Tarka the Otter Page 6

  When the moon had come to its full round shine, Tarka was hunting his own food in the pools and necks of the clear water running round the bend above Canal Bridge, which rod-and-line men declare to be the best salmon beat of the Two Rivers. One August night, after play under the oaken fender that took the heat away from the pool, he had left his mother but a short while and was running along the bank, when a raucous cry in the darkness made him halt. His paw was raised. His nostrils twitched. The cry had come from the meadow, where tufts of rush-grass and sedge were left uncropped by cattle. It was followed by others – slurred and throaty notes which rose slowly into the air and ended in a sweet and liquid cry. The curlews, which were feeding with their young flown from the moors where they were born, were disturbed by something, and had cried the alarm. Tarka had heard curlews crying during many nights, but never before in such a way. He heard thuds in the ground; and from the river the warning whistle of his mother.

  Remembering what had come with the ground thuds before, when the air of the hollow tree had shaken to the baying of hounds, Tarka ran swiftly to water. The bitch had left the river and was standing on the bank, sniffing the night wind. A cloud like the seal of an otter drifted across the moon. Tarka slipped into the river, but returned to his mother, being curious. The alarm cries of the curlews had ceased, and other notes fell from the sky. In the riverside sedges two warblers began to speak to one another. They mixed hastily the notes of song and alarm, with the gentle under-song voice used only to their mates when brooding in the cradles woven to the green flags.

  The ominous sound of a human voice came to Tarka, and a houndlike taint which raised the hair of his neck. Immediately the mother yikkered a threat, and with her cubs ran down the bank and hid among the sedges. Clouds hid the shine of the moon.

  On the bank, dark against the sky, appeared the figures of men, and a long-legged lurcher dog. The men scrambled down to the river’s verge. There was a moment of quiet, when the trilling cries of the flying curlews rose above the water murmurs and the wind in the trees.

  A scratching noise and the flickering of a small light. It went out. Another match was struck and shielded by a hand, until spread into a lurid flame, over-casting with ruddy glow the dim shades of trees across the water. The flare lit the faces of two men. One held a pitchfork with gleaming prongs. They stood still and watchful. Then a youthful voice ten yards higher up the river said: ‘Fine li’l brown dog going through the daggers, Shiner! Wish I’d took hold of ’n.’

  Neither of the men answered. They were staring intently at the water. Slowly the torch-bearer raised an arm and pointed. The spear was poised, to quiver over the man’s head, while a ream, or little arrowy wave, skated over the pool.

  A hoarse voice whispered ‘Now!’ and the fork was plunged into the water. A curved flash of fire scattered its ripple. The torch-bearer threw down his torch and waded into the water followed by the young man, who had run down the bank when he had seen the jumping salmon. They were groping for the fish, guided by the agitated spear-shaft, when the man yelled that one of the prongs had gone through his hand. He held it up, dripping blood, and cursing that the top of one of his fingers was knocked off.

  The man on the bank picked up the torch – oily rags tied to a stick – and held it as far out as he could over the water without filling his boots. The youth cried out that he had got a grip on the sow’s gills and that he couldn’t hold it much longer. Before the man could get to him, he had dropped the fish, yelling that he had been bitten in the leg by the little brown dog.

  On the moonlight bank, beside the black-and-red smoking rags, they tried to bind their wounds; and the uninjured man was bending down to pick up his empty sack when the lurcher dog began to growl. Its snarls increased; it ran forward; it yelped with pain and ran back past them, followed by two yellow, glowing eyes.

  ‘Fine li’l brown dog you zee’d in the daggers,’ growled the poacher called Shiner, who had lost a finger-joint. ‘Us may as well keep whoam when they sort o’ dogs be about!’

  Chapter Six

  YELLOW from ash and elm and willow, buff from oak, rusty brown from the chestnut, scarlet from bramble – the waters bore away the first coloured leaves of the year. Beeches preserved their tawny form in rain and hail, but yielded more and more to the winds. Sandmartins and warblers deserted their old haunts; kingfishers and herons remained. The reeds sighed in the songless days, the flags curled as they withered, and their brittle tops were broken by the rains.

  Eels began to pass down to the sea. They were the females, travelling from ponds and lakes, from dykes and ditches and drains, from the hill streams of Dartmoor where the Two Rivers had their ancient source. The eyes of the eels grew larger as they were swept down in the turbid waters, as they writhed over wet grass, along cart ruts and drains. These eels were urged seawards by a common desire – to journey onwards from where the shallow bed of ocean broke off and dropped deep into its grave below Ireland. To reach their spawning bed across the Atlantic these fish would swim against the warm Gulf Stream, coming at last to a great eddy, or stagnancy, where, below ancient oak timbers rotting in seaweed, strange fish carrying lights moved in heaviest darkness far under the floating weed of the Sargasso Sea, whence as transparent, flat, ribbon-shaped elvers they had set out for the fresh waters of Europe. After their immense journey the elvers had reached the mouths of rivers and passed up to ponds and ditches, where those that were not killed by man, otter, heron, gull, water-fowl, cormorant, kingfisher, dwarf owl, and pike, lived and grew until desire and instinct moved them to seek their ancestral birthplace off the Gulf of Mexico.

  The eels of the Two Rivers were devourers of the spawn and fry of salmon and trout, and the otters were devourers of eels. Tarka stood on the shillets of the shallow stream while they twisted and moved past his legs. At first he ate a small portion of each capture near the tail, but when his hunger was gone he picked them up, bit them, and dropped them again. The more he killed the more he wanted to kill, and he chopped them until his jaws were tired. It was a slimy sport, and afterwards he washed for nearly half an hour, squatting on a mossy rock.

  While the eels were migrating the otters found their food easily, as there was no hunting to be done. They followed the eels down the river, eating them tail-first as far as the vent, and leaving the head and paired fins. They played away most of the night. The mother took her cubs to a steep, sloping bank of clay which had been worn in past winters by many otters sliding down it. Nine feet below was a pot-hole with seven bubbles turning in the centre with a stick, and as Tarka slid down head-first he meant to seize the stick and play with it. When he looked up through the water it was gone, and many other bubbles rode there, a silver cluster about the blurred image of another otter. Hearing the strokes of an otter’s rudder he looked in the direction of the sound, and saw a strange cub, with the stick in its mouth, travelling under the foamy current. Tarka followed the dim form until he reached a barrier made by an uprooted pollard willow and broken branches lodged in the stream. He climbed on the trunk, shaking water from his ears and eyes, and ran back with jubilant whistles to the sides. There he saw the cub, the stick in its mouth, standing with a grown otter. Tarka yikkered, and ran back to the water. The grown otter mewed to him, ran after him, licked his face, and purred in his ear. He tissed at her, and whistled to his mother, who came to him, but did not drive the stranger or the cub away.

  The stranger had been the mother of many litters long before Tarka’s mother had been born. Her fur was grizzled on pate and shoulders, and her muzzle was grey. Her canine teeth were long and yellow and she had lost three of her incisors. She knew every river and stream that flowed north into the Severn Sea. She had roamed the high cold moors of three counties, and had been hunted by four packs of otter-hounds. Her name was Greymuzzle.

  She played with the otters at the slide, and remained with them when the low clouds became rosy in the east. That day all five hovered on Leaning Willow Island, and she curled besi
de Tarka, and washed his fur, treating him as though he were her own cub. Then she washed the other cub, who had a white-tipped rudder. Greymuzzle had met White-tip wandering alone three weeks before, and had remained with her ever since. There was friendship and sympathy between the two grown otters, for they never yikkered or tissed at each other. Indeed, although Tarka’s mother did not remember Greymuzzle, the old otter played with her and her cub brothers all one night in one of the duckponds near the estuary.

  The rain was blown in grey drifts down the valley, and the river flooded the martin holes that riddled the sandy banks. Trees and branches and dead animals bumped towards the sea. So heavy was the autumnal fresh that the otters could not see to hunt in the river. They travelled up the valley on land, feeding on little voles turned out of their drowned homes, and on rabbits which they caught in a warren in a wood where the corpses of herons, kingfishers, red-throated divers, cormorants, and shags were nailed to an oak tree. Some had been shot, others trapped. The cormorants and shags were beheaded, for the Two Rivers Board of Conservancy paid one shilling for every head. The wings of the kingfishers were cut off their tiny bodies, for some women in towns were willing to pay money for the bright feathers, which they wore as ornaments on their hats.

  After another gale the birds’ nests of old summer began to show in the woods above the winding river. Very beautiful were the wild cherry trees at the fall of their vermilion leaves. The gales of the October equinox stripped them off the branches and whirled them away. The otters went down again on another fresh, sometimes leaving the water to cross bends of marshy ground and fields, following trackless paths which otters had run along before fields were ploughed; before wild men hunted them for their skins with spears of fire-hardened wood. These paths were older than the fields, for the fields were once the river’s wider bed, in the mud of which the heavy rudders had whilom dragged. They floated under Halfpenny Bridge, and lay by day in the reeds of the old canal bed. A dog disturbed them, and the next night they travelled inland, and sought a resting-place in the hillside earth of badgers. The white-arrowed faces of the Brocks only peered and sniffed at them. A few dawns previously a fox had crept into the same earth among the hillside pines, but the badgers had turned him out as he stank, and his habits were displeasing to their tidy ways. Had the fox crept there during the day, and his wheezing told them that he was being hunted by hounds, he would not have been bitten and driven out, but given shelter, for man was their common enemy.

  The Brocks allowed the otters to sleep in one of their ovens – as countrymen call the chambers connecting the tunnels, for they were the size and shape of the cloam ovens wherein some Devon farm-wives still bake bread. The otters were clean, and washed themselves before sleeping and so the badgers were agreeable. At fall of night they left the earth together, Tarka keeping close to his mother, for the size and appearance of the old boar who had been snoring during the day on his bed of bitten grass and moss in the next oven made him uneasy. The badgers waddled down their paths trodden through the spindleberry shrubs and blackthorns, but the otters made their own way among the brambles to the sloping top of the hill. They ran along a row of sheep-nibbled rape to the skyline, crossed a road, and pushed through the hedgebanks of many small fields. Travelling down a pasture, and through a wood of oak and holly, they came to a pill, or creek, whose banks were fissured by guts and broken by tidal waters. White-tip suddenly galloped away over the mud, for she recognized the Lancarse pill which carried the stream coming down the valley from the Twin-Ash Holt, where she had been born. It was low tide, and the water ran below glidders, or steep muddy slopes. They spread their legs and the water took them under a road-bridge to the river, which ran through a wide and shallow pool crossed by black round iron pillars of the Railway Bridge – the Pool of the Six Herons. Whenever Tarka crawled out to catch one of the little birds feeding by the water-line, his feet sank into mud and his belly dragged. Alarmed by the otters the birds arose with cries which seemed to awake echoes far down the river. These were the cries of ring plover and golden plover, or curlew, whimbrel, snipe, and redshank, and all the way down into a dim starlit distance the cries were borne and repeated.

  The brown water rocked them down, and as they were drifting in a wide curve Tarka saw something which filled him with fear. The constellation of the Plough, which had been before them, was now on their left, with its starry share touching the tops of the trees far away. The stars were friendly, being of the night, and the water, but these strange lights were many times the size of the morning star. They stretched in a twinkling line across the river, throwing a haze above them, like the dawn which the otters of the Two Rivers know as a warning.

  Neither of the older otters was afraid, so Tarka swam without diving. The lights made the three cubs uneasy. As they drifted nearer, rumbling sounds came on the night breeze which had arisen two hours since with the flowing of the tide over the estuary bar.

  Soon the sweep of the fresh lessened, for the tide was pressing against the river. A wavelet lifted Tarka and passed behind him, another curled like a long razor-fish shell and broke over him. He shook the water from his whiskers, and licked his lips, liking the strange taste. He lapped and drank. The fore-running press of the young tide lifted him up and down, and chopped with playful foam at his pate. On every ribbed shoal and mudbank the wavelets were lapping the stones and stocks, lapsing with faint trickling sounds, and leaving the domes of froth which trembled and broke in the wind. As the otters swam down with stronger strokes the mudbanks changed to sandy shoals, and air bubbles out of rag-worms’ holes shook up in the shallow water through which they paddled. Long dark shapes rode on the water, swinging slowly in the tide, and the wavelets went flip flup against them. Tarka was afraid of the salmon boats, but the old otters ignored them. The lamplights on the bridge were now very large and bright, and had ceased to twinkle. They passed more boats at their moorings. The rumbling noises of traffic on the bridge were loud, and figures were seen. In front, twenty-four arches, of different shapes and sizes, bore the long bridge. Greymuzzle dived, and the four followed her.

  She had caught the scent of men and dogs blowing from the bridge, two hundred yards in front. Underwater Tarka swam until he could swim no more, and rising quietly to vent, he turned his head to see if any danger were near, and swam on. He rose to breathe nine times before reaching the bridge, and the eighth rising brought him under one of the arches. He swam hard against the tide pouring between two piers.

  This was the first time Tarka passed under the ancient Long Bridge, which the monks built across their ford two centuries before the galleons were laid down in the shipyards below to fight the Spanish Armada. When the otters had passed under the bridge they had to swim hard, keeping near the right bank of the river to avoid the main flow of the tide. Flukes were caught in the estuary that night by the otters diving to deep water; they were not easy to find, for the dabs and plaice lay flat on the sand when they saw the dark shapes above them, and their sand-speckled backs hid them. The otters raked the bottom with their paws, driving up the fish which they seized and took on the bank to eat.

  In the nights that followed Tarka learned to eat crabs, cracking them with his teeth. With the other otters he sought the shellfish among the rocks below the stone quay of a fishing village at the meeting-place of the Two Rivers, where often at night they were disturbed by the pailfuls of rubbish flung over by the natives. Once a pailful of hot ashes came down, burning both Tarka and White-tip.

  By day the otters slept in the reeds of a duckpond which they reached by drifting with the tide up the other horn of the estuary, and turning into the Branton pill, where ketches and gravel barges were moored. At dawn, they left the salt water and rang over the eastern sea-wall to the duckpond shaped like a ram’s horns. In the brackish waters of the duckpond the otters took mullet which had been washed in when the sea-wall had broken years before, and rainbow trout put there by the owner. Old Nog fished these waters, and at night many kinds
of wildfowl flapped and quacked beside the reeds: mallard, wigeon, teal, coot, dabchick, and strays of the duck family – shoveller, pochard, and golden eye.

  On the fourth night of the otters’ arrival at Ram’s-horn duckpond, the swallows which settled among the reed-maces at sunset did not sleep. They twittered among themselves when the first stars gleamed in the water, for they had received a sign to leave the green meadows they loved so well. They talked in the undersong voices – which men seldom hear, they are so soft and sweet – while clinging to the unburst heads of the reed-maces. They talked of white-and-grey seas, of winds that fling away the stroke of wings, of great thundershocks in the sun-whitened clouds under, of wild rains and hunger and fatigue to come before they saw again the sparkles in the foam of the African strand. But none talked of the friends who would fall in the sea, or be slain in France and Spain and Italy, or break their necks against the glass of lighthouses, for the forktailed birds of summer had no thought of these things, or of death. They were joyous and pure in spirit, and alien to the ways of man.

  During the day Tarka had been watching them, being curious. He had watched them sweeping above him with a windy rush of wings that darkened the sky, and had listened to their sharp cries as they dipped and splashed in the wind-ruffled water. As he was stretching himself before leaving his couch at sunset they flew like a great sigh up to the stars. Krark! Krark! Krark! cried Old Nog, standing grave and still in the shallow water at the pond’s edge. It was the last English voice many of them would hear, the blue-winged ones of summer, who had begun the weary migration from the land of thatched homesteads and old cob linhays.