CHAPTER NINETEEN

Tarka became one with the river, finding his course among the slimy stones so that his back was always covered. He rose beside the middle pier, whose cutwater was hidden by a faggot of flood sticks. Under the sticks was dimness, streaked and blurred with sunlight. Tarka hid and listened.

His paws rested on a sunken branch. The water moved down, clouded with the mud-stirrings of the leat. He lay so still that the trout returned to their stances beside the stone sterlings.

_B'hoys, b'hoys! Com' on, ol' fellars! Leu in, ol' fellars. Com' on, all 'v yer!_

The stain spread into the pool below the bridge. Hounds whimpered and marked at the stick-pile. Their many tongues smote all other sounds from Tarka's ears. He knew they could not reach him in his retreat, and so he stayed there even when a pole, thrust into the heap, rubbed against his flank. Then over his head the sticks began to crack and creak, as a man climbed upon them. The man jumped with both feet together on the heap. Tarka sank and turned downstream. Cries from the lower parapet; thudding of boots above. The chain of bubbles drew out downstream.

Tarka swam to the left bank, where he touched and breathed. He heard, in the half-second his head was out of water, the noise that had terrified him as a cub--the noise as of an iron-shod centipede crossing the shallows. Way down the river was stopped by a line of upright figures, standing a yard apart and stirring the water with poles. Tarka heard the noise under water, but he swam down until he saw before him the bright-bubbled barrier. He swung round and swam upstream as fast as three-and-a-half webbed feet could push him.

He swam under the heap of sticks again, enduring the massed tongues of marking hounds until the creaking and thudding over his head drove him to open water again. He swam under an arch, turned by the lower sterling, and swam up another arch, to a backwater secluded from the main stream by the ridge of shillets made by the cross-leaping waters of the runner in flood. An ash tree grew over the backwater, but Tarka could find no holding in its roots. He swam past the legs of swimming hounds and went down again.

_Tally Ho!_

He swam through the plying poles of the stickle, and ran over the shallow, reaching safe water before the pack came down. He was young and fast and strong. Hounds were scattered behind him, some swimming, others plunging through the shallows below the banks, stooping to the scent washed on scour and shillet, and throwing their tongues. He could not see them, when swimming under water, until they were nearly over him. He swam downstream, never turning back, touching first one bank to breathe, and then swimming aslant to the other. Once in the straight mile of river under the Town on the Hill, he emerged by a shallow almost by Deadlock's feet; instantly he turned back. Farther down, by a jungle of balsam, whose top drought-roots were like the red toes of a bird, he left the river and ran on the bank, under trees. He had gone thirty yards on the hot land when Render and Deadlock crashed through the jungle of hollow sap-filled stalks after him. Although his legs were short--it was difficult to see them when he ran--he moved faster than any of the men hunting him could run. He left the land a hundred yards above Taddiport Bridge, by a bank where shards of Roman tiles were jutting.

Below the bridge was a ridge of shillets, long and wide as the broken hull of a sailing ship. Alders and willows grew here, and tall grasses that hid the old dry twigs and reeds on the lower branches of the trees. Floods had heaped up the island. The wet marks of Tarka's feet and rudder soon dried on the worn flakes of rock; but not before the larger pads of hounds, making the loose shillets clatter, had covered them.

_Leu-in! Leu-in, b'hoys. Ov-ov-ov-ov-over!_

Tarka's feet were dry when he took again to water, after trying to rid himself of scent on the stones so hot in the sun. He passed plants of water-hemlock and dropwort, tall as a man, growing among the stones, some sprawling with their weight of sap. He swam on down the river, passing Servis Wood, over which a buzzard, pestered by rooks, was wailing in the sky. The rooks left it to see what the hounds were doing, and wheeled silently over the river. Their shadows fled through the water, more visible than the otter.

A thousand yards from Taddiport Bridge, Tarka passed the brook up which he had travelled with his mother on the way to the Clay Pits. He swam under a railway bridge, below which the river hurried in a course narrow and shaded. An island of elm trees divided the river bed; the right fork was dry--hawkweed, ragwort, and St. John's wort, plants of the land, were growing there. Tarka swam to the tail of the island, and climbed up the dry bank. The place was cool and shady, and filled with the stench arising from the broad leaves and white flowers of wild garlic growing under the trees. Tarka trod into a thick patch, and quatted low.

Hounds passed him. He listened to them baying in the narrow channel below the island.

Deadlock clambered up the dry bank, ran a few yards among the grasses, threw up his head, sniffed, and turned away. Tarka held his breath. Other hounds followed, to sniff and run down the bank again. Tarka listened to them working among the roots under the island bank, and across the river. He heard the chaunting voices of huntsman and whippers-in; the noises of motor-cars moving slowly along the hard-rutted trackway, the old canal-bed, above the right bank of the river; the voices of men and women getting out of the motor-cars; and soon afterwards, the scrape of boots on the steep rubble path down to the dry, stony bed.

Tarka had been lying among the cool and stinking garlic plants of Elm Island for nearly five minutes when he heard gasping and wheezing noises at the top of the island. The two terriers, Bite'm and Biff, were pulling at their chains, held by the kennel-boy. Their tongues hung long and limp, after the two-mile tug from the mills over sun-baked turf, dusty trackway, and hot stones, to Elm Island. Just before, while tugging down the path, Bite'm had fainted with the heat. A lapping sprawl in the river had refreshed the couple, and now they strove against the collars pressing into their windpipes.

Tarka started up when they were a yard from where he lay. The kennel-boy dropped the chain when he saw him. Tarka ran towards the river, but at the sheer edge of the island he saw men on the stones six feet below. He ran along the edge, quickening at the shout of the kennel-boy, and had almost reached the island's tail when Bite'm pinned him in the shoulder. Tissing through his open mouth, Tarka rolled and fought with the terriers. Their teeth clashed. Tarka's moves were low and smooth; he bit Bite'm again and again, but the terrier hung on. Biff tried to bite him across the neck, but Tarka writhed away. The three rolled and snarled, scratching and snapping, falling apart and returning with instant swiftness. Ears were torn and hair ripped out. Hounds heard them, and ran baying under the island cliff to find a way up. The kennel-boy tried to stamp on and recover the end of the chain, for he knew that in a worry all three might be killed. White terriers and brown otter rolled nearer the edge, and fell over.

The fall shook off Bite'm. Tarka ran under the legs of Dabster, and although Bluemaid snapped at his flank he got into the water and sank away.

_Tally Ho! Tally Ho! Yaa-aa-ee on to'm!_

By the bank, fifty yards below Elm Island, stood the Master, looking into water six inches deep. A fern frond, knocked off the bank upstream, came down turning like a little green dragon in the clear water. It passed. Then came an ash-spray, that clung around the pole he leaned on. Its leaves bent to the current, it stayed, it swung away, and drifted on. A dead stick rode after it, and a fly feebly struggling--and then the lovely sight of an otter spreading himself over the stones, moving with the stream, slowly, just touching with his feet, smooth as oil under the water. A twenty-pound dog, thought the Master, remaining quiet by the shallow water, listening to the music of his hounds. There was a stickle below Rothern Bridge.

The hounds splashed past him, stooping to the scent. Tarka's head showed, and vanished. He swam under Rothern Bridge, whose three stone arches, bearing heavy motor-transport beyond their old age, showed the cracks of suffering that the ferns were filling green. A sycamore grew out of its lower parapet. Deeper water under the bridge; the frail bubble-chain lay on it. A cry above the bridge; a line of coarser bubbles breaking across the stickle, where six men and two women stood in the river.

Tarka's head looked up and saw them. He lay in the deep water. He turned his head, and watched hounds swimming down through the arch. He dived and swam up; was hunted to shallow water again, and returned, making for the stickle. The water was threshed in a line from shillet-bank to shillet-bank, but he did not turn back. As he tried to pass between a man in red and a man in blue, two pole-ends were pushed under his belly in an attempt to hoick him back. But Tarka slipped off the shillet-burnished iron and broke the stickle. The whips ran on the bank, cheering on the hounds.

_Get on to 'm! Hark to Deadlock! Leu-on! Leu-on! Leu-on!_

* * * * *

A quarter of a mile below Rothern Bridge the river slows into the lower loop of a great S. It deepens until half-way, where the S is cut by the weir holding back the waters of the long Beam Pool. Canal Bridge crosses the river at the top of the S.

Where the river begins to slow, at the beginning of the pool, its left bank is bound by the open roots of oak, ash, alder, and sycamore. To hunted otters these trees offered holding as secure as any in the country of the Two Rivers. Harper, the aged hound--he was fourteen years old--knew every holt in the riverside trees of Knackershill Copse, and although he had marked at all of them, only once had he cracked the rib of an otter found in the pool. Leeches infested the unclear water.

Tarka reached the top of the pool. Swimming in the shade, his unseen course betrayed by the line of bubbles-a-vent, he came to the roots of the sycamore tree, where he had slept for two days during his wandering after the death of Greymuzzle. He swam under the outer roots, and was climbing in a dim light to a dry upper ledge when a tongue licked his head, and teeth playfully nipped his ear. Two pale yellow eyes moved over him. He had awakened the cub Tarquol.

Tarka turned round and round, settled and curled, and closed his eyes. Tarquol's nostrils moved, pointing at Tarka's back. His small head stretched nearer, the nostrils working. He sniffed Tarka's hair from rudder to neck, and his nose remained at the neck. It was a strange smell, and he sniffed carefully, not wanting to touch the fur with his nostrils. Tarka drew in a deep breath, which he let out in a long sigh. Then he swallowed the water in his mouth, settled his ear more comfortably on his paw, and slept; and awoke again.

Tarquol, the hairs of his neck raised, was listening at the back of the ledge. He was still as a root. The ground was shaking.

_Go in on 'm, old fellars! Wind him, my lads! B'hoys! B'hoys! Come on, b'hoys, get on to 'm._

The otters heard the whimpers of hounds peering from the top of the bank, afraid of the fall into the river. They watched the dim root-opening level with the water. Footfalls sounded in the roots by their heads; they could feel them through their feet. Then the water-level rose up and shook with a splash, as Deadlock was tipped into the river. They saw his head thrust in at the opening, heard his gruff breathing, and then his belving tongue. Other hounds whimpered and splashed into the river.

_Pull him out, old fellars! Leu-in there, leu-in, leu-in!_

Heavy thuds shook down bits of earth on the otters' heads and backs. The iron-bar, with its ball-handle, started to break through the top of the holt. Tarquol tissed, moving to and fro on the ledge in his fear of the unknown. Often he looked at the opening, wanting to escape. The bar was pounding a root.

Tarka quatted on the ledge; he knew that Deadlock would follow him wherever he swam in water. Tarquol, twisting and weaving his head, ran down on roots to the water, dragging his rudder for a dive; but a whitish light alarmed him and he ran up to the ledge again. The whitish light was reflected from the breeches of a wading man. A voice sounded near and hollow. Then a pole pushed through the opening between two roots. Its end was thrown about, nearly striking Tarquol's head. It was pulled out again, and the whitish light moved away. The pounding of the bar stopped. Tarka heard the whining of Bite'm.

Hands held and guided the terrier past the outside root. Tarquol tissed again as the dim light darkened with the shape of the enemy, whose scent was on the hair of Tarka's neck. Bite'm whined and yapped, trying to struggle up to the otters. His hind feet slipped off the roots, and he fell into the water below. _Plomp, plomp, plomp_, as he trod water, trying to scramble up the side.

Again the opening grew dark with arms holding and guiding another terrier, and Biff began to climb. _Wough! wough! wough!_ Soon she fell into the water. The terriers were called off. Tarka settled more easily, but Tarquol could not rest. Hounds and terriers were gone, but still the voices of men were heard. The sound was low and regular, and Tarka's eyes closed. Tarquol quatted beside him, and for many minutes neither moved. Then the murmur of voices ceased with footfalls along the bank, coming nearer, and stopping above. A man climbed down the bank and slid feet first into the water; the chalky light was reflected in at the opening. An arm was thrust in, and the wrist-jerk sent a handful of small pieces of rock into the holt. The pieces hissed when they met the water, and gave off streams of bubbles. The otters gazed down at them. The man moved away from the holt, and his friends hauled him to the top of the bank.

Silence, except for the hissing and bubbling in the holt. The otters were immobile in curiosity. Neither Tarka nor Tarquol thought of the strange bubbling as an act of the man. Often they had seen bubbles arising from the holes of eels and ragworms in mud. Sometimes in solitary underwater play they had blown bubbles, and tried to bite them before they broke at the surface. Tarka and Tarquol moved lower along a root to be nearer the strange bubbles. Tarka was lower than the cub, near the water, when he started and sprang as though trapped, gave a retching cough, and tumbled into the water. Tarquol tissed with fright, gaped when he breathed the acetylene gas, and followed Tarka out of the holt. He saw Tarka's chain rising bright before him. He turned upstream and was alone.

Seventy yards from the holt he rose under the bank to rest, and heard the baying of hounds. He dived again and went on upstream at his greatest speed. At his next vent he knew that the terrible beasts were following him. He swam out of the pool, turned back again, saw their heads in the water from bank to bank, became scared, and left the river.

Galloping across the meadow faster than he had ever run in his life, with the hunting cries behind him and the thudding hooves of bullocks cantering away from hounds on his left, Tarquol came to sheds where farm machines were stored, and going through a yard, he ran through a gap in a hedge into a garden, where an old man was picking off the tops of his broad beans in a row, muttering about the black-fly on them. Tarquol passed him so near and so swiftly that the granfer's short clay pipe dropped from between his gums. He muttered in the sunshine and pondered nearly a minute. Hardly had he stooped to pick up his pipe when a great black and white hound crashed through the hedge and ran over his tetties and sun-dried shallots, followed by three more hounds, and after them a couple, and then his garden was filled with them.

_Git'oom!_

The hounds were gone, leaving him staring at his broken beans.

Tarquol had run round the walls of the cottage and into a farmyard, scattering fowls in terror before him. One of the hens, who was broody, ran at him and leapt at his back, pecking and flapping. Tarquol kicked a little dust behind his straight rudder. At full speed he ran into a pigsty, where a sow was lying on her side with a farrow of eleven tugging at her. Seeing him, they stopped tugging, stared together, squeaked together, and scampered away into corners. The sow, too fat to get up quickly, tried to bite Tarquol as he rippled from corner to corner. The baying of the pack grew terribly loud, and still Tarquol darted about the sty, seeking a way of escape. The sow, after many grunts, flung herself on her trotters and bundled her flabby mass to the door, unlocked her dirty teeth to bite Deadlock, who had just arrived. Squealing with rage, her bristly, mud-caked ears flapping on her chaps, she chased him out of the sty, followed him back into the yard, and scattered the rest of the pack.

Tarquol had run out behind the sow. He gained three hundred yards before hounds found his line again. He ran with the sun behind him for two hundred yards over grass, then he turned and went through a thorn hedge, climbed the railway embankment, and ran up over Furzenbeam Hill, leaving an irregular trail. He ran for three miles on land, hiding among the dry spikes of gorse, and under branches. Sometimes he mewed in his misery.

Hounds ran far ahead of the men and women. Eventually the pack--with the exception of Pitiful, who was lost--hunted him back to the railway line, to where he was crouching low in the thorn hedge. A bird with a loud rasping voice, and a beak like a bent iron nail, clacked and chattered on a briar rising out of the hedge. It was a bird of property, or red-backed shrike, and Tarquol was quatting by its larder of bumble-bees, grasshoppers, and young harvest mice impaled on thorns. The mice were dead, but the bees still moved their legs.

Tarquol ran out of the thorns just before Render's muzzle pushed into his hiding place; but hounds leapt the low hedge and overtook him, before he had gone very far on his short, tired legs. Deadlock seized him and shook him and threw him into the air. Tarquol sprang up as soon as he fell, snapping and writhing as more jaws bit on his body, crushed his head, cracked his ribs, his paws, and his rudder. Among the brilliant hawkbits--little sunflowers of the meadow--he was picked up and dropped again, trodden on and wrenched and broken, while the screaming cheers and whoops of sportsmen mingled with the growling rumble of hounds at worry. Tarquol fought them until he was blinded, and his jaws were smashed.

LAST CHAPTER

When he had swum out of the gassed holt, Tarka had turned to deeper water and gone under the railway bridge twenty yards below--the line with its embankment and three bridges cut the S from south to north. He kept close to the left bank, in the margin of shade. The copse ended at the bridge; below was a meadow. He rose to breathe, heard the hounds, and swam on under water. He passed a run of peal, which flashed aside when they saw him, and sped above the bridge at many times the pace of a travelling otter. Sixty yards below the bridge, by the roots of a thrown alder, Tarka rose to listen. Looking around, he saw neither hound nor man, and knew he was not being followed. He thought of the holt under the oak tree above the next railway bridge, and swam on down.

Where the river's bend began to straighten again, the right bank lay under oak trees growing on the hill-slope to the sky. Tarka dived and swam across the river to the holt he had remembered as he left the roots of the sycamore. This holt had a sunken opening, where no terrier could enter. Here Tarka's sire had been asleep when hounds had found him two years before. Tarka swung up, coming into a dark cavern lit by a small hole above, and stinking of the paraffin poured there the previous afternoon. He sniffed the oil film on the water, and turned back into the weir-pool.

Again he made a hidden crossing, to listen under cover of flag-lilies for more than a minute. The river was quiet. He heard the sound of falling water, and swam slowly down, often touching under the bank. He passed under the middle arch of the railway bridge, and reached the weir slanting across the river. The summer water tumbled down the fish-pass, but glided thin as a snail's shell over the top end of the concrete sill. The lower end, by the fender at the head of the leat, was dry. Tarka walked along the sill, nearly to the end, which was two inches above the level of the pool. He stretched his weary back on the warm concrete and sprawled in the sun.

He lay basking for more than an hour, enjoying the sound of water tumbling in the pass and sliding down the face of the weir. Swallows dipped in the pool, and sometimes a peal leapt in the shadow of the bridge. Tarka's head was always raised before the fish fell back, but he did not leave the sill. Warm and brilliant sun-flickers on the shallows below dazed his eyes, and made him drowsy. But when a hound, working alone down the left bank, climbed on the sill by the pass and shook itself, he was instantly alert. Half lying down, he remained quite still, while the hound lifted its muzzle to sniff. Something moved on the bridge--otter and hound turned their heads together, seeing a man behind the railing. At first the man saw only the hound, but when it walked along the sill and ran down the face of the weir, he saw the otter it was following. The man had come along the railway to see if many fish were in the pool; he was a poacher nicknamed Shiner, and the top of one of his fingers was missing. He had no love for otters. Along the railway line he hastened, and shouted to the otter-hunters.

Followed in silence by the hound Pitiful, Tarka swam leisurely. He watched, from under a tree, a single enemy working down the shallow, crossing to deeper water to seek his scent along the banks. He let it come within a few feet of his head, then dived and swam away. Pitiful never saw him, or the chain of bubbles. Often she followed the wash carried down with the current; and when it grew weak, she would amble along the banks until she found where the otter had touched.

Tarka felt neither fear nor rage against the hound. He wanted to be left alone. After several hidden swims from bank to bank, and finding no holding where he might lie up and sleep until evening, he walked out by a cattle-trodden groove in the right bank, and ran away over land. He followed the otter-path across a quarter of a mile of meadow, and came to the river again by the third oak above Canal Bridge.

Tarka drifted under the high lime-spiky arches of the bridge, and the white owl, roosting on a ledge below the parapet, beside the briars of a dog-rose growing there with hawkweeds, saw him going downstream.

Bees came to the wild roses, crammed more pollen into their laden thigh-bags, and burred away over the bridge. A petal dropped, a swallow played with it as it fell, clipping it with first one wing and then the other, until it dropped into the water, and was carried away, past the gap in the bank where the Owlery Oak, Tarka's birthplace, had been held by its roots two years before.

Then Pitiful swam under Canal Bridge, and after her the pack came down, and many men, and the owl was driven into wavy flight down the river. It pitched in the tree of Leaning Willow Island, as a dull clamour broke out half a mile up the river. Hounds had marked the otter under a hover, and driven him out.

The water of the pool was swimming-deep from the shallow above Canal Bridge to the shallow above Leaning Willow Island. The surface above Tarka mirrored the bed of the river--the dark rocks, the weed, the sodden branches, with the legs and bodies of hounds--until ripples broke the mirror into shards of light. In this underwater realm, where sounds were so distinct--the crush of nailed boots on stones, the tip-tap of poles, the thresh of hounds' legs, and even the flip of cyclops and water-flea--Tarka swam until he was forced to vent, which he did at the river verge, under the banks, or by clumps of yellow flags. Sometimes he crept on the stones, hiding himself under overhanging roots as he sought a refuge, until dreading the nearness of hounds he slipped into the river again, covered with a silver skin of air. As he swam, twin streams of bubbles came out of his nostrils, raced over his head and neck, and shook off his back to lie on the surface in a chain, watched by many eyes. Up and down the pool he went, swimming in midstream or near the banks, crossing from side to side and varying his depth of swimming as he tried to get away from his pursuers. Passing under the legs of hounds, he saw them joined to their broken surface-images. From under water he saw men and women, pointing with hand and pole, as palsied and distorted shapes on the bank. However hard he swam with his three and a half webs, always he heard the hounds, as they spoke to his scent lying in burst bubble, in seal on muddy scour, on leaf and twig. Once in mid-river, while on his way to a clump of flags, his breath gave out, and he bobbed up to breathe a yard from Deadlock. He stared into the eyes of his old enemy; and dived. During forty seconds he swam a distance of seventy yards, to a bed of reeds, where he breathed and rested. No one saw him; but they saw the chain.

Up the river again, past the Peal Rock, and under the middle arch of Canal Bridge to the shallow, crossed by a line of men and women, white and blue and green and red and grey, standing close together.

_Tally Ho!_

He turned and reached covering water just before hounds.

_Get on to 'm! Leu-on, leu-on! Wind him, old fellars!_

The huntsman was wading up to his waist in the water, scooping the air with his grey hat. Bellman, a small-footed hairy black-and-tan, cross between a drafted harrier and a Dumfriesshire rough otter-hound, yelped his impatience, seeming to snap the water as he swam. Sometimes the huntsman gave an encouraging spitnote on his horn. Tarka went down river, but a blurred and brilliant colour band stretched from bank to bank above Leaning Willow Island. He tried to get through the stickle, but stocking'd leg was pressed to stocking'd leg, a fixed barrier behind plying poles. The owl flew out of the willow, miserable in the sunlight with small birds pursuing it.

Tarka turned and swam upstream again, leaving hounds behind. For five minutes he rested under a thorn bush. Deadlock found him, and on he went, to Canal Bridge once more, where he lay in the water, weary after the long chase. At the beginning of the sixth hour he tried to pass the higher stickle, but his enemies stood firm on the stones. The tongues swelled under the bridge. He was nearly picked up by Hurricane, the Irish staghound, but the blunted canine teeth could not hold him.

The chain became shorter. Tarka was too weary to seek a holding in the banks. He breathed in view of his enemies. Seven and a half couples of hounds swam in the pool, their sterns throwing behind them arc-lines of drops on the surface. Others splashed in the shallows under the banks. The huntsman let them work by themselves.

During the sixth hour the otter disappeared. The river grew quiet. People not in uniform sat down on the grass. The huntsman was wading slowly upstream, feeling foothold with his pole and keeping an eye on Deadlock. Stickles stood slack, but ready to bar the way with pole-strokes. Look-outs gazed at the water before them. It was known that the otter might leave the river at any moment. The boy with the warped pole, on whose cheeks were two patches of dried otter-blood, was already opening his knife, ready to cut another notch on the handle, in the form of a cross.

But more than an hour the sun-thongs flickered across the placid water; and in softening light the owl returned, flying high over the bridge, to the mouse runs in the quiet meadow beyond.

* * * * *

A fallen bough of willow lay in the pool near one bank, and Tarka lay beside it. His rudder held a sunken branch. Only his wide upper nostrils were above water. He never moved. Every yard of the banks between the stickles was searched again. Poles were thrust into branches, roots, and clumps of flag-lilies. The wading huntsman prodded Peal Rock and the rock above it. Hounds sat on the banks, shivering, and watching Deadlock, Render, and Harper working the banks. The crack of a whip, a harsh voice rating--Rufus had turned a rabbit out of a bramble and was chasing it across the meadow. He returned to the river in a wide circle, eyeing the whip.

At the beginning of the eighth hour a scarlet dragonfly whirred and darted over the willow snag, watched by a girl sitting on the bank. Her father, an old man lank and humped as a heron, was looking out near her. She watched the dragonfly settle on what looked like a piece of bark beside the snag; she heard a sneeze, and saw the otter's whiskers scratch the water. Glancing round, she realized that she alone had seen the otter. She flushed, and hid her grey eyes with her lashes. Since childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father, looking for flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes beheld.

For two minutes the maid sat silent, hardly daring to look at the river. The dragonfly flew over the pool, seizing flies and tearing them apart in its horny jaws. Her father watched it as it settled on the snag, rose up, circled, and lit on the water, it seemed. Tarka sneezed again, and the dragonfly flew away. A grunt of satisfaction from the old man, a brown hand and wrist holding aloft a hat, a slow intaken breath, and,

_Tally Ho!_

Tarka dived when the hounds came down, and the chain showed where he had swum. Many saw his dark sleek form as he walked by the edge of a grassy islet by the twelve trees. The hounds ran to him, and Tarka turned and faced them, squatting on his short hindlegs, his paws close against his round and sturdy chest. He bit Render in the nose, making his teeth meet. In an instant he drew back, tissing, and bit Deadlock in the flews. The narrow lower jaw snapped again and again, until the press of hounds hid him from sight.

He squirmed away through legs and under bellies, biting and writhing a way to the water; and the chain drew out on the surface of the pool while hounds were still seeking him on the stones where he had sat and faced them.

_Leu-on, then! Leu-on! Ov-ov-ov-ov-over!_

Tarka's pace was slow, and his dives were short. In the water by the Peal Rock he lay, glancing at the faces along the banks, across the river, and in the river. His small dark eyes showed no feeling. He turned away from the human faces, to watch the coming of hounds. He was calm and fearless and fatigued. When they were his length away, he swung under, showing the middle of his smooth back level with the surface, and swimming past their legs. He saw the huntsman's legs before him joined to the image of legs, and above the inverted image a flattened and uncertain head and shoulders. Up and down he swam, slower and slower.

At the beginning of the ninth hour an immense fatigue came over him, greater than his fatigue when in the long hard winter he had lived for over a month on seaweed and shellfish in the estuary. He was swimming up from the lower stickle when the water seemed to thicken at each thrust of his webs. He ceased to swim, and drifted backwards. Barbrook touched his neck as he dived. He reappeared two poles' length away, and lay still, looking at the huntsman wading nearer.

For ten minutes he rested, between dives of a few yards only, and then he rolled from Deadlock's bite and went downstream. He swam with his last strength, for upon him had come the penultimate desire of the hunted otter, the desire that comes when water ceases to be a refuge, the desire to tread again the land-tracks of his ancestors. He crawled half up the bank, but turned back at the thudding of many feet, and swam down to the stickle. The sideway ply of a pole in a turmoil of water struck him on the head. He pushed past the iron point, but it was brought down on his shoulder, to hold him against the shillets. Hounds were fifteen yards away, urged on by hat and horn and the yarring cheers of the whippers-in. Thrice Tarka's teeth clicked on the iron pressing his shoulder as he strove against the weight of the sportsman trying to lift him back. A second pole was brought down from the other flank, crossing with the first. The wooden pincers held him; he twisted like an eel and bit into a leg. With furious strength he writhed from the crossed poles, and through the stickle, as Deadlock bore down upon him and pulled him back by the rudder. Amidst the harsh cries of men and women and the heavy tongues of hounds Tarka was overborne by the pack. The Master looked at his watch--eight hours and forty-five minutes from the find in the Dark Pool. Then the screeching, yarring yell of one of the honorary whips:

_Yaa-aa-ee-io! Leu-in on 'im! Yaa-ee-oo!_

for again Tarka had escaped from the worry, and had merged into the narrow stream of water that hurried to Leaning Willow Island.

Below the island the river widened, smooth with the sky. Tarka swam down slowly, bleeding from many wounds. Sometimes he paddled with three legs, sometimes with one, in the water darkening so strangely before his eyes. Not always did he hear the hounds baying around him. At the beginning of the tenth hour he passed the banks faced with stone to keep the sea from the village, and drifted into deeper water, whereon sticks and froth were floating. Hounds were called off by the horn, for the tide was at flood.

But as they were about to leave, Tarka was seen again, moving with the tide, his mouth open. The flow took him near the bank; he kicked feebly, and rolled over.

_Tally Ho!_

Deadlock saw the small brown head, and threw his tongue in triumph as he jumped down the bank. He seized it, and lifted the otter high, flung him about, and fell into the water with him. They saw the broken head look up beside Deadlock, heard the cry of _Ic-yang!_ as Tarka bit into his throat, and then the hound was sinking with the otter into the deep water. Oak-leaves, black and rotting in the mud of the unseen bed, arose and swirled and sank again. And the tide slowed still, and began to move back, and they waited and watched, until the body of Deadlock arose, drowned and heavy, and floated away amidst the froth on the waters.

They pulled the body out of the river and carried it to the bank, laying it on the grass, and looking down at the dead hound in sad wonder. And while they stood there silently, a great bubble rose out of the depths, and broke, and as they watched, another bubble shook to the surface, and broke; and there was a third bubble in the sea-going waters, and nothing more.

HERE ENDS TARKA THE OTTER BY HENRY WILLIAMSON, BEGUN IN JUNE 1923 AND FINISHED IN FEBRUARY 1927 IN THE VILLAGE OF HAM IN DEVON.

Transcriber's note

The Table of Contents from the printed edition was removed and an expanded one was made for this edition.

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