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. Craaleek, cur-lee-eek! The curlews saw them as they swam the shallow water to the top of the Shrars-hook. 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
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