The trail led over the sandhills with their thin stabbing marram grasses, and to the mossy pans behind them, where grew privet bushes and blunt-head club-rushes. The way was strewn with rabbit skulls and empty snail shells. Tarka crossed the marsh of Horsey Island – where grew Russian thistles, sprung from a single seed blown from the estuary off a Baltic timber ship years before – until he came to the sea-wall, and below the wall, to the mouth of the Branton pill. The tide took him slowly in a patch of froth which the meeting waters had beaten up, the gossip of the Two Rivers. He ran over the eastern sea-wall, and along the otter-path to the Ram’s-horn pond.
Hu-ee-ic!
He swam to the wooden bridge by the boat-house, and to the withies on the islet.
Hu-ee-ic!
He hunted the brackish waters until the stars were dimmed by dawn, when he pressed through the reeds by a way he had trodden before, but forgotten, and slept on an old couch where lay bones, and a little skull.
Chapter Seventeen
ALL DAY the wind shook the rusty reed-daggers at the sky, and the mace-heads were never still. Before sunset the couch was empty. The purple-ruddy beams stained the grass and the thistles of the meadow, and the tiles of the cattle-shippen under the sea-wall were the hue of the sky. Westward the marshman’s cottage, the linhays, the trees, the hedges, the low ragged line of the Burrows, were vanishing in a mist of fire.
The tide was ebbing, the mud slopes grey, with ruddy tricklings. In the salt turf below the sea-wall great cracks wandered with the fire of the sky. Ring plover and little stints ran by the guts, and their slender peering images quenched the flame in the water. Bunches of oar-weed on each sodden perch dripped their last drops among the froth and spinning holes of the gliding tide. The mooring buoys rolled and returned, each keg gathering froth that the current sucked away under its lowest stave. By an old broken wicker crab-pot, only its rib-tops up, a small head showed without a ripple, moving with the water. Men were walking on the deck of a ketch below; other men were sitting at oars in a boat under the black hull waiting for their mates. A dog began to bark, then it whimpered, until it was pushed over the gunwale. It met the water in a reddish splash.
Men climbed down to the boat, oars were dipped, and the dog swam astern, breathing gruffly and whining. The otter head, drifting nearer, sank when a man pointed with his pipe-stem. Fifty yards below, by the chain sagging and lifting from the bows of the riding ship, the head looked up again beside the broken wicker-work. ‘Artter,’ said the man who had pointed, and forgot it. They were going to drink beer in the Plough Inn.
Their voices became faint as they walked on the wall. Flocks of ring plover and little stint flickered and twisted over the mud and the water. A late crow left the saltings, as a sedge owl swept on long wings over the drooping yellow grass of the wall, and slunk away across the water.
Where the pill emerged into the estuary the mud was scoured, leaving sand and gravel. Below the stone setts and pobbles of the wall’s apron, whose cracks held the little ruddy winter leaves of the sea-beet, was an islet of flat stones, apart from the wall by a narrowing channel where water rushed. On the stones stood Old Nog, watching for shapes of fish. The broken crab-pot bumped and lurched along the channel, and the heron straightened his neck when he saw a fish jump out of its crown. He peered in the dusky water, where weeds moved darkly, and saw the fish darting before a tapered shadow. It was green and yellow, with a streamer flying from its back. Old Nog snicked the gemmeous dragonet from before the otter’s nose, shook it free of his beak, caught it in a jerk that pushed it into his gullet, and swallowed it while the otter was still searching.
Tarka saw a blur of movement above, and swam on underwater to the wide sea.
Colour faded; the waves broke grey. Across the marsh a shining fly had lit on the white bone of the lighthouse. A bird flew in hooped flight up the estuary, wheeled below the islet, and began feeding. It saw Tarka, and out of its beak, hooped as its wings in downward gliding, fell a croak, which slurred upwards to a whistle, and broke in a sweet trill as it flew away. Other curlews on the sandbanks heard the warning, and to the far shore the wan air was beautiful with their cries.
Rows of hurdles, black and weed-hung, stood out of the water farther down the estuary. They were staked on three sides of a pool, while every rising tide flooded over the tops of the fences. It was an old salmon weir. The hurdles had been torn away so many times by the dredging anchors of gravel barges and ketches, whose crews were friendly with poor net fishermen, that the owner had let the weir fall ruinous. Herons fished from the hurdles, and at low tide crows picked shellfish off the stakes, and flying with them to the islet, dropped them on the stones.
At half tide Old Nog flew to the seventh hurdle up from the western row, where, unless gorged or in love or disturbed by man, he perched awhile during every ebb-tide. He stood swaying and sinuating his neck; the grip of his toes was not so strong as it had been in his early tree-top life. While he was trying to stand still, before jumping to the rim of the sandbank awash below him, a salmon leapt in the lagoon, gleaming and curved, and fell back with a thwack on the water. Old Nog screamed, and fell off the hurdle. Three heads looked up, and dipped again. Old Nog walked along under the hurdles, watching the water. The salmon was many times Old Nog’s own weight, but it was a fish, and Old Nog was a fisher.
Tarka was drifting past the weir when he heard the whistle of White-tip beyond the hurdles. His head and shoulder rose out of the water; he listened.
Hu-ee-ic!
White-tip answered him. Her cry was like wet fingers drawn over a pane of glass. Tarka’s cry was deeper, more rounded, and musical. He ran across the strip of wet sand, clambered over the hurdles, and down to the lagoon. He touched water, and a ripple spread out from where he had disappeared. His seals in the sand crumpled as they welled water.
Ka-ak! Old Nog ejected the living dragonet in his excitement, for the salmon had leapt again, a glimmering curve. The teeth of White-tip clicked at its tail. Three otter heads bobbed, flat as corks of a salmon net. They vanished before the double splash fell.
The salmon passed through the cubs, cutting the water. They turned together. Tarka drove between them and slowed to their pace, keeping line. Then White-tip, who was faster than Tarka, overhauled them, and the old otters took the wings. The line swung out and in as each otter swam in zigzag. The eager cubs swam in each other’s way. Once more the salmon rushed back against the current, straining through the top hurdles, where the water was deeper and safer. Tarka met it; and the thresh of its turning tail beat up splinters of water. The line of otters forced it into the shallow by the lower hurdles. They swam upon it, resting in two feet of water, but it escaped past one of the cubs.
Soon the tide dropped back from the top row of hurdles and the water was cleared of sand. A race poured steadily through a gap in the sandbank, spreading wider as it drained the lagoon. In the penned and slack upper water the salmon was lying, its fins and tail so still that shrimps rose out of their hiding-places in the sand beside it. While it rested in the water, its gills opening and closing, a dark squat thing was walking on the sands towards it, using its fins as feet. It was the shape of an immense tadpole, covered with tatters of skin like weed. Its head was as broad as a barrel, gaping with a mouth almost as wide. Its jaws were filled with bands of long pointed teeth, which it depressed in the cavern of its mouth when it came near the salmon. Out of the middle of its head rose three stalks, the first of which bore a lappet, which it waved like a bait as it crept forward. It was a sea-devil, called rod-and-line fish by fishermen. During the spring-tide it had left the deep water beyond the bar where usually it lived, and moving up the estuary, had been trapped in the hurdle weir.
It crept forward so slowly that the salmon did not know it for an enemy. The close-set eyes behind the enormous bony lips were fixed on the salmon. Chains of bubbles loomed beyond, with otter shapes; the salmon swirled off the sand, into the cavern of jaws; the teeth rose in spikes and the
jaws shut.
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 porthole. 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. Craa-leek, cur-lee-eek! The curlews saw them as they swam the shallow water to the top of the Sharshook. 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 wounded fish to the rocks, and the otters scratched away scales in their haste to eat its pink flesh. They sliced from the shoulders, dropping pieces to feel the curd squeezed from the corners of their mouths. Tarka and White-tip ate quietly, but the cubs yinnered and snarled. Their faces were silvery with scales when they left the strewn bones. Being clean little beasts they washed chins and whiskers and ears, and afterwards sought water to drink in the pond behind the sea-wall cottage.
Among the reeds the four otters lay, dozing and resting, while rain pitted the grey sheet of water and wind bent down the stalks of the wild celery that grew in the marsh. When the clouds became duller they left the pond, and saw the tide lapping almost over the top of the wall, coloured with the fresh from the rivers.
Mullet had come up with the tide, and a school of nearly a hundred found a way through a drain-lid under the sea-wall of the pill. At the end of the night the otters, who had been gorging on eels in the mires – reed-fringed dykes in the grazing marsh, filled with fresh drinking-water from the hills – found them in the pit in the corner of Horsey Marsh. For two hours they chased and slew, and when every fish was killed Tarka and White-tip stole away on the ebb to the sea, leaving the young otters to begin their own life.
The next night was quiet and windless, without a murmur of water in the broad Pool, on which the lights of the village drew out like gold and silver eels. Sound travels far and distinct over placid water, and fishermen standing in groups on the quay, after the closing of taverns, heard the whistling cries of the young otters, a mile away on Crow Island, lost on the shingle where the ring plovers piped. They were heard for three nights, and then the south-west gale smote the place and filled the estuary with great seas.
Black bits of old leaves turned and twirled in the flooded weir-pool above Canal Bridge, like the rooks turning and twirling high in the grey windy sky. The weir in flood was an immense loom in sunlight; the downfalling water-warp was whitey-yellow with bubbles; to and fro across the weir moved the air-hollows, a weft held by a glistening water-shuttle. Below, the bubble-woven waters were rended on the shillets; they leapt and roared and threw up froth and spray. A branch of a tree was lodged on the sill; the rocks had stripped it of bark. Sometimes a lead-coloured narrow shape, longer than a man’s arm, would appear in the falling water-warp, moving slowly against the torrent with sideways flaps of tail until washed back into the lower river again, which roared and heaved like fighting polar bears. The sun lit the travelling air-hollow under the sill of the weir.
The salmon never reached the sill. Some fish tried to swim up the fish-pass, but the pound of the flood was mightier on the steps. Above in the weir-pool a bird was swimming, low in the water, watching with small crimson eyes for trout. Its beak was sharp as a rock-splinter. Above the water it was brownish-black, foam-grey beneath – a Great Northern Diver, or loon, in winter plumage. When Tarka saw it first it was rolling from side to side and stretching out first one wing then the other. The otter on the bank alarmed the bird, which tipped up and vanished quick as the flash of a turning fish, hardly leaving a ripple. When it appeared again the otter was gone. It lay in the water, nearly a yard long, with head and neck stretched out, and swam rapidly upriver. At the top of the pool it saw another otter, and uttering a wailing cry of alarm, splashed along the water to rise, making a dozen oar-like dips with the tips of its wings. With neck outstretched it took the air and flew round the curve of the river, with wing-beats quicker than a heron’s.
Tarka and White-tip had come from the wood in daylight, lured to play by the sun and the flood. Tarka dropped over the sill, the whitey-yellow turmoil bumped and tossed him below. A minute later a narrow lead-coloured shape pushed slowly up the concrete spill-way, and behind it the darker sturdier shape of an otter. Fish and animal made slow and laborious headway; they seemed to be hanging in the warp; and then White-tip dropped over in the smooth and glistering water’s bend. They instantly disappeared. The racing churn carried them on its top to the bank thirty yards below, and there left them on stones; and there, an hour later, a thirty-pound fish, clean-run, its gills crusty with ocean shellfish, was found by the water-bailiff, with bites torn from behind its shoulder – the mating feast of otters.
November, December, January, February, were past – but otters know only day and night, the sun and the moon. White-tip and Tarka had followed the salmon up the big river, but at the beginning of the new year they had come down again. Drifting with the ebb under Halfpenny Bridge, they crossed the marsh and came to the Pool of the Six Herons, out of whose deep middle reared the black iron piers of the Railway Bridge. Just below the Railway Bridge, the muddy mouth of the Lancarse Yeo was washed and widened by the sea, and in here, on the flood tide, the otters turned. White-tip was way-wise in this water, having known it in cubhood. She was going back to the Twin-Ash Holt above Orleigh Mill, where she had been born.
With the tide the otters drifted under the road-bridge to a holt in an old rabbit-bury above high-water mark. It was fallen in, and the home of rats, so they left it, and travelled on in daylight. A mile from the pill-mouth the water ran fresh and clear. After another mile they came to the meeting of two streams. White-tip walked up the left stream, and soon she reached the slide where she had played during many happy nights with her cub-brothers; and climbing up, she was in the remembered weir-pool. It was narrow, and nearly hidden by trees. Past six pines, and round a bend, where two ash trees leaned over the brook. Ivy grew on one, moss on the other. Floods had washed the earth from their top roots, carving a dark holt under the bank. White-tip had forgotten the baying and yapping and thudding one day long ago, when an iron bar had broken a hole in the roof and scared the five of them into the water. She had remembered the bass at night round the bridge piers in the Pool of the Six Herons, the frogging places in the Archery Marsh, the trout and the mullyheads in the Duntz Brook, the eels in the millpool; and she had come back to them.
The soft elderberry tree broke into leaf, with the honeysuckle; the wild cherry blossom showed white among the oaks. The greed shovels of the celandine dug pale gold out of the sun, and the flowers were made. Oak and ash remained hard-budded; these trees, enduring and ancient, were not moved to easy change like lesser growths.
On the first day of March Halcyon the kingfisher, speeding up the brook, hit the sandy bank with his beak and fell away. His mate followed him, knocking out another flake of earth, and thus a perching place was made. They picked out a tunnel with their beaks, as long as a man’s arm, with a round ca
ve at the end in which seven round eggs were laid, shiny and white, among bones of fishes and shucks of water-beetles. Then the river-martins came back to their old drowned homes in the steep sandy banks above the springtime level of the brook. In the third week of March the carrion-crow, secure in her nest of sticks atop one of the six pines growing over the pool below the Twin-Ash Holt, watched the first chipping of her five eggs, watched the tip of a tiny beak chip, chip, chipping a lid in a green black-freckled shell. The crow sang a song, low and sweet, in the tree top. White-tip heard the song as she suckled her cubs in the Twin-Ash Holt. Every night Tarka came up from the Pool of the Six Herons to see her.
March winds brought the grey sea-rains to the land, and the river ran swollen, bearing the floods of its brooks and runners. Salmon, languid from spawning, dropped tail-first over the sills and down the passes of the weirs, and Tarka caught them easily in the eddies and hovers, and dragged them on the bank. He took bites from the infirm and tasteless flesh, and left the fish uneaten. Many of the salmon that reached the sea alive were taken in the nets of fishermen rough-fish-catching, in the estuary Pool, to be knocked on the head and thrown back – for the fishermen hated the water-bailiffs who upheld the Conservancy Bye-laws protecting salmon out of season, and secretly killed the fish because of their hatred. The fishermen did not believe that salmon spawned in fresh water, where the rivers were young, but regarded it as a story told to prevent them fishing for salmon throughout the year.
Oak and ash broke their buds, and grew green; the buzzards repaired their old nests, and laid their eggs. The heron’s young, after days of flapping and unhappy crying, flew from their tree-top heronry in the wood below Halfpenny Bridge. And one evening in June, between the lights, Old Nog and his mate sailed down to the pool by the Railway Bridge to give the four fledgelings their first lesson in fishing. Curlews saw the dark level wings gliding over the mudbanks, and cried the alarm, being afraid of the sharp beaks. Every year Old Nog and his mate taught four fledgelings to spear fish in the pool, which lay placid when the sea had lapsed.
Tarka the Otter Page 16