TARKA THE OTTER
CHAPTER ONE
Twilight over meadow and water, the eve-star shining above the hill, and Old Nog the heron crying kra-a-ark! as his slow dark wings carried him down to the estuary. A whiteness drifting above the sere reeds of the riverside, for the owl had flown from under the middle arch of the stone bridge that once had carried the canal across the river.
Below Canal Bridge, on the right bank, grew twelve great trees, with roots awash. Thirteen had stood there—eleven oaks and two ash trees—but the oak nearest the North Star had never thriven, since first a pale green hook had pushed out of a swelled black acorn left by floods on the bank more than three centuries before. In its second year a bullock’s hoof had crushed the seedling, breaking its two ruddy leaves, and the sapling grew up crooked. The cleft of its fork held the rains of two hundred years, until frost made a wedge of ice that split the trunk ; another century’s weather wore it hollow, while every flood took more earth and stones from under it. And one rainy night, when salmon and peal from the sea were swimming against the brown rushing water, the tree had suddenly groaned. Every root carried the groans of the moving trunk, and the voles ran in fear from their tunnels. It rocked until dawn ; and when the wind left the land it gave a loud cry, scaring the white owl from its roost, and fell into the river as the sun was rising.
Now the water had dropped back, and dry sticks lodged on the branches marked the top of the flood. The river flowed slowly through the pool, a-glimmer with the clear green western sky. At the tail of the pool it murmured against the stones, and quickened into paws of water, with star-streaming claws ; the jets and rills ran shallow and fast to an island, on which grew a leaning willow tree. Below the island the river moved swift and polished, blurred under its broken banks by the alders and sallows laden with damp nests of flood-sticks. Round a bend it hastened, musical over many stretches of shillet; at the end of the bend it merged into a dull silence of deep saltwater, and its bright spirit was lost. The banks below were mud, channered by the sluices of guts draining the marsh. Every twelve hours the sea passed an arm under Halfpenny Bridge, a minute's heron-flight below, and the spring tides felt the banks as far as the bend. The water moved down again immediately, for the tide’s-head had no rest.
The tree lay black in the glimmering salmon pool. Over the meadow a mist was moving, white and silent as the fringe of down on the owl's feathers. Since the fading of shadows it had been straying from the wood beyond the mill-leat, bearing in its breath the scents of the day, when bees had bended bluebell and primrose. Now the bees slept, and mice were running through the flowers. Over the old years’ leaves the vapour moved, silent and wan, the wraith of waters once filling the ancient wide river-bed—men say that the sea’s tides covered all this land, when the Roman galleys drifted up under the hills.
Earth trickled by the gap in the bank to the broken roots below. Voles were at work, clearing their tunnels, scraping new shafts and galleries, biting the rootlets which hindered them. An otter curled in the dry upper hollow of the fallen oak heard them, and uncurling, shook herself on four short legs. Through a woodpecker’s hole above her she saw the star-cluster of the Hunting Dogs as faint points of light. She was hungry. Since noon the otter had lain there, sometimes twitching in sleep.
The white owl alighted on the upright branch of the tree, and the otter heard the scratch of its talons as they gripped the bark. She looked from the opening, and the brush of her whiskers on the wood was heard by the bird, whose ear-holes, hidden by feathers, were as large as those of a cat. The owl was hearkening, however, for the prick of the claws of mice on leaves, and when it heard these tiny noises, it stared until it saw movement, and with a skirling screech that made the mouse crouch in a fixity of terror sailed to the ground and clutched it in a foot. The otter gave but a glance to the bird; she was using all her senses to find enemies.
She stood rigid. The hair on her back was raised. Her long tail was held straight. Only her nose moved, as it worked at the scents brought by the mist from the wood. Mingled with the flower odours, which were unpleasant to her, was the taint that had given her a sudden shock; causing her heart to beat quickly, for power of running and fighting if cornered: the taint most dreaded by the otters who wandered and hunted and played in the country of the Two Rivers—the scent of Deadlock, the great pied hound with the belving tongue, leader of the pack whose kills were notched on many hunting poles.
The otter had been hunted that morning. Deadlock had chopped at her pate, and his teeth had grooved a mark in her fur, as she ran over a stony shallow. The pack had been whipped off when the Master had seen that she was heavy with young, and she had swum away down the river, and hidden in the hollow of the water-lapped trunk.
The mist moved down with the river; her heart slowed; she forgot quickly. She put her head and shoulders under water, holding her breath, and steadying herself by pressing her tail, which was thick and strong and tapered from where her backbone ended, against the rough bark. She was listening and watching for fish. Not even the voles peeping from their holes again heard the otter as she slid into the water.
Her dark form came within the inverted cone of water-light wherein movement above was visible to a trout waving fins and tail behind a sunken bough. While the otter was swimming down to the rocky bed, she saw the glint of scales as the fish sped in zigzag course to its cave. The otter was six feet under the surface, and at this depth her eyes, set level with the short fur of the head, could detect any movement above her in the water lit by star-rays. She could see about four times her own length in front, but beyond all was obscure, for the surface reflected the dark bed of the river. Swimming above the weeds of the pool, she followed the way of the trout, searching every big boulder. She was way-wise in the salmon pool. In underwater pursuit her acute sense of smell was useless, for she could not breathe.
She peered around the rocks, and in every cave in the bank. She swam without haste, in a slow and easy motion, with kicks of her thick webbed hindfeet, and strokes of her tail which she used as a rudder to swing herself up or down or sideways. She found the flsh under an ash-tree root, and as it tried to dart away over her head, she threw herself sideways and backwards and seized it in her teeth. By a bay in the bank, broken and beaten by the hooves of cattle going to drink, she ate her prey, holding it in her forepaws and cranching with her head on one side. She ate to the tail, which was left on a wad of drying mud cast from a hoof; and she was drinking a draught of water when a whistling cry came from under Canal Bridge. It had a thin, hard, musical quality, and carried far down the river. She answered gladly, for it was the call of the dog-otter with whom she had mated nearly nine weeks before. He had followed her down from the weir by the scent lying in her seals, or footprints, left on many scours, and on the otter-path across the meadowland of the river’s bend. He swam in the deep water, hidden except for his nose, which pushed a ream on the surface placid in the windless night.
As she watched, the ream became a swirl. The otter on land heard the instant hiss of breath in the nostrils before they sank. Immediately she slipped into the river with the least ripple tracing where she had entered. The dog-otter had sniffed the scent of a fish.
Bubbles began to rise in the pool, making two chains with silver-pointed links, which moved steadily upstream. Twenty yards above the swirl, which lingered as the sway of constellations between black branches, a flat wide head fierce with whiskers looked up and went under again, the top of a back following in the down-going curve so smooth that the bubbles rising after it were just rocked. Time of breathing-in was less than half a second.
The bubbles, eking out of nostrils, ran over pate and neck and shook off between the shoulders, to rise in clusters the size of hawthorn peggles; the dog-otter was swimming with his forelegs tucked against his chest. Near the bridge the bubbles rose large as oak-apples; he was kicking four webs together, having sighted the fish. The bubbles ended in another swirl by a weed-fringed sterling, and a delicate swift water-arrow shot away between the two piers of the middle arch—the peal, or sea-trout, had gone down, passing three inches off the snapt jaws.
The river became silent again, save where it murmured by root and rock. Old Nog the heron alighted by a drain behind the sea-wall of the marsh two miles below Halfpenny Bridge, whither he had straightly flown. The white owl had just caught by an old straw rick its second mouse. which, like the first, caught five minutes before, was swallowed whole.
Where water clawed the stones at the tail of the pool, the peal leapt to save itself from the bigger enemy ever trudging and peering behind it. It fell on the shillets, on its side, and flapped, once, then lay still, moving only its gills. Then a dog-otter was standing by it, holding up his nose to sniff the air when a thin, wavy, snarling cry rose out of the river. It was the bitch’s yinny-yikker, or threat. She ran upon the fish, pulled it away from the dog, who was not hungry, and started to eat it.
While she was chawing the bones and flesh of the head the dog played with a stone, and only when she had turned away from the broken fish did he approach and lick her face in greeting. Her narrow lower jaw dropped in a wide yawn which showed the long canine teeth, curved backwards for holding fish, and kept white by the strength of bites. The yawn marked the end of a mood of anxiety. The dog had caught and eaten a peal on his journey, and was ready for sport and play, but the bitch did not follow him into the river. She felt the stir of her young, snarled at the dog in sudden fear, and turned away from the water.
She ran over the bullocks’ drinking place and passed through willows to the meadow, seeking old dry grasses and mosses under the hawthorns growing by the mill-leat, and gathering them in her mouth with wool pulled from the over-arching blackberry brambles whose prickles had caught in the fleeces of sheep. She returned to the river bank and swam with her webbed hind-feet to the oak tree, climbed to the barky lip of the holt, and crawled within. Two yards inside she strewed her burden on the wood-dust, and departed by water for the dry, sand-coloured reeds of the old summer’s growth which she bit off, frequently pausing to listen. After several journeys she sought trout by cruising under water along the bank, and loach which she found by stirring up the sand and stones of the shallow whereon they lurked. The whistles of the dog were sometimes answered, but so anxious was she to finish making the couch in the hollow tree that she left off feeding while still hungry, and ran over the water-meadow to an inland pond for the floss of reed-maces which grew there. On the way she surprised a young rabbit, killing it with two bites behind the ear, and tearing the skin in her haste to feed. Later in the night a badger found the head and feet and skin as he lumbered after slugs and worms, and chewed them up.
The moon rose up two hours before the dawn, and the shaken light on the waters gladdened her, for she was young, and whistling to her mate, she swam to the high arched bridge up-river and hid among the sticks and branches posited by the flood on the bow of the stone cutwater. Here he found her, and as he scrambled up she slipped into the river and swam under the arch to the lower end of the cutwater, meeting him nose-tonose in a maze of bubbles, and swimming back under the arch. They played for half an hour, turning on their backs with sideway sweeps of rudders, and never touching, although their noses at each swirling encounter were but a few inches apart. It was an old game they played, and it gave them delight and made them hungry, so they went hunting for frogs and eels in a ditch which drained the water-meadow.
Here they disturbed Old Nog, who was overlooking one of his many fishing places along the valley. Krark! He flapped away before them, his long, thin, green toes scratching the water. The otters hunted the ditch until the moon paled of its gleam, when they went back to the river. They played for awhile, but jackdaws were beginning to talk in soft, deep, raven-like croaks in the wood, as they wakened and stretched wings and sought fleas. A lark was singing. The dog turned east, and ran along the otter-path used by otters long before the weir was made for the grist-mill below Leaning Willow Island. His holt was in the weir-pool. The bitch drifted lazily with spread limbs, over shallow and through pit, to the rippled water by the hollow tree, into which she crept. Cocks crew in the distant village as she was licking herself, and when she was clean she turned in the couch and made a snug sleeping place, and resting chin on rudder, was asleep.
The rising sun silvered the mist lying low and dense on the meadow, where cattle stood on unseen legs. Over the mist the white owl was flying, on broad soft wings. It wafted itself along, light as the mist; the sun showed the snowy feathers on breast and underwings, and lit the yellow-gold and grey of its back. It sailed under the middle arch of the bridge, and pulled itself by its talons into one of the spaces left in the stonework by masons. Throughout the daylight it stood among the bones and skulls of mice, often blinking, and sometimes yawning. At dimmity it flew down the right bank of the river and perched on the same branch of the fallen oak and skirred to its mate, who roosted by day in a barn near the village.
It flew away; it fluttered down upon many mice in the fields; but the otter did not leave the holt. The instincts which had served her life so far were consumed in a strange and remote feeling that smouldered in her eyes. She lay on her side, in pain, and a little scared. The song of the river, hastening around Leaning Willow Island, stole into the holt and soothed her; the whistles of her mate above the bridge were a comfort.
When the moon gleamed out of the clouds in the east, pale and wasted as a bird in snow, the occasional whistles of the dog ceased. She did not care, for now she needed no comfort. She listened for another cry, feeble and mewing, and whenever she heard it, she rounded her neck to caress with a gentle tongue a head smaller than one of her own paws. All the next day and night, and the day after, she lay curled for the warming of three blind cubs; and while the red of sunset was still over the hill, she slid into the water and roved along the left bank, looking in front and above her, now left, now right, now left again. A glint in the darkness! Her back looped as the hind legs were drawn under for the full thrust of webs, and bubbles wriggled off her back larger than oak-apples; she was only a little slower than when she had last chased a trout. Her rudder, about two-thirds as long as her body and two inches thick at the base, gave her such a power of swiftness in turning that she snatched the fish two feet above as it flashed over her head.
She ate it ravenously, half standing in shallow water, yinnying at shadows as she chawed and swallowed. After four hasty laps she went under again. She caught an eel, ate the lower part of it and returned to the holt. But she was still hungry and left them a second time, running up the bank to stand upright with the breeze drawing across her nostrils. Blackbirds in the wood were shrilling at tawny owls which had not yet hooted. The otter dropped on her forepads and ran to water again. The weight of her rudder dragging on a sandy scour enabled her to immerge noiselessly while running.
The eldest and biggest of the litter was a dog-cub, and when he drew his first breath he was less than five inches long from his nose to where his wee tail joined his backbone. His fur was soft and grey as the buds of the willow before they open at Eastertide. He was called Tarka, which was the name given to otters many years ago by men dwelling in hut-circles on the moor. It means Little Water Wanderer, or, Wandering as Water.
With his two sisters he mewed when hungry, seeking the warmth of his mother, who uncurled and held up a paw whenever tiny pads would stray in her fur, and tiny noses snuffle against her. She was careful that they should be clean, and many times in the nights and days of their blind helplessness she rolled on her back, ceasing her kind of purr to twist her head and lick them. And sometimes her short ears would stiffen as she started up, her eyes fierce with a tawny glow and the coarse hair of her neck bristling, having heard some danger sound. By day the dog was far away, sleeping in a holt by the weir-pool which had its rocky entrance underwater, but in the darkness his whistle would move the fierceness from her eyes, and she would lie down to sigh happily as her young struggled to draw life from her.
This was her first litter, and she was overjoyed when Tarka’s lids ungummed, and his eyes peeped upon her, blue and wondering. He was then eleven days old. Before the coming of her cubs, her world had been a wilderness, but now her world was in the eyes of her firstborn. After a day of sight-seeing he began to play, tapping her nose with a paw and biting her whiskers. He kicked against the other cubs, growing lustily, and his eyes darkened, and he tried harder than ever to bite his mother’s whiskers, which tickled him when he was being held between her paws and washed. Once, when he was milk-happy and had snarled his first snarl without frightening her into stopping the licking of his belly, he was so furious that he tried to bite off her head. She opened her mouth and panted, which is the way otters laugh among themselves, while he kicked and struggled, and she pretended to bite through his neck. Tarka was not afraid, and clawed her whiskers and struggled to be free. His mother released him very gently: on wobbly legs he returned to the assault of her head, but he snarled so much that he was sick; and when she had tidied him he fell asleep under her throat.
When his eyes had been opened a fortnight, Tarka knew so much that he could crawl as far as a yard from her, and stay away although in her anxiety she mewed to him to return. She was afraid of the daylight by the opening of the holt, but Tarka had no fear. He liked to stare at the waterflies dancing their sun-dance over the ripples. One morning as he was blinking away the brightness a bird about the size of a sparrow alighted on a twig over the hole. A sparrow in size, but not in colour! It may have been that the Quill Spirit had painted the bird with colours stolen from rock and leaf and sky and fern, and enriched them by its fervour, for the bird’s feet were pinker than the rock-veins in the cleaves of Dartmoor, his wings were greener than opening buds of hawthorn, his neck and head were bluer than the autumn noonday sky, his breast was browner than bracken. He had a black beak nearly as long as his body. He was Halcyon the kingfisher. His feathers were now at their brightest, for his mate had just laid her seven glossy white eggs at the end of a tunnel in the bank.
Halcyon peered with a bright brown eye at Tarka, who wanted the bird to play with. A wind ruffled one of the emerald feathers, and Halcyon crouched to peer into the water. Tarka mewed to him to come and be played with, and at the sound the bird gave a sudden piercing whistle and flew upriver, leaving Tarka creasing his nose as he blinked at the perching place, unable to understand why it was not there.
He went back to his mother and played the biting-game with her, after which he slept. When he awoke again, he saw one of his sisters playing with something and immediately wanted it. The cub was patting it with one paw, holding her head sideways; but as it did not run, she patted it with the other paw, while holding her head to that side. Tarka was slowly crawling towards it, meaning to take it for himself, when he noticed that it was looking at him. The look frightened him and he tissed at it. The other cub jumped back and tissed as well, and the noise awakened the youngest cub, who spat at her mother. The mother licked its face, yawned, and closed her eyes.
Again Tarka crawled towards the thing looking at him. He sniffed at it and crept away. He crept back to it, but the other cub tissed and so he returned to his mother. When next he went towards it, the look in its eyes had changed, and he boldly touched it with his nose and shifted it with a paw. It looked at him no longer, for it was only the skull of a field-vole, and light coming down the woodpecker’s hole from above had put shadows into its empty eyes. Tarka moved it between his paws; some of its teeth dropped out and rattled inside the hollow. The sound pleased him. He played with the skull until he heard one of his sisters mewing in hunger, when he hurried back to his mother.
One evening, while the cubs were alone, Tarka was pla3nng with his rattle when he saw a live vole, that had come into the holt through an opening by the roots. As the way was large enough for a rat to pass, he crept easily along the tunnel, up which the vole had fled in fright as soon as it smelled him. The tunnel ended at the broken roots, to which part of the earth that had nourished them still clung. Little green leaves were growing out of this earth, for the oak’s disaster had been as a blessing to many seeds of charlock which had been lying buried in the cold earth long before the acorn had sprouted.
Voles, which are the red mice of the fields, were squeaking among the roots as they hurried to their holes; for the explorer ran among them, crying the alarm that a great weasel was coming. Tarka did not know that his scent had filled them with terror; indeed, he did not know what a vole was. He had seen movement and gone to it, for he was always ready to play, and play was movement. The squeaks ceased.
All was quiet and he heard, for the first time, the jets and rills on the stones which made the ancient song of the river. He wanted to get nearer to the sounds and crawled along a root. When he was half-way along it, he saw that there was nothing on either side of him. He was alone on the root. He tried to turn back, but the claws of one hindfoot slipped and there he clung, curved across the wood, unable to go up or down. He mewed to his mother, but she did not come. His cries grew more and more plaintive as he became colder.
About five minutes afterwards a ream passed under the stone bridge and moved into deeper and quieter water where its raised lines were carried to the banks before being smoothed away by the flow. The angular wave pushed steadily down the river. The bitch was returning. She had caught and eaten six small trout and two eels during the uneasy half-hour she had been away. When nearly opposite the holt she turned across the current, and had almost reached it when she flung head and shoulders out of the water. While rising she was staring, sniffing the air, and listening; and before all the drops running off her whiskers had splashed, her head was underwater and her body doubling with the effort of thrusting four webs together. Then more drops splashed by the holt. A pebble rolled down the bank.
The bitch had heard Tarka’s cries, and fear had shocked her into the swiftest movements. She was in the root-pit beside Tarka while the stars were still shaking in the undulation of the old ream. He trembled with cold. A score of hearts under browny-red coats beat faster at the otter’s chiding yikker as she picked up her cub by the neck and carried him to the shore. She swam with her head held high and carefully, lest the water should touch him. Afterwards, lying on the warm couch, she forgot her fright and closed her eyes in enjoyment of her young.
The next night Tarka crept along the root again, and fell in the same way. He was crawling around, when a strange-smelling animal leaned over him, wetting him with drops from its jowl. He tissed at it and tissed again when he heard the yinny-yikker of his mother and the snap of her teeth as the animal was driven away. Then something bit the back of his neck and lifted him up. With the cub dangling from her mouth, the bitch threatened the dog, who had followed her in curiosity to the holt. The dog tried to look into the tree on the following night, but the bitch dragged him down by the rudder, as though she would drown him. The dog thought this was fun, and ragrowstered with her under and on the water all the way to Leaning Willow Island, where she left him, remembering Tarka.