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 Wcis 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, butcrossing 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. Aiter the meal Tarka drank rain-water 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--
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