drink in
the pond behind the sea-wall cottage.
Among the reeds the four otters lay, dozing and resting, while rain
pitted the grey sheet of water and wind bent down the stalks of the
wild celery that grew in the marsh. When the clouds became duller they
left the pond, and saw the tide lapping almost over the top of the
wall, coloured with the fresh from the rivers.
Mullet had come up with the tide, and a school of nearly a hundred
found a way through a drain-lid under the sea-wall of the pill. At
the end of the night the otters, who had been gorging on eels in the
mires--reed-fringed dykes in the grazing marsh, filled with fresh
drinking water from the hills--found them in the pit in the corner
of Horsey marsh. For two hours they chased and slew, and when every
fish was killed Tarka and White-tip stole away on the ebb to the sea,
leaving the young otters to begin their own life.
The next night was quiet and windless, without a murmur of water in
the broad Pool, on which the lights of the village drew out like gold
and silver eels. Sound travels far and distinct over placid water, and
fishermen standing in groups on the quay, after the closing of taverns,
heard the whistling cries of the young otters, a mile away on Crow
Island, lost on the shingle where the ring-plovers piped. They were
heard for three nights, and then the south-west gale smote the place
and filled the estuary with great seas.
* * * * *
Black bits of old leaves turned and twirled in the flooded weir-pool
above Canal Bridge, like the rooks turning and twirling high in the
grey windy sky. The weir in flood was an immense loom in sunlight;
the down-falling water-warp was whitey-yellow with bubbles; to and fro
across the weir moved the air-hollows, a weft held by a glistening
water-shuttle. Below, the bubble-woven waters were rendered on the
shillets; they leapt and roared and threw up froth and spray. A branch
of a tree was lodged on the sill; the rocks had stripped it of bark.
Sometimes a lead-coloured narrow shape, longer than a man's arm, would
appear in the falling water-warp, moving slowly against the torrent
with sideways flaps of tail, until washed back into the lower river
again, which roared and heaved like fighting polar bears. The sun lit
the travelling air-hollow under the sill of the weir. The salmon never
reached the sill. Some fish tried to swim up the fish-pass, but the
pound of the flood was mightier on the steps. Above in the weir-pool a
bird was swimming, low in the water, watching with small crimson eyes
for trout. Its beak was sharp as a rock-splinter. Above the water it
was brownish-black, foam-grey beneath--a great northern diver in winter
plumage. When Tarka saw it first it was rolling from side to side and
stretching out first one wing then the other. The otter on the bank
alarmed the diver, who tipped up and vanished quick as the flash of a
turning fish, hardly leaving a ripple. When it appeared again the otter
was gone. It lay in the water, nearly a yard long, with head and neck
stretched out, and swam rapidly up-river. At the top of the pool it saw
another otter, and uttering a wailing cry of alarm, it splashed along
the water to rise, making a dozen oar-like dips with the tips of its
wings. With neck outstretched it took the air and flew round the curve
of the river, with wing-beats quicker than a heron's.
Tarka and White-tip had come from the wood in daylight, lured to
play by the sun and the flood. Tarka dropped over the sill, the
whitey-yellow turmoil bumped and tossed him below. A minute later a
narrow lead-coloured shape pushed slowly up the concrete spill-way, and
behind it the darker, sturdier shape of an otter. Fish and animal made
slow and laborious headway; they seemed to be hanging in the warp; and
then White-tip dropped over in the smooth and glistering water's bend.
They instantly disappeared. The racing churn carried them on its top to
the bank thirty yards below, and there left them on stones; and there,
an hour later, a thirty-pound fish, clean-run, its gills crusty with
ocean shellfish, was found by the water-bailiff, with bites torn from
behind its shoulder--the mating feast of otters.
November, December, January, February were past--but otters know only
day and night, the sun and the moon. White-tip and Tarka had followed
the salmon up the big river, but at the beginning of the new year they
had come down again. Drifting with the ebb under Halfpenny Bridge,
they crossed the marsh and came to the Pool of the Six Herons, out of
whose deep middle reared the black iron piers of the Railway Bridge.
Just below the Railway Bridge, the muddy mouth of the Lancarse Yeo was
washed and widened by the sea, and in here, on the flood tide, the
otters turned. White-tip was way-wise in this water, having known it in
cubhood. She was going back to the Twin-Ash Holt above Orleigh Mill,
where she had been born.
With the tide the otters drifted under the road bridge to a holt in
an old rabbit bury above high-water mark. It was fallen in, and the
home of rats, so they left it, and travelled on in daylight. A mile
from the pill-mouth the water ran fresh and clear. After another mile
they came to the meeting of two streams. White-tip walked up the left
stream, and soon she reached the slide where she had played during
many happy nights with her cub-brothers; and climbing up, she was in
the remembered weir-pool. It was narrow, and nearly hidden by trees.
Past six pines, and round a bend, where two ash trees leaned over the
brook. Ivy grew on one, moss on the other. Floods had washed the earth
from their top roots, carving a dark holt under the bank. White-tip had
forgotten the baying and yapping and thudding one day long ago, when
an iron bar had broken a hole in the roof and scared the five of them
into the water. She had remembered the bass at night round the bridge
piers in the Pool of the Six Herons, the frogging places in the Archery
Marsh, the trout and the mullyheads in the Duntz brook, the eels in the
mill-pool; and she had come back to them.
The soft elderberry tree broke into leaf, with the honeysuckle; the
wild cherry blossom showed white among the oaks. The green shovels of
the celandine dug pale gold out of the sun, and the flowers were made.
Oak and ash remained hard budded; these trees, enduring and ancient,
were not moved to easy change like lesser growths.
On the first day of March Halycon the kingfisher, speeding up the
brook, hit the sandy bank with his beak, and fell away. His mate
followed him, knocking out another flake of earth, and thus a perching
place was made. They picked out a tunnel with their beaks, as long
as a man's arm, with a round cave at the end in which seven round
eggs were laid, shiny and white, among bones of fishes and shucks of
water-beetles. Then the river-martins came back to their old drowned
homes in the steep sandy banks above the springtime level of the
brook. In the third week of March the carrion crow, secure in her nest
of sticks atop one of the six pines growing over the pool below the
Twin-Ash Holt, watched the first chipping of her five eggs, watched the
tip of a tiny beak chip, chip, chipping a lid in a green black-freckled
shell. The crow sang a song, low and sweet, in the tree-top. White-tip
heard the song as she suckled her cubs in the Twin-Ash Holt. Every
night Tarka came up from the Pool of the Six Herons to see her.
March winds brought the grey sea-rains to the land, and the river ran
swollen, bearing the floods of its brooks and runners. Salmon, languid
from spawning, dropped tail-first over the sills and down the passes of
the weirs, and Tarka caught them easily in the eddies and hovers, and
dragged them on the bank. He took bites from the infirm and tasteless
flesh, and left the fish uneaten. Many of the salmon that reached the
sea alive were taken in the nets of fishermen rough-fish-catching, in
the estuary Pool, to be knocked on the head and thrown back--for the
fishermen hated the water-bailiffs who upheld the Conservatory Bye-laws
protecting salmon out of season, and secretly killed the fish because
of their hatred. The fishermen did not believe that salmon spawned in
fresh water, where the rivers were young, but regarded it as a story
told to prevent them fishing for salmon throughout the year.
Oak and ash broke their buds, and grew green; the buzzards repaired
their old nests, and laid their eggs. The heron's young, after days
of flapping and unhappy crying, flew from their tree-top heronry in
the wood below Halfpenny Bridge. And one evening in June, between the
lights, Old Nog and his mate sailed down to the pool by the Railway
Bridge to give the four fledglings their first lesson in fishing.
Curlews saw the dark level wings gliding over the mudbanks, and cried
the alarm, being afraid of the sharp beaks. Every year Old Nog and his
mate taught four fledglings to spear fish in the pool, which lay placid
when the sea had lapsed.
Six herons stood in a row eighty yards above the bridge, in the sandy
shallow at the head of the pool. _Kack! Kack! Kack! Kack!_--the young
birds squawked with eagerness and delight. Dusk deepened over the wide
and empty river, the pool shone faintly with the sky. Down by the round
black piers of the bridge something splashed. Old Nog raised his head,
for he had been awaiting the splash. It was a sign that the bass in
the pool were beginning to feed.
Splash, splatter, splash. Soon many fish were rising to take the
shrimp-fry on the surface. They were hungry after the daytime rest,
having gone up with the tide to Halfpenny Bridge, and returned to the
pool without feeding, while men on the banks fished with lines of
rag-worm baited hooks. Usually the men went home to supper, with empty
baskets, before the fishes' feeding time. Then to the quiet pool came
that wise fisher, Old Nog, with his family, standing motionless while
the bass swam into the shallow water;--splash, splatter, splash, as
they turned on their gleaming sides to take the shrimp-fry. Old Nog
peered, with beak held low, and snicked--_Kack! Kack! Kack! Kack!_
cried the four small herons, beating vanes and falling over long toes
in their eagerness to gulp the silvery fish.
_Gark!_ said Old Nog, swallowing the bass, and thrusting his beak and
long feathered neck at the four. _Gark!_ They got out of his way; never
before had he spoken so severely to them. One saw the flicker of a fish
in the water, and stepped towards it; the bass saw the enemy, and sped
into deeper water. _Rark!_ said Old Nog, sharply, and they stood still.
Sucking noises arose out of the pool as it grew darker. These were the
feeding noises of male eels, thin and small and mud-coloured, whom the
larger blue females would meet in the autumnal migration. In wriggling
rushes the eels sought the shrimp-fry in the shallows, and whenever one
passed near a beak--_dap!_ it was snicked, lifted from the water as a
writhing knot, and swallowed.
The Railway Bridge loomed low and black against the glimmer of sky and
water. Splash, splatter, the bass were moving about the pool. Two or
three lay, troutwise, in the slight downward current by each round iron
pier, watching the surface above them for the dark moving speck of a
shrimp. The splashes of their jumps echoed under the girders.
A summer sandpiper flew over the bridge, crying in the darkness, for
it had been alarmed while feeding under the glidders of the empty
pill. It was answered by a curlew on the gravel bank above the herons.
Immediately below the bridge the brook poured its little fresh stream
into the pool; raising up little ridges of sand, sweeping them away
again with sudden little noises. Splash, splatter, the bass were
feeding in the weed on the stone piling below the bridge-end. Patter,
patter, five dark shapes moving on the soft wet sand of the pill's
mouth--the pattering ceased, and the brook slurred its sand-sounds as
they slid into the pool. White-tip had brought her four cubs from the
Twin-Ash Holt.
The vigorous splashing of the bass was lessening, for many fish were
gorged with fry. A whitish shine by the stone piling, and one had
risen to seize a shrimp in its large mouth--splash, flicker, splatter,
bubble. A dark shape crawled out of the water with the bass. Three
lesser shapes followed, yikkering on the stone piling. White-tip turned
back into the pool.
_Krark! Kak! Ark! Kak! Kack! Kack! Kack! Kack! Kak! Kak! Gark! Kack!_
With heads upheld and watching, the herons talked among themselves.
They saw three cubs fighting over the fish on the piling; and two heads
in the water between the first and second pier. Tarquol, the eldest
cub, was following White-tip, for he liked to do his own hunting; and
it was in the Pool of the Six Herons that the strange big otter, who
chased him in and out of the piers, never biting or sulking, was to be
found. Tarquol, who had two white toes on one of his paws, was stronger
than the other cubs, and often hurt them in play without knowing it.
The bass, staying in the flumes around the piers with fin and tail,
watched the dim forewater above them. All was dark beside and below
them. Tarquol and White-tip swam one on either side of a pier, deeper
than the bass, whose narrow shapes were dark and plain above them. A
fish darted around the pier before White-tip, and was taken by Tarquol.
He ate it on the quick-sand of the right bank, away from the cubs. The
sharp point of the back fin pricked his mouth.
The otters caught eels in the shallow edges of the pool, watched by the
hungry herons, whose harsh continuous cries told their anger. When the
cubs had eaten enough they played on the sand, running on and on until
they were behind the six birds, on the ridge of gravel where snags
were part buried. Curlews--the unmated birds which had not gone to the
moors--flew off the glidders, and away up the tidal reaches of the
river.
_Hu-ee-ic!_
Tarquol, playing with the rotten crown of an old bowler hat--fishermen
always kept their bait in old Sunday chapel-going hats--heard the
whistle, and dashed back to the pool. _Krark!_ cried Old Nog, flying
up before him, his toes on the water. _Kak! Kack! Kack! Kack! Kack!_
as his mate and youngsters followed. Old Nog flew over the bridge,
but seeing and hearing the tide flowing up, he wheeled and beat up
the Yeo valley. The five herons followed him, but he dived at them,
screaming _Gark! Gark!_ Old Nog was weary after many weeks of hunger,
of disgorging nearly all he caught into the greedy maws of four grown
fledglings, and often, the greedy maw of his mate. _Krark!_ a cry of
satisfaction. Old Nog flew alone.
Every night for a week the otters came to the pool at low water, until
the tides, ebbing later and later, and so into daylight, stopped the
fishing. One evening, when the Peal Rock in the river below Canal
Bridge was just awash after a thunderstorm, Tarka and White-tip and
the four cubs followed a run of peal as far as the weir-pool, staying
out until after sunrise, when several fish were taken in the water,
then low and clear again. The Twin-Ash Holt was far behind them, so
they slept in a holt under an oak, which was entered by an opening two
feet below the water-level. The next night they went on up the river,
catching and eating fish on the scours and shoals, then hastening back
to water again. Tarquol swam near Tarka; the cub was lithe and swift as
his parent, and sometimes snatched fish from his mouth. They rolled and
romped together, clutching rudders and heads and pretending to bite;
their joyful whistles went far down the river, heard by Old Nog as he
sailed by in the wasting moonlight.
Paler the moon rose, and at dawn White-tip went down with the cubs and
Tarka wandered on alone; but he turned back again, calling her to Canal
Bridge to play one last game.
_Hu-ee-ic!_
They played the old bridge game of the West Country otters, which was
played before the Romans came. They played around the upper and lower
cutwater of the middle pier, while the lesser stars were drowned in
the heavenly tide flowing up the eastern sky, and the trees of the
hill-line grew dark, and larks were flying with song.
_Hu-ee-ic!_
Tarquol followed Tarka out of the river and along the otter-path across
the bend, heedless of his mother's call. He followed up the river and
across another bend; but, scared of the light, returned to water and
sought a holt under a sycamore. Tarka went on alone, up three miles
of river, to a holt in a weir-pool shadowed by trees, where peal were
leaping. The sun looked over the hills, the moon was as a feather
dropped by the owls flying home, and Tarka slept, while the water
flowed, and he dreamed of a journey with Tarquol down to a strange sea,
where they were never hungry, and never hunted.