Tarka the Otter Read online

  Tarka had been peering from the holt and, at the first whistle, he moved forward into the water, making hardly a ripple. He swam across the pool with his forelegs tucked under him, kicking with the hindlegs only. The toes were spread at the thrust, so that two webs drove him forward with one kick. Behind him swam the cubs, the arrowy ripples pushed from their noses breaking against each other. They followed Tarka across the floating crowsfoot flowers and reached their mother who lay so still. They spoke to her, nuzzling her with their heads and mewing their hunger. When she would not speak to them they bit her rudder, they cajoled and wheedled, they made angry tissing noises, but she did not move. They left her; and suddenly she sprang up with an otter-laugh, which was not so much a sound as the expression of lips curled back from teeth, and the rolling of the head. She was boisterous with joy after the day’s fright, and had been shamming death in fun. Calling the cubs to follow her, she sank into the water and swam upstream.

  The cubs knew that she was looking for fish, and they followed her by scent in the line of bubbles that was breaking along on the surface. She looked up with a fish in her mouth and they raced for it, yikkering threats to each other. The otter led them out of the pool and to a shallow; she dropped the fish, a trout of three ounces, and went to the gravelly bank where the water was deeper. Tarka picked up the live trout and took it on to a mossy boulder, where he ate it in less than a minute.

  The otter caught small fish so quickly in the narrow water that Tarka was soon gorged; and the other cubs in their quick hunger were able to snatch a fish from him while he was rolling on his back in order to have the pleasure of clawing it over his head. The bitch cubs were smaller than Tarka, but quicker in movement. Sometimes they swam along the bank underwater, looking left and right; but their mother had scared the fish before them and they rarely saw the gleam which was a fish curving back over her head. Often they snapped at stones or roots, mistaking them for trout.

  At the end of the night, Burnt Sycamore Holt lay a mile and a half behind them. It was time to hide when buzzards were seen soaring above the oak and larch woods. The bitch led them out of the water, through willows and ash trees and brambles, and across a narrow-gauge railway track to a fir plantation. Two years before her mother had taken her to a large rabbit bury near the edge of the quarry, and now she led her own cubs there. A scent strange to Tarka was on the dry soil before the tunnel but his mother did not heed it. She ran down the tunnel and immediately a fox crept out of it by another way, not wanting to meet a bitch otter with cubs underground, or indeed anywhere.

  While the otters were cleaning themselves, the fox was sitting down outside the hole, sometimes yawning; he had within him a fill of mice, beetles, and young rabbits. He was drowsy. He remembered his scratching post, the stump of a sapling larch, and walked there, to rub his flanks against it. Reddish hairs lay around it on the ground; one side was polished. When he had scratched enough he walked to a grey stone wall behind a cattle shippen and climbed upon it, waiting for the sun.

  The disused rabbit bury was dry and echoed the greater noises of day – the screeching of whistles as light engines, drawing trucks of white clay from the pits on the moor where the brook took its source, slowly approached the crossing of the lane below; the voice, up the valley, of a man chaunting coo-coo-coo-coo-coo, and the barks of a dog running round a field while cows swung in a file along a narrow, trodden way, to the milking shed; the buzz, like a blowfly in a spider’s web, of a motor-car passing slowly over the little bridge and the rails beyond; the wheeooing of buzzards and the croaking of crows above the larch wood. These noises did not disturb the otters.

  At dimmit light they went down to the brook again, meeting the fox, who was quietly lapping to quench his thirst made by swallowing the fur of so many mice. He looked at the otter; the otter looked at him. The fox went on lapping until the water was spoiled by their musky scent, when he went up the hill to sniff in his earth. For ten minutes he sniffed and pondered, until his curiosity was satisfied, and then he started his nightly prowl – after a little scratching against his post.

  The otter took her cubs up the brook and over a field. Away from water her movements were uneasy. Often she stopped in her low running to stare with raised head and working nostrils. A galvanized iron chicken coop in a field caused her to make a wide loop – the scent of man was there. A pair of boots left by a tramp in a hedge made Tarka tiss with fear, turn about, and run away. The cubs were now as active and alert as their mother.

  At last they reached the ditch remembered by the otter. She leaned down to the brown-scummed water, clinging to the bank by her rudder. Bull frogs had been croaking a moment before she arrived there, but now they were silent and burrowing in the mud. With paw and nose she sought under the weed, nipping them and dropping them on the grass. The cubs seized them and turned away, yikkering; and when she had caught all she could find, the otter ran back to the cubs and began to flay the frogs for their skins were tough.

  They left some of the frogs uneaten, for there were eels in the ditch. Iggiwick, the vuz-peg – his coat was like furze and his face like a pig’s – found the remains, and was gleefully chewing when a badger grunted near. With a squeak of terror the vuz-peg rolled himself in a ball, but the badger bit through the spines as though they were marram grasses. Iggiwick squealed like marram grass in flame. Later in the night nothing was left except the trotters, teeth, and spiny coat of poor Iggiwick.

  They were too far off to hear the dying squeals of the vuz-peg, for during the half-hour before the badger caught him they had travelled a mile up the brook. The otter swam in front, the cubs scrambling behind her. Often a fish would dodge back by her whiskers, missing the snap of her teeth by the space of a fin, and the cubs would bump into one another in their eagerness to get it. When this happened, the otter would turn again to her prowling from bank to bank, and leave the fish to be caught by them.

  The brook became smaller and narrower, and at the end of the night it was less than a yard across. The next evening they left the rushes in the wet ground where they had been sleeping, and crossing a road, came to a bog tract where curlew and snipe lived. Tarka ran over the line of a hare, and followed it in curiosity until his mother called him back. Mosses made the way soft and held many scents – of marsh orchid, stinking iris, bog pimpernel; of wild duck, stoat, short-eared owl, magpie, and, once, the rank-smelling flight-quill of a raven.

  They reached a thread of water and followed it downwards until it was joined by another thread. The two made a stream, which hastened under whitish banks of clay. The otter sought for fish, but finding none, climbed out of the channel by a slanting otter-path and crossed the railway track near a tall, dark chimney that rose out of buildings. It was a brick factory. An otter had travelled before them, and in a hollow behind birch trees about a quarter of a mile on they heard a whistle; and running towards the call, they came to a deep, reedfringed pond, on the clay side of which a grown dog-otter was playing with the wings of a drake. Tarka kept behind his mother, being frightened of the stranger. He had a split ear, done in a fight two years before. Mother and cubs went into the pond, leaving him rolling on the bank and tossing the wings with his paws.

  The pond was an old pit from which white clay had been dug. The water was deeper than any the cubs had swum in. Round the edge grew reed-maces; it was early June and the wind-shaken anthers were dropping the yellow pollen on the juicy heads which would pass, with autumn, into the drab hues of decay. Ten ducklings were hiding in the reeds, while their mother circled in the starry sky, telling them, with soft cries of quaz-qua-a-a-az-quaz, not to move. She had flown up when the dog-otter had caught and eaten the drake, swimming up underneath it. At the time of capture the drake had been trying to swallow a frog, by quapping with its bill, which held one of the legs. When the otter’s teeth had gripped the drake, the frog had escaped; but it commenced to swell on the water and so it could not swim down to the pit’s floor. Tarka saw it above him as he pushed about eag
erly underwater; the frog showed darkly in the dim surface mirror which reflected the grey sludge of the pond’s bed. Tarka caught it, and ate it under a thorn bush planted by a thrush beside the pond.

  Mother and cubs roved about in the water for a while, and the dog joined them. The frogs and eels, having seen them, were hiding, and so the bitch climbed out through grey-lichened whitethorn bushes and ran among rushclumps to the next pit. They hunted through four ponds before they had caught enough to be ready for romping. The fourth pond was larger than the others, and so deep that Tarka had not breath enough to follow the grown otters down in the gloomy water, although he tried many times. He knew they were playing, and mewed to them to come up. Sometimes a string of luminous bubbles shook up and past him, but that was all he saw of the fun; he could see above him, but all was obscure beneath, although he could sometimes hear them.

  The old dog-otter was happy, because he had another otter to play with him. His wander years were past; he had killed salmon in the Severn, eaten pollack on the rocks of Portland Bill, and lampreys in the Exe. Now he dwelled among the reeds and rushes of the White Clay Pits, and whenever otters journeyed to the ponds, which formed an irregular chain in a wide flat valley drained by the stream, the old dog, who was rather deaf, would join them; and in the deep pond, he would lure one or another down to a rusted, weed-grown engine that had lain for years half-buried in the clayey ooze. A great joy it was to him to hide in the funnel, and to swim out upon the otter seeking him. Again and again after taking in air he would swim down to his engine, but if any otter except himself tried to hide in the funnel, he would bite it furiously with the few worn teeth that remained in his jaws.

  For three years he had lived on the frogs and eels and wild-fowl of the ponds. The clay-diggers often saw him as they went home in the trucks; they called him Marland Jimmy.

  The pollen-holding anthers of the reed-maces withered and dropped into the water, but still the bitch and cubs stayed on the land of ponds. Here Tarka tasted his first pheasant, caught by the bitch in the woods where game was preserved. It was a cock-bird, and had only one wing, the other having dropped off in the winter, after a shot-gun wound. The bird was a swift runner, and nearly pecked out the eye of the otter before it died.

  By day they slept in the reeds. From his couch of bitten and pressed-down hollow stems, Tarka watched the dragonflies which flew glittering over the water. On a reed beside him was fixed the brittle greyish mask of a nymph which had crept out of the pond the day before, having done with the years of preying on pollywiggle, minnow, and water-flea. The sun looked upon it; it dried; it heaved at its mask, which split down the back. Legs and head of a colourless insect crept out with short and flaccid wings. It clung limply to the reed, while its wings uncreased and hardened in the heat. It took the dragonish breath of noon and changed it into gleams of scarlet; its eyes grew lustrous with summer fire. The pond glittered. Its wings, held low near its body, glittered a little; they spread wide and were tremulous for flight. It was gone among the whirring dragonflies, whose bodies were banded with yellow and black, and bright with emerald and red and blue.

  Cuckoos were calling, and sedge-warblers chattering among the green pennons of the reeds. Sometimes one flew over the pond with a mild and hawk-like flight, calling wuck-oo, wuck-wuck-oo, and the little agitated warblers flew after it. The hen cuckoos did not sing their name, but made a low gobbling cry as they answered their mates. They were noisy about the pond, as they sought warblers’ nests wherein to drop their small, thick-shelled, greyish-brown eggs. Once a cuckoo was flying over with an egg in its beak when a sparrowhawk dashed at the bird and the egg dropped into the water. Splap! Tarka awakened, saw the egg, dived, brought it to the couch, and ate it before the shadow of a grass-stalk had moved its own width on the bank.

  Chapter Four

  TARKA was rolling on his back in the beams of the sun one morning, when he heard the distant note of the hunting horn and soon afterwards the tongues of hounds. The bitch listened, and when the baying became louder, she pressed through the reeds with the cubs and took to the bramble undergrowth beyond the north bank of the pond. A south wind was blowing. She ran down the wind, the cubs following just behind her. When she stopped to listen, she also licked her neck; and a human observer might have thought that this act showed her to have no fear of being hunted.

  The heart of the otter was beating quickly; and whenever she stopped to listen, her aroused nervous force was as a burden, only to be eased by movement.

  Now the hounds were hunting Marland Jimmy, who was swimming about the pond and looking at them from among the reeds. When he was tired of swimming backwards and forwards underwater, he crept out through brambles and ran across a few acres of boggy moorland to the stream. He was fat and, for an otter, slow on his broad pads. Hounds were after him when he was halfway across the rushy tract, where lichens and mosses held a distinct scent of him. The old otter reached the stream and went down with the water until he came to a drainpipe, where he had often sheltered. Soon the tongue of Deadlock boomed up the pipe, but he lodged there in safety. Then a terrier named Bite’m crept to within a foot of him and yapped in his face. His hearing having dulled with the years, the otter was not disturbed by these noises; nor was he alarmed by the thuds of an iron bar over his head. Bite’m was called back and another terrier yapped away at him until it, too, was recalled. Voices of men quietened; and after a few minutes the sounds came down the length of pipe behind him, followed by a disgusting smell. Marland Jimmy endured the smell and more thumpings above him; and when, an hour later, he crept out into bright light, the water passed away from him with a coloured smear on its surface. The old otter licked the greyish-yellow fur of his belly, and nibbled the smarting skin between his toes, all the rest of the afternoon, but the smell of paraffin stayed on him.

  The bitch and cubs were safe, for although hounds drew down the brook, finding and carrying their line to a wood, the hunt was stopped by a keeper. Young pheasants were in the wood, and gins were tilled for their enemies. Hanging from the branch of a tree in this preserve were the corpses of many vairs and fitches, some green, others hairless and dry, some with brown blood clotting broken paws and noses. All showed their teeth in death, as in life. With them were bundles of claws and beaks and feathers, which once had been dwarf owls, kestrels, magpies, sparrowhawks, and buzzards. The hues and sheens of plumage were gone, and their eyes’ light; soon they would drop to the earth, and flowers dream out of their dust.

  The brook was a haunt of dippers, whose cries were sudden as the cries of water-and-stones; speedy little brown birds, white-breasted, who in flight were like drab kingfishers. A tawny owl perching against the trunk of a larch tree also saw the otters coming up the stream, and its eyes, soft with light as the dark blue sloe is soft with bloom, watched them until they crept into a rocky cleft below a fall, where royal ferns cast their great shadows and water-violets were cooled by dripping mosses.

  After sunset a swarm of cockchafers whirred and flipped about the top of the larch, and the owl, hungry after huddling still for fifteen hours, flapped up through the maze of cone-knotted twigs and caught two in its feet. It ate them in the air, bending to take them in its beak; and when it had caught and swallowed a dozen, it let out a quavering hoot to its mate – for the tawny owls liked to be near each other in their hunting – and, perched on a low branch of another tree, listened and watched for a young rabbit. After a few moments, its head was tilted sharply downward: the otter and cubs were going through the wood.

  At midnight the western sky was pale blue and hollow like a mussel-shell on the seashore. The light lingered on the hill-line, where trees were dark. Under the summer stars a hundred swifts were screaming as they played away the night, two miles above the earth; in fine weather they kept on the wing for many days and nights together, never roosting. Their puny screams were heard by Tarka as he rubbed his neck against the grassy mound of an ants’ nest.

  While he was enjoying the fee
ling a loud chakkering noise came down from the wood. The otters swung round. Four heads pointed towards the trees. The bitch ceased to nibble her fur; the other cubs forgot their play with the head of a corncrake. The noise, distinct in the dewfall, was met by other cries as harsh and angry.

  When the curious otters reached the wood, other noises were mingled with the chakkering. Green points of light glinted in the undergrowth about them, like moonlight in dewdrops, for many vairs were watching a fight of the two dog-fitches on the woodland path. Running along the bank of a ditch beside the path, the fitches had met at the mouth of a drainpipe, out of which strayed a hunger-making smell. The pipe, covered with grass sods, lay beside an oak-log felled for a path across the ditch. Both ways had been made by the keeper; one for himself and the other for fitches and vairs, whose liking for pipes and covered ways he knew. There were many such ways in the wood, and to make them more attractive, the keeper had placed the flesh and entrails of dead rabbits inside the pipes.

  Each dog-fitch was trying to break the other’s neck by a bite behind the ear. They rolled and snapped and scratched with their long claws, their black-tipped tails twitching with rage.

  Every stoat and weasel which heard them ran to watch the fight on the pathway made by the hobnailed boots of the keeper. Tawny and dwarf owls peered down from branches of oak trees, while from afar a fox listened, and prowled on again. A crow awoke in an ivy-thick holly, muttered aa-aa, and laid its beak among its neck-feathers once more. Tarka circled round the stoats with the other cubs, mewing and yikkering with excitement; and then he smelled the rabbit flesh inside the drainpipe. The youngest cub also smelled it. She was quicker than Tarka, and her head and shoulders were inside one end when he ran in at the other. He had bared his teeth to snatch the flesh when there was a hard snap, a knock of iron on the pipe, a blow on the side of his head, and a loud whimpering and tissing from the cub.