sniff what was wauling at him. He steadied himself by touching the stone on which it stood, and the ram-cat made a noise like one Tarka had heard before, when a pailful of hot embers had been shot over the village quay by the estuary. He fled, remembering a burn. Alone again, the ram-cat lowered body on stumps, and lifted ears to listen for (illegible text).
When the next night White-tip followed Tarka’s trail along the dry bed, Shaggery was sitting above the bury, in an old mossy-damp magpie’s nest. Again the waul and the grinding of teeth, again the spitting hiss, and again an otter hurrying back to water.
Tarka had gone under the last bridge above the tide, and the sun was rising when he crept out by a mud glidder and curled himself in a bed of green flags. Water ran clear and shallow on its rocky bed below the mud. Swallows flew to and fro over the river channel, winding deeper and broader through the meadows. All things were warmed in the sun. The grass and dock-leaves under the tide-wall were greenish-grey with salt and silt dried on blade and stalk and leaf, after the sluggard tide’s lapse. Seaweed, black and brittle, lay below the wall with scriddicks of old rush-tops and sticks among white flowers of scurvy-grass. The sun moved above the oakwood that sloped from the rocky bank across the river; the leaves of lower branches were blenched, and weed-hung. A hot, broken glitter, like a flight of silver birds, played lightly on the green flags where Tarka was lying. One brilUant beak of light slipped round a flag and pecked at
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