Tarka the Otter

by Henry Williamson

  Some days after the swallows had gone, Tarka heard a strange, soft curlew-like whistle while playing in the Ram’s-horn duckpond. The five otters ceased their play and listened. The whistle came again, and Tarka’s mother answered. The answering whistle was keen and loud. The bitch swam towards it, followed by Greymuzzle and White-tip. The whistle made Tarka cry in rage, Ic-yang, and when a dog-cub has cried thus he is no more a cub, but a dog-otter.

  The night before, the otters had fished in the estuary by the seaweedy hurdles and posts of a silted-up salmon weir, where in former times salmon were left penned by the tide. They had returned to the duckpond across fields and dykes, along an otter route, and on their trail an old dog-otter had followed.

  Now he had trailed them to the duckpond, a big, flat-headed, full-thighed dog and with great whiskers, more than double the weight of Tarka. He frightened the crier of Ic-yang, who crouched tissing with his sister when the stranger sniffed at her nose and then licked it. This action caused Tarka’s mother to behave in a curious manner. Turning fiercely on the cub, she rolled her over, bit her, and chased her underwater. Many bubbles were blown up. Tarka dived to see why this strange thing had happened, but the dog turned in a swirl of water to snap at his head. Tarka was so scared that he swam to the bank and crawled out among the dry thistles. Here, while the water ran from his fur, he whistled to his mother. He saw her swimming with her head out of water, with the strange dog behind pretending to bite her. She was heedless of her cub’s cries, and dived with the dog in play. For hours Tarka ran on the grassy bank of the duckpond, following his mother as she played in the water. Once the dog rose to the surface with a mullet in his mouth, which he did not trouble to kill before leaving it to float on its side. Tarka whistled again and again, and at last the big dog left the water and chased the small dog for whistling to his mate.

  Tarka ran away. He crossed over the sea-wall, and worked up the stony bed of the pill, catching the flukes and green crabs which were feeding at the mouth of an open sewer. He met White-tip and Greymuzzle, and together they returned to the duckpond when the wildfowl flighted over. He was swimming round one bend of the Ram’s-horn when the big dog heard the strokes of his hindlegs and swam after him again. Tarka dived and twisted, and although he was bitten twice in the neck and once through the paw, he was not caught. His mother’s training had made him swift and strong. He quitted the water and was pursued through grassy tufts and thistles and bunches of frayed flags to the seawall, where the big dog turned and whistled to his mate. Hearing another whistle – it was really an echo of his own – he galloped in rage back to the duckpond. Then Tarka whistled, and the dog returned to kill him. Tarka went up and over the sea-wall at his greatest speed, across the mud and stones of the pill and to the western sea-wall, where he stopped. He cried Ic-yang! several times, but if the dog had returned in answer to the challenge, it is doubtful whether Tarka would have waited to drink the blood of his enemy.

  Already his mother had forgotten, and perhaps would never again remember, that she had loved a cub called Tarka.

  Chapter Seven

  TARKA was alone, a young male of a ferocious and persecuted tribe whose only friends, except the Spirit that made it, were its enemies – the otter-hunters. His cubhood was ended, and now indeed did his name fit his life, for he was a wanderer, and homeless, with nearly every man and dog against him.

  He fished the pools and guts of the Branton pill, eating what he caught among the feathery and aromatic leaves of the sea-wormwood plants which grew in the mudded cracks of the sloping stone wall with the sea-beet, the scentless sea-lavender, and the glasswort. One night a restlessness came over him, and he rode on the flood-tide to the head of the pill, which was not much wider than the gravel barges made fast to rusty anchors half-hidden in the grass, and to bollards of rotting wood. The only living thing that saw him arrive at the pill-head was a rat which was swarming down one of the mooring ropes, and when it smelled otter it let out a squeak and rapidly climbed over the sprig of furze tied to the rope to stop rats, and ran back into the ship. Tarka padded out of the mud, and along the footpath on the top of the sea-wall, often pausing with raised head and twitching nostrils, until he came to where the stream, passing through a culvert under the road, fell into a concrete basin and rushed thence down the fish-pass. He swam under the culvert, following the stream round bends and past a farmyard, through another culvert under a cart-road, and on till he came to a stone bridge near a railway station. A horse and butt, or narrow farm cart, was crossing the bridge, and he spread himself out beside a stone, so that three inches of water covered his head and back and rudder. When the butt had gone, he saw a hole and crept up it. It was the mouth of an earthenware drain, broken at the joint. He found a dry place within. When it was quiet again, he went under the bridge and fished up the stream, returning at dawn to the drain.

  He was awakened by the noise of pounding hooves; but the noises grew remote and he curled up again, using his thick rudder as a pillow on which to rest his throat. Throughout the day the noises of hooves recurred, for below the bridge was a ford where farm horses were taken to water. Twice he crept down the drain, but each time there was a bright light at the break in the pipe, and so he went back. At dusk he slipped out and went upstream again. Just above the bridge was a chestnut tree, and under it a shed, where ducks were softly quacking. He climbed on the bank, standing with his feet in sprays of ivy, his nose upheld, his head peering. The scents of the ducks were thick and luring as vivid colour is to a child. Juices flowed into his mouth, his heart beat fast. He moved forward, he thought of warm flesh, and his eyes glowed amber with the rays of a lamp in the farmhouse kitchen across the yard. The chestnut rustled its last few rusty leaves above him. Then across the vivid smear of duck scent strayed the taint of man; an ivy leaf trembled, a spider’s web was broken, the river murmured and the twin amber dots were gone.

  Beside the stream was a public footpath and an illuminated building wherein wheels spun and polished connecting-rods moved to regular pulses which thudded in the air like the feet of men running on a bank. Tarka dived. He could not swim far, for by the electric power station the river slid over a fall. He swam to the right bank, but it was a steep wall of concrete. Again he dived, swimming upstream and crawling out on the bank. For many minutes he was afraid to cross the railway line, but at last he ran swiftly over the double track, and onwards until he reached the stream flowing deep under a footbridge.

  He had been travelling for an hour, searching the uvvers of the banks for fish as he had learned in cubhood, when on a sandy scour he found the pleasing scent of otter. He whistled and hurried upstream, following the scent lying wherever the seals had been pressed. Soon he heard a whistle, and a feeling of joy warmed his being.

  A small otter was waiting for him, sitting on a boulder, licking her coat with her tongue, the white tip of her rudder in the water. As Tarka approached, she looked at him, but she did not move from the boulder, nor did she cease to lick her neck when he placed his fore-pads on the stone and looked up into her face. He mewed to her and crawled out of the water to stand on hindlegs beside her and touch her nose. He licked her face, while his joy grew to a powerful feeling, so that when she continued to disregard him, he whimpered and struck her with one of his pads. White-tip yikkered and bit him in the neck. Then she slid into the water, and with a playful sweep of her rudder swam away from him.

  He followed and caught her, and they rolled in play; and to Tarka returned a feeling he had not felt since the early days in the hollow tree, when he was hungry and cold and needing his mother. He mewed like a cub to White-tip but she ran away. He followed her into a meadow. It was strange play, it was miserable play, it was not play at all, for Tarka was an animal dispirited. He pressed her, but she yikkered at him, and snapped at his neck whenever he tried to lick her face, until his mewing ceased altogether and he rolled her over, standing on her as though she were a salmon just lugged to land. With a yinny of anger she threw him
off, and faced him with swishing rudder, hissing through her teeth.

  Afterwards she ignored him, and returned to the river as though she were alone, to search under stones for mullyheads, or loach. He searched near her. He caught a black-and-yellow eel-like fish, whose round sucker-mouth was fastened to the side of a trout, but she would not take it. It was a lamprey. He dropped it before her again and again, pretending to have caught it anew each time. She swung away from his offering as though she had caught the lamprey and Tarka would seize it from her. The sickly trout, which had been dying for days with the lamprey fastened to it, floated down the stream; it had been a cannibal trout and had eaten more than fifty times its own weight of smaller trout. Tar from the road, after rain, had poisoned it. A rat ate the body the next day, and Old Nog speared and swallowed the rat three nights later. The rat had lived a jolly and murderous life, and died before it could fear.

  The lamprey escaped alive, for Tarka dropped it and left White-tip in dejection. He had gone a few yards when he turned to see if she were following him. Her head was turned, she was watching. He was so thrilled that his whistle – a throat sound, like the curlew’s – was low and flute-like. She answered. He was in love with White-tip, and as in all wild birds and animals, his emotions were as intense as they were quick. He felt neither hunger nor fatigue, and he would have fought for her until he was weak now that she had whistled to him. They galloped into the water-meadow, where in his growing desire he rushed at her, rolling her over and recoiling from her snapping of teeth. She sprang after him and they romped among the clumps of flowering rush, startling the rabbits at feed and sending up the woodcock which had just flown from the long low island seventeen miles off the estuary bar.

  White-tip was younger than Tarka, and had been alone for three weeks before the old, grey-muzzled otter had met and taken care of her. Her mother had been killed by the otter-hounds, during the last meet of the otter-hunting season at the end of September.

  Tarka and White-tip returned to the stream, where among the dry stalks of angelica and hemlock they played hide-and-seek. But whenever his playfulness would change into a caress, she yinny-yikkered at him. She softened after a while, and allowed him to lick her head, once even licking his nose before running away. She was frightened of him, and yet was glad to be with him, for she had been lonely since she had lost Greymuzzle, when a marshman’s dog had chased them out of a clump of rushes, where they had been lying rough. Tarka caught her, and was prancing round her on a bank of gravel when down the stream came a dog-otter with three white ticks on his brow, a heavy, slow-moving, coarse-haired otter who had travelled down from the moor to find just such a mate as the one before him. Tarka cried Ic-yang! and ran at him, but the dog-otter, who weighed thirty pounds, bit him in the neck and shoulder. Tarka ran back, tissing, swinging and swaying his head before he ran forward and attacked. The older dog rolled over him, and bit him several times. Tarka was so mauled that he ran away. The dog followed him, but Tarka did not turn to fight. He was torn about the head and neck, and bitten thrice through the tongue and narrow lower jaw.

  He stopped at the boulder where White-tip had been sitting when first she had seen him, and listened to the whistles of his enemy. The water sang its stone-song in the dark as it flowed its course to the sea. He waited, but White-tip never came, so he sank into the water and allowed himself to be carried down past bends and under stone arches of the little bridges which carried the lanes. He floated with hardly a paddle, listening to the song of the water and sometimes lapping to cool his tongue. The wheels and rods of the power station turned and gleamed behind glass windows like the wings of dragonflies; over the fall he slid, smooth as oil. Slowly and unseen he drifted, under the chestnut tree, under the bridge, past the quiet railway station, the orchards, the meadows, and so to the pill-head. The current dropped him into the basin of the fish-pass, and carried him down the slide to salt water. With the ebb he floated by ketches and gravel barges, while ring plover and little stints running at the line of lapse cried their sweet cries of comradeship. The mooring keg bobbed and turned in the ebb, the perches, tattered with seaweed, leaned out of the trickling mud of the fairway, where curlew walked, sucking up worms in their long curved bills. Tarka rode on with the tide. It took him into the estuary, where the real sea was fretting the sandbanks. He heard a whistle, and answered it gladly. Greymuzzle was fishing in the estuary, and calling to White-tip.

  The old otter, patient in life after many sorrows and fears, caressed his bitten face and neck and licked his hurts. They hunted together, and slept during the day in a drain in one of the dykes of the marsh, which was watered by a fresh stream from the hills lying northwards. Night after night they hunted in the sea, and often when the tide was low they played in the pool opposite the fishing-village that was built around the base of a hill. The north-east wind blew cold over the pans and sandy hillocks near the sea, but Greymuzzle knew a warm sleeping-place in a clump of round-headed club-rush, near the day-hide of a bittern. She became dear to Tarka, and gave him fish as though he were her cub, and in the course of time she took him for her mate.

  Chapter Eight

  THE TREES of the riverside wept their last dry tears, and the mud in the tidehead pool made them heavy and black; and after a fresh, when salmon came over the bar, beginning their long journey to spawn in the gravel where the rivers ran young and bright, broken black fragments were strewn on the banks and ridges of the wide estuary. In November the poplars were like bedraggled gull-feathers stuck in the ground, except for one or two or three leaves which fluttered on their tops throughout the gales of November.

  One evening, when the ebb-tide was leaning the channel buoys to the west and the gulls were flying silent and low over the sea to the darkening cliffs of the headland, Tarka and Greymuzzle set out on a journey. They had followed the salmon up the river, and Greymuzzle had returned for a purpose. The bright eye of the lighthouse, standing like a bleached bone at the edge of the sandhills, blinked in the clear air. The otters were carried down amidst swirls and topplings of waves in the wake of a ketch, while the mumble of the bar grew in their ears. Beyond the ragged horizon of grey breakers the day had gone, clouded and dull, leaving a purplish pallor on the cold sea.

  The waves slid and rose under the masted ship, pushing the white surge of the bar from her bows. A crest rolled under her keel and she pitched into a trough. On the left a mist arose off a bank of grey boulders, on which a destroyer lay broken and sea-scattered. It had lain there for years, in bits like beetle fragments in a gorse-spider’s grey web-tunnel. One of the great seas that drive the flying spume over the potwallopers’ grazing marsh had thrown it up on the Pebble Ridge. During the day Tarka and Greymuzzle had slept under the rusty plates, curled warm on the wave-worn boulders rolled there by the seas along Hercules Promontory.

  Two hours after midnight the otters had swum five miles along the shallow coast and had reached the cave of the headland, which Greymuzzle had remembered when she had felt her young kick inside her. The tide left deep pools among the rocks, which the otters searched for blennies and gobies, and other little fish which lurked under the seaweed. They caught prawns, which were eaten tail first, but the heads were never swallowed. With their teeth they tore mussels off the rocks, and holding them in their paws, they cracked them and licked out the fish. While Greymuzzle was digging out a sand-eel, Tarka explored a deep pool where dwelt a one-clawed lobster. It was hiding two yards under a rock, at the end of a cleft too narrow to swim up. Four times he tried to hook it out with his fore-pad, the claws of which were worn down with sand-scratching, and in his eagerness to get at it he tore seaweed with his teeth. The lobster had been disturbed many times in its life, for nearly every man of the villages of Cryde and Ham had tried to dislodge it with long sticks to which they had lashed hooks. The lobster had lost so many claws that, after nine had been wrenched off, its brain refused to grow any more. Its chief enemy was an old man named Muggy, who went to the pool every Sunday
morning at low spring-tide with a rabbit-skin and entrails, which he threw into the water to lure it forth from the cleft. The lobster was too cunning, and so it lived.

  The otters rested by day on a ledge in the cave under the headland. Here dwelt Jarrk the seal, who climbed a slab below them by shuffles and flapping jumps. Sometimes Tarka swam in the pools of the cave, rolling on his back to bite the drops of ironwater which dripped from the rocky roof, but only when Jarrk was away in the sea, hunting the conger where the rocks of Bag Leap ripped foam out of the tide.

  The greatest conger of Bag Leap, who was Garbargee, had never been caught, for whenever it saw Jarrk the seal, its enemy, it hid far down in the crab-green water, in a hole in the rocks of the deepest pool, where lay shellcrusted cannon and gear of H. M. sloop Weazel wrecked there a century before. When no seal was about, Garbargee hung out of the hole and stared, unblinkingly, for fish, which it pursued and swallowed. One morning as Tarka, hungry after a stormy night, was searching in the thong-weed five fathoms under the glimmering surface, something flashed above him, and looking up, he saw a narrow head with a long hooked preying beak and two large webs ready to thrust in chase of fish. This was Oylegrin the shag, whose oily greenish-black feathers reflected light. The smooth narrow head flickered as Oylegrin shifted his gaze, and a pollack below mistook the flicker for a smaller surface-swimming fish. The pollack turned to rise and take it, and the shag saw the gleam of its side at the same time as Tarka saw it. Oylegrin tipped up and kicked rapidly downwards faster than an otter could swim. His tight feathers glinted and gleamed as he pursued the pollack. Garbargee also saw the pollack and uncurled a muscular tail from its hold on a jut of rock. The conger was longer than a man is tall, and thicker through the body than Tarka. It weighed ninety pounds. It waved about the weedy timbers, and as it passed over, crabs hid in the mouths of cannon.