# Tarka the Otter/Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE
When Tarka awoke he saw a small eye quizzing him from among the ash-sprays. He stretched up his head and sniffed, and at the movement the eye disappeared. Ticking cries sounded from the middle of the tangle.
Hearing them, an ackymal that had been searching the stream-side hawthorn boughs for green caterpillars flittered to the islet and chittered beside the crackey. The ackymal had a mate in a stump hole, brooding over a family of thirteen in a nest of moss and feathers, and the crackey had a mate and a family of eight in a ball of grasses hidden in the side of a hay-stack. Both nests were hundreds of wing-flutters away, yet when the hens, both shorter than a man’s finger is long, heard the cries of their songfolk, they left their young and hastened to join them. Their scolding was a summons to all small birds. Blackbirds flew in from the fields and let out shrill ringing cries which jerked their tails as they perched above the otters. Soon many small birds were gathered in the trees of the islet, and their mingled cries brought six larger birds, who sloped up one behind the other. They were among birds what the Irish are among men, always ready in a merry and audacious life to go where there is trouble and not infrequently to be the cause of it. Raising their crests and contracting their light blue eyes, the six jays screamed with the noises of tearing linen.
The cubs lay still, but the otter lifted up her head. She had met jays before, and knew that men sometimes go where the pretty crows are ​nagging. For half an hour she was anxious, ready to take her cubs into the friendly water immediately the jay cries became shorter; which would mean the coming of the greatest enemy, man.
The birds became hungry. The crackeys and ackymals and ruddocks—Devon names for wrens and tomtits and robins—flew away when the otters neither heeded nor harmed them. The jays remained; but when a sparrowhawk dashed into the trees in search of a pigeon, they departed and mobbed the hawk, helped by a pair of carrion crows.
Again the spirit of the green place was tranquil, with peaceful doves cooing in the noonday’s rest. All the long day the sun swung over the islet until the hilltops were fiery. Shadows lifted from the waters and moved up the trunks of trees. They faded in evelight. The pool darkened. Over the fields flew a white owl, one of hundreds which like great blunt-headed moths were quartering the pastures and tilth of all the lands served by the Two Rivers. It fanned above the vole-runs, where the craneflies rose in flight from flower and bent. The reeling song of a nightjar on a gatepost ran through the ground mist not high enough to hide the flowers of ragged robin and the hardening seeds of the flowering rush. The pigeons settled at the tops of the ashpoles, and ceased their clapping and flapping of wings.
A drop of water splashed, another and another. The otter had withdrawn her head from the river, wherein she had been harkening ​for stir of fin or wave of tail. Filling her lungs with new air, she slipped into the water and swam to the other end of the islet, where a scour had been formed by the flood-rains of the last south-westerly wind. Here the grown family of the moorhen was paddling. When almost under them, the otter saw the legs and the images of legs joined to them, black in silhouette against the less dark surface. She seized one of the moorhens and drew it under, releasing it to bite it in her jaws, and carried it back to her cubs, swimming with her nose, whiskers, eyes, and part of the dead fowl out of the water. The cubs were waiting, and seeing that she had food, they ran to her and pulled it out of her mouth, tearing away feathers and mewing with their pads on the dead bird. When the otter returned to the scour the moorhens were gone, so she dived and sought fish.
Late at night she returned with the cubs to the wood, and whistled for the lost one. She did not know it was dead; she knew only her longing for it. Her whistles went far in the still night, as she ran with nose to the ground, stopping to whine when her grief became acute. The cock on the apple bough heard her and crew to the dog in the kennel, who barked to its master. Hearing the bark, the otter took her cubs away; and at the end of the night, when they reached the big river, the lost cub was forgotten.
They hunted and ragrowstered for many days under the high wooded hills, below which the river wound and coiled like a serpent. When the moon hung thin and bright in the dusk—the fourth he had seen—Tarka could swim thirty ​yards under water before he needed to put out his nose to breathe. In one of their haunts, the smaller cub caught a big trout driven upwater by the bitch, and as she dragged the flapping fish on the stones, Tarka seized it above the tail. She snapped at his head, dropping her bite to do so, and he dragged it away. She bit it through the red-spotted back, and they tugged, wrenching the fish into pieces which they ate held in pads and munching with their heads on one side, whereas before they had usually swallowed without chewing. At any threat of piracy one whipped round to eat facing another direction; very soon all the trout was gone except a scriddick, or fragment, of the tail.
There was no more yinny-yikkering when they had fed, for then was the time for play. When Tarka had drunk some water, he snapped playfully at the cub’s head, and inviting her by his manner to catch him, romped through the shallow into the pool. Sometimes he swam with only his hind legs, as his mother did when she was not close upon a fish, but when his sister was so near to his rudder that she could touch the tip of it, he used all four webs and swerved by a swish of his rudder which swung him round in his own length. In one of his turns she caught him and they rolled in the water, pretending to bite each other, and kicking as kittens do. And so it was that Old Nog, the wisest heron of the Two Rivers, heard the noise of bubbles breaking on the water as he alighted by the pool side. He watched, prepared to jump-and-flap if there were danger. He saw a swirl on the water, and the roll of two ​dark sleek bodies. He waited. They rolled nearer. With neck and beak held low—a two-pointed horn spear on a shaft hidden by long narrow feathers—^he waded into water over his knee joints. While he paused for a plunge of the spear, which had pierced and held many a rat and eel, the bitch’s head arose a yard from him and at her sharp cry the cubs fell apart and swam under. The heron, with a harsh squawk of anger and alarm, jumped into the air and beat away slowly, with legs stretched out behind him and neck tucked between his lean shoulders. Kaack! cried Old Nog, as he flew to his next Ashing place.
For several nights after feeding, the cubs went down to a mill-pool to ragrowster, always with the mother, who delighted in playing tricks upon them. Once she whistled the food-cry, and they ran in excitement to her, only to find a large leaf laid on a stone. It was fun, and they chased her. The pool, placid after a dry month, was made turbid by the fragments of leaf, stick, and stone stirred from the weedy bottom. She let them catch her, and enjoyed the rage of her little cubs who snarled so fierce and bit so hard, but could not hurt her.
Early one morning the south-westerly wind arose from off the Atlantic, and brought fast low clouds over the land. A blown grey rain hid the trees on the slopes of the valley. At night the young moon was like a luminous grub spinning a cocoon around itself in the sky. The river pushed to the sea with the fresh, or brown flood-water, and at nightfall their holt, rising three feet under a waterside alder, was filled. The otters rode down ​on the fresh, over the spillway of the Dark weir, where branches were fixed amid long claws of water. They spread their legs and floated. The noise of the great waters filled Tarka with joy. A log rolled in front of him, and he scrambled on it, to jump off again with happy cries. He pretended that froth was fish, and turned over on his back, trying to clutch it. The river swilled him along, while he whistled in happiness. A memory of big fish was moved in the otter’s mind by the smell of the fresh, and she was taking her cubs down to river-bend above Canal Bridge, where she and her mate had killed salmon and peal before the cubs were born.
During the journey the clouds were blown to the north-east, over the high and cold moorland, and when the otters had drifted under Rothern Bridge the moon was shining bright in a dark blue sky. Bubbles glinted around Tarka's head, where the water, hurrying too fast over shoals, tumbled back upon itself. Round a bend the river began to slow and deepen—it was dammed half a mile below by a concrete weir built diagonally from bank to bank. This was the head of the weir-pool. The otters drifted on, round another bend until they came to where the smooth and thundering fall-over of the bubble-whitened water slanted across the river, broken near the left bank by the plunge of breakers down the fish-pass. A mist hung over the river. An icicle stood in the moonlight below the fish-pass, a silver spark for an eye.
Below the fish-pass the water rushed in a foamy spate. Above, it slid black and polished. ​Presently out of the lower whiteness a silvery flicker shook and vanished. The silver spark vanished and glinted lower. Old Nog, peering below the pass, was so excited that he nearly fell over the three long green toes of each foot, in his haste to overlook more of the water. A second fish tried to leap the weir: with sideways flaps of tail it struggled up the spillway, but the claws of the water pulled it back. The moon in its first bright quarter was smitten into a myriad shimmerings by the lower turmoil. Suddenly, it seemed, the shimmerings were drawn together into a larger quartered moon, which rose out of the water in a silvery curve, and fell into the pool above, soundlessly in the immense roar of the fall.
The otters were lying in an uvver, or hollow, near the right bank, away from the tug of the cascade plunging down the fish-pass. The water in the uvver turned quietly. On its surface revolved a wheel of sticks, riveted by bubbles. The otters turned with it, hanging rudders down in the current. When the salmon leapt the weir, the bitch became rigid and her nostrils widened; but before the burst of the splash had dropped back, she had become supple again. The back of her sleek head gleamed and was gone. The cubs followed her, naturally so swift that a human observer might have wondered what cry or signal had been made by the otter.
They swam by the bank until the pull of the water grew less, when the mother turned into midstream and sought the salmon by working upwater from bank to bank through the gloomy and tumultuous spate. The current forced them ​to swim with the webs of four feet. Tarka swam on her left flank and the other cub on her right. Sometimes he was flung sideways, or spun in another whirling wheel. He was swimming out of one when the bitch either scented the fish or saw the swift ream of its dorsal fin, for she turned and swam with the current, leaving them behind. Tarka turned after her, and was pursuing with all his strength when a narrow fish, larger than any he had ever seen, swished past him. A few moments afterwards the otter followed, but Tarka had to rise to breathe, and when he swam down again he was alone. He knew that hunted fish usually went upwater, so he swam against the current, swinging from side to side as he had learned by imitating his mother.
When, after several minutes, he could find neither mother nor sister, he climbed on the bank, where wet vegetation and sticks loading the lower branches of nut trees showed how quickly the fresh had risen, and was falling. Plashes of water covered the grassy depressions of the meadow, where moorhens were feeding; and Tarka was returning from an unsuccessful pattering after the birds when he heard his mother’s whistle. She had been swept down the fish-pass and hurled against the concrete rim of the middle trough, where the water had pounded her until she had been flung out on the straight rush and left, gasping and coughing, on rocky shillets heaped against the lower bank by old floods. She was savage in failure, and took her cubs over the plashy meadow to a wood to find rabbits. In this wood she had never heard the ​iclack of a sprung gin, so she had no fear. But the rabbits told their fear by thumping their hindlegs, and those which did not bolt into the open ran to their buries and sat there quivering, with ears laid over shoulders. The otters followed them to where they crouched, inert in terror, their faces pressed into the earth where the tunnels stopped. Twelve were dragged out squealing, and killed; three being skinned by the bitch. While they were feeding, a harsh chattering came from one of the holes, with two pricks of greenish light. Here stood Stikkersee the weasel, who was in a rage because the water-fitches were in his wood. Stikkersee was about half as long as the otter’s rudder, but he was not afraid of her. He came within a yard of her nose and raved so persistently at the smell of so much blood that she turned away from the little beast’s racket and went back to the river.
When the moon had come to its full round shine, Tarka was hunting his own food in the pools and necks of the clear water running round the bend above Canal Bridge, which rod-and-line men declare to be the best fishing stretch of the Two Rivers. One August night, after play under the oaken fender that took the leat away from the pool, he had left his mother but a short while and was running along the bank, when a raucous cry in the darkness made him halt. His paw was raised. His nostrils twitched. The cry had come from the meadow, where tufts of rush-grass and sedge were left uncropped by cattle. It was followed by others—slurred and throaty notes which rose slowly into the air and ended in
66 ​a sweet and liquid cry. The curlews, which were feeding with their young flown from the moors where they were born, were disturbed by something, and had cried the alarm. Tarka had heard curlews crying during many nights, but never before in such a way. He heard thuds in the ground; and from the river the warning whistle of his mother.
Remembering what had come with the ground thuds before, when the air of the hollow tree had shaken to the baying of hounds, Tarka ran swiftly to water. The otter had left the river and was standing on the bank, sniffing the night wind. A cloud like the seal of an otter drifted across the moon. Tarka slipped into the river, but returned to his mother, being curious. The alarm cries of the curlews had ceased, and other notes fell from the sky. In the riverside sedges two warblers began to speak to one another. They mixed hastily the notes of song and alarm, with the gentle under-song voice used only to their mates when brooding in the cradles woven to the green flags.
A low sound of a human voice came to Tarka, and a hound-like taint which raised the hair of his neck. Immediately the mother 3dkkered a threat, and with her cubs ran down the bank and hid among the sedges. Clouds hid the shine of the moon.
On the bank, dark against the sky, appeared the figures of men, and a long-legged lurcher dog. The men scrambled down to the river’s verge. There was a moment of quiet, when the trilling cries of the fl3ring curlews rose above the water-murmurs and the wind in the trees.
​A scratching noise and the flickering of a small light. It went out. Another match was struck and shielded by a hand, until it spread into a lurid flame, overcasting with ruddy glow the dim shades of trees across the water. The flare lit the faces of two men. One held a pitchfork with gleaming prongs. They stood still and watchful. Then a youthful voice ten yards higher up the river said:
"Fine li'l brown dog going through the daggers. Shiner! Wish I’d took hold of ’n.”
Neither of the men answered. They were staring intently at the water. Slowly the torch-bearer raised an arm and pointed. The spear was poised, to quiver over the man’s head, while a ream skated over the pool.
A hoarse voice whispered "Now!" and the fork was plunged into the pool. A curved flash of fire scattered its ripple. The torch-bearer threw down his torch and waded into the water, followed by the young man, who had run down the bank when he had seen the jumping salmon. They were groping for the fish, guided by the agitated spear-shaft, when the man yelled that one of the prangs had gone through his hand. He held it up, dripping blood, and cursing that the top of one of his fingers was knacked off.
The man on the bank picked up the torch—oily rags tied to a stick—and held it as far out as he could over the water without filling his boots. The youth cried out that he had got a grip on the sow’s gills and that he couldn’t hold it much longer. Before the man could get to him, he had dropped the fish, yelling that he had been bitten in the leg by the little brown dog.
​On the moonlit bank, beside the black-and-red smoking rags, they tried to bind their wounds; and the uninjured man was bending down to pick up his empty sack when the lurcher dog began to growl. Its snarls increased; it ran forward; it yelped with pain and ran back past them, followed by two yellow, glowing eyes.
"Fine li’l brown dog you zee'd in the daggers," growled the poacher called Shiner, who had lost a finger-joint. "Us may as well keep whoam when they sort o’ dogs be about!"