Tarka the Otter

by Henry Williamson

  Three buzzards sailed over the river, one above the other, like the stars in Orion’s Belt; the top bird moving with steady wings, the lower bird circling, and the lowest veering on broad vanes, cleaver-shaped, heavily with rolling sweeps into the lingering wind that eddied about the top of oak trees. The tree trunks were dark; only from the high young branches had the sun struck colour, yellow and pale green.

  A lustrous blue line was drawn against the dark forest of trunks as a kingfisher sped downriver. The buzzards drifted away south, their wings narrowing with a gold glister, and shrank into the sun.

  Peet! The short, shrill cry came from a silver point drawing a ruddy line over the mud. With a fish in its beak the kingfisher sped upriver to its young in a sandy bank above the Mouse Hole Pool. Martins twittered along the river bank, and hovered about the heads of bullocks, taking crisp-winged flies from their muzzles and between their horns. Tarka yawned, and dozed again.

  A dark cloud arose over the crest of the oakwood, and the greenery of young leaves faded. Rain beat on the flags. A million million drops in the river leapt to meet the drops fresh-risen from the Atlantic. The cloud passed, and again the meadow was hot and bright. The swallows flew up the river, quitting at the coils its glitter and yellow kingcups, and fleeing on across the green meadow to the road by the bridge. Here, in the hollows of the broken road surface, was to be found after rain a greyish mud that set harder than the browny mud of the salty scourings in the river. Only by the bridge was this mud to be found, for the road sloped up and down over the river, and the slopes were not tarred, lest the feet of horses slip. The aerial masons were about to build their nests on the rafters of shippen and barn; they flew in pairs, singing their sun-songs.

  Beside the bridge grew an elderberry tree, straight and sturdy as a young oak in a park; one of the few soft-cored elderberry trees in the country of the Two Rivers that had not grown up a cripple of the winds. Its leaves partly hid a motor-car, in whose closed body, shut away from the wind and the sun of the English spring, sat some men and women. They were awaiting hounds before moving to the parapet of the bridge, and perhaps, if a kill seemed certain and early, to the meadow over the low wooden fence. Other motor-cars stopped on the bridge. The swallows swooping over the stonework saw the sunlight browned by the smoke of engines, and dived back again over the grass. The baying of hounds above the bridge became louder, for the otter had swum through the lower stickle, and was travelling downstream.

  The hunted otter was White-tip. She had been chased for nearly three hours. Always the cries and tongues and legs had followed her, up the pools and down the pools, from holt to holding, from holding to shallow.

  Tally Ho!

  She saw faces and waving arms above the bridge, but she did not turn back.

  Light-laden drops rolled down the green flags as their points drew down the sky. Tarka lay still, watching. They rustled and broke with soft sappy noises. White-tip was pressing the bed of flags. Her mouth was open. Tarka, who had been listening for half an hour to the distant cries of men and hounds, stared at the movement. A sudden clamour ran down the river loud and startling, for Deadlock had found White-tip’s deep seals in the mud, where she had crept out of the water.

  The two otters ran through the flags and slid down the mud to the river again. Tarka spread himself in the shallow flow, moving with light touches of claws just over the rocks and stones of the bed. He moved slowly, as an eel moves, as smooth as the water, and with sinuous ease. Sometimes he crept out at the edge of the mud, walked a few yards, and slipped back into the water again. Hounds were crushing the flags around his bed, and throwing their tongues along his line.

  He swam through a long pool at his fastest pace, putting up his nostrils every fifty yards to breathe, and down again immediately. He left the oakwood behind him, and came to a narrow gut draining the water of a small marshy valley, where bullocks were grazing. The gut lay under trees above a rocky bank. Its other bank was mud. Seaweed hung on the roots of trees six feet above his head. Tarka walked up the gut, as far as the first channer in its glidder, partly hid by the broad strongly-keeled leaves of river sedge. He followed it into the marsh, and climbing out, ran along a path trodden by cattle, through a gate and down to a lower marsh, hidden from the opposite bank by a tide-wall. The tongue of Deadlock spoke across the river, and Tarka slipped into another gut. He trod through brown mud to a black ooze, in which he moved like an eel. The drain led under the tide-wall to the glidder above the river. It led into darkness, with light coming through the chinks of a circular wooden trap, that kept the tides back from the land. He sniffed at a chink, and waited in the ooze.

  For two hours Tarka lay behind the wooden trap, while the noises of hunting moved away into remoteness. Slowly the sound of the low running river was stilled into slack water. Tricklings, the lap and slanting wash of ripple-ends, a turning drift of froth and sticks below the mud – the sea was moving up again. A heron alighted at the bottom of the muddy glidder, and stalked gravely into water to his knees. Flukes were rising off the silt, seeking food. The heron bent down and peered. He stepped forward on one foot, and speared with a swift plunge. Then he stared up the river. A thin-drawn thread of sound in the air, looped to another and another and another; loosed as four gossamers floating by in the wind. It was the recall to hounds. In the after-quiet the heron stalked to his spearing again. The murky water twirled by the knee-joints of his thin green legs. Splash, flicker, and shaken drops – he swallowed fluke after fluke; but when twenty yards beyond the trap he straightened up his neck, stood on his toes, jumped hurriedly out of the water, and flapped away, pulling up his shanks after him, and tucking his long neck and head between his shoulders. He had seen the heads of men.

  Smells of the lower river, riding up with the young tide into the Mouse Hole Pit, had overspread the wishy washy otter-scent, and the pack was being taken back to kennels. The horn-like voice of the huntsman, as he talked to hounds by name, came to the otter through the chinks of the sodden elmwood trap. They trotted on the opposite bank happy at the hunsman’s heels, led home by aged Harper who had taught them all to mark an otter. Flews to flews with him was Deadlock, and at his stern, Bluemaid, old before her time, worn out by swimming. Then came Pitiful, who worked hard and alone; whenever it was possible to go wrong, Pitiful went wrong; it was Pitiful who, whenever they passed by the dry river-bed, led them on the trail of Shaggery the ram-cat; if a hound were missing it was always Pitiful. Near her was Captain, a black-and-tan rough dog, who looked like a lurcher; the huntsman did not take Captain to important meets, for Captain’s voice was like a knife whose edge is turned. He did not throw his tongue, he screamed; and sometimes in his excitement he babbled, flinging water-lies about. Bite’m the terrier hurried among them, sometimes sniffing in tufts, hoping to find a rat to shake; and following Bite’m, like an easy-going, big, heavy boy led by a sharp little quick-eyed tacker, came Rufus, who cared more for a nest of field-mice than for a joint or rib of rank otter. After Rufus on the tide-wall ran Dewdrop, whose long fawn-coloured hair was curly with wet. Her ears hung long and loose.

  Often while the trophies were being taken by the huntsman those ears would flap between blue-stocking’d legs, and teeth would slyly nip through wool, as though it were brown fur of the worry. By the Wharfedale bitch – for Dewdrop was the only true otter-hound in the pack – ran Playboy and Actor, whose dingy-white shapes were so alike that only the huntsman could name them truly. Behind them came Render and Fencer, who always tore at roots of a holt with their teeth; Hemlock, with one eye blind, the dark pupil grey-veined with the scar of a blackthorn prick; Hurricane, the ancient Irish staghound with the filed canines; Barbrook and Bellman, Boisterous and Chorister, Coraline, Sailoress, Waterwitch, and Armlet, who always stood apart from the pack during holt-marking and bayed moodily like a lighthouse siren. Then came Sandboy, who fought other hounds at the worry, and Grinder and Darnell – hounds who had chased the fox. They trotted on the side-wall between the sho
rt, quick-stepping huntsman and the long-legged whip and kennel-boy, whose long, loose striding had been formed in early years by crossing ploughlands on his way to school.

  Twenty paces behind the pack walked the Master with two members of the Hunt. He was saying that it had been a great day, only lacking a kill to complete it, when old Harper stopped and lifted his muzzle. The air on the water, colder than the land air, was brimming over the sea-wall, and Harper had smelled an otter. Deadlock moved into the air-stream, threw up his head, whispered, and ran down the grassy bank to the broken turf above the glidder. Sterns were waved like feathers. Deadlock leapt into the river, followed by half the pack. Pitiful started patiently to work the waterline of the mud and Captain babbled in excitement as he lapped and swam.

  The water was three feet deep. Hounds scrambled up the glidder, some slipping down, drawing long clawlines on the harder clay beneath. They whimpered and scratched before the round wooden trap, and Armlet bayed them on from the bank above. Terrier Bite’m pushed his small eager body between their flanks, under their legs, whining and yelping. Five men waded the river, testing a footway with taps of iron-shod poles before them. Thinking that the otter they had hunted for more than five hours was hiding inside, and that the tired hounds would have no chance to kill even an exhausted otter in the rising water, the pack was not withdrawn when Bite’m was taken to the open end of the drain, where Tarka’s deep seals in the lower ooze showed like big blackberries crushed in the mud. Bite’m was given a pat on his ribs and gently shoved into the dark hole. He crept in, quick and shivering.

  The ooze sucked at Tarka’s webs as he turned away from the light-stripped lid of the drain. His heart beat as fast as waterdrops drip without dribbling. The hanging sodden door went sug-plog-sug as paws struck it. He looked up and down, round and up again, for a way of escape. He crawled in the ooze, away from the immense din, and saw an enemy coming towards him an instant before he smelled it. Is-is-iz!

  They met and joined and twisted into shapes smoothed by ooze. The terrier got a grip on the otter’s rudder and hung on to it. Tarka bit and bit and bit, quick as a striking viper, in cheek, shoulder, flank, nose, and ear. Noises of bumping and squelching and snarling and tissing became louder when the trap was lifted and light showed the red and black shaking shapes. The otter’s rudder near the opening was seized and pulled by a hand. Another hand gripped the terrier’s scruff. The long black smooth shape was lugged out of the drain, the terrier fixed to it. Hounds were leaping and clamouring up at the men. A hand held Bite’m’s tail-stump, another hand squeezed, trying to make him unclench. Tarka writhed and contorted as he hung by his rudder; his back became a bow, suddenly bending up, and his teeth made a row of holes in a hand. The jerk made his rudder slip, and he dropped among boots, to squirm between legs and away down the glidder. He pulled Bite’m with him.

  Hounds trod on him, snarling and thrusting. Tarka was hidden under their heads, picked up and thrown sideways, then dropped and picked up and shaken. Eight jaws held him at one time in the midst of a deep sullen growling. He was hid in the plunging of white and brown and black bodies. He bit Deadlock through the flews, and again in the nose, as he was lifted on other muzzles, Bite’m still joined to the base of his rudder. The pack bore him down to the tide, where the worry broke up. Heads were lifted again, and tongues thrown. Hounds stooped to water; some swam after Captain, who was cutting the air with his knife-edge voice.

  But Tarka was gone, and so was Bite’m. The terrier came to the surface a minute later, forty yards away, and swam inshore, spluttering and gasping, the short hairs of the otter’s rudder still between his teeth.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE TIDE was flooding fast in midstream. It carried with it sunken branches that sometimes showed a stick, and turned under again. Tarka passed them as he swam into a riband of water returning under the steep and broken rock-face that was the river’s left bank. The riband moved down again, feeling the roots of oak trees, and reclaiming the seaweed hung there since the morning ebb. The otter drifted to a root and rested his paws upon it, breathing through his mouth. Two pink nicks above his nose welled red immediately; so did his paws. He bled also from rudder, back, neck, flank, and shoulder. While he was among the hounds he had felt neither fear nor hurt for the power of all his senses had been in movement to escape. Now his wounds smarted with the salt in the water, and he listened in a still dread for Deadlock’s tongue. He lay still for a quarter of an hour.

  No hound spoke. The water rose, and lifted him off the root, and carried him away. He drifted through the Mouse Hole Pit and beyond the oakwood to the deeper winding bed in the meadow, where oarweed hung dry on the lower branches of thorns, with sticks, grasses, sometimes the skeleton of a rabbit or bird. Dead brambles tangled in the thorns were swinging in the water, combing the scum of the tide. Cuckoo flowers grew above the top of the flood, their small pale gentle faces rising on tall stems from the dead stumps of trees, some broken and wilting, trodden into the mud and asleep again.

  Through the soft pasture ground the river roamed, coiling and uncertain. The tide-water filling it gleamed dully like a seal’s hide, greyish brown and yellow freckled. The mud at its edges streamed with tiny bubbles out of the ragworm’s holes. It carried Tarka with its other flotsam to the middle of its last sea-bend, where the tide lay like a dead seal. Already it had started to ebb. Tarka crawled into shallow fresh water singing round stones, and reached two rocks covered with green water-moss. Here he sat and licked his wounds, and lapped the salt from his mouth. Long shadows were on the grass and the faint-screaming swifts were high over the valley, eager for the sunset and their mystic star-games.

  Above the tide’s head the banks were of brown soil and upright under the broken turf. Seedling plants of balsam were four inches high. Willows were green and waving in the evening wind. Tarka walked under the bank on dry shillets and sandy scours washed loose of mud, until he reached the roots of a big tree based at the tail of an eddying pool. He crept into darkness, to a dry shelf within, and slept.

  The high stars of mid-May were shining through the branches when he came out of the holt, slow and stiff and hungry. Below the two rocks the water gushed in many clear rills. Tarka walked across a bend, down a bank, over the shallow, and up the other bank. He made a landloop that took him to the bottom of the railway embankment, and pushing through a low thorn hedge, he climbed the grassy bank to the rails. Over the wooden sleepers he walked so that the stenches of oil and tarred cinder would mingle with his own scent, in case the enemies were trailing him.

  At the next bridge, under which a dwarf owl nested he left the track and went to water again. Working down the river, crossing from side to side and searching for fish under stones and in deep holes, he left the grassy sloping tide-walls behind and passed by boats resting on a ridge of gravel above a long road-bridge. Swimming with a fluke to the riverside, he could find no bank. The water lapped a stone wall. He swam under an arch of the bridge and ate the fish on a ledge of sand raised over an old galvanized iron bath thrown away into the river. Below the bridge was a railway bridge, supported by round iron piers sunk into the gravel. A wave washed against the base of the pier near the right side of the river as he swam round it, hoping to find mussels clinging there. The sea was returning again. It poured over the ridges of sand, making a sound with every stone and shell and shillet tumbling before its eager spread. Hu-ee-ic! Tarka chopped at the froth, the new smarting of his wounds unheeded. Hu-ee-ic! The salt wave was of the sea, and the sea was the friend of otters.

  As he was swimming down in a turbulent pool, Tarka saw a big fish turn before him. He raced after it. His hindlegs pushed forward under his body for the full double-thrust, and the arch of his back opened the big bite of Deadlock that had nearly touched the spine. He bled, but felt no pain in the joy of hunting a big fish. The mullet – one of many that had come up from the estuary, feeding in the muddy collar of the tide’s head – nearly dashed into the stone wall of the quay
in its terror. It saved itself by a leap that took it a yard into the air, and falling back, it sped swiftly down the river. Tarka followed it to where it had leapt, stood head and shoulders out of the water, while he looked round, before rolling under again. He swam up the base of the wall and turned back by the railway bridge, swimming three double-thrusts to the left, then three to the right, while watching for the glint of scales. He followed the wall until he came to an opening in the quay where the tide was rushing. Another fish turned in the turbid swirling water before him, and darted up the pill. Tarka swam up the narrow way, but seeing nothing, swung back into the wide river. He swam across the tide to the opposite bank by a shipyard, then returned along the piers of the bridge, searching by the stone sterlings.

  The tide was pouring fast between the piers when he reached the wall again. Swimming along the wall he turned up the pill, and let the tide take him. With easy strokes he explored the water, swinging in a zigzag course from side to side. At the end of each crossing he threw head and shoulders out of the water, to breathe and survey before pushing off again with a thrust of hindlegs from the stones under the glidders. Many times he swerved off his course to peer round and under things that lay on the bed, broken kettles, cooking-pots, basins, and battered oil-drums thrown away in the mud.

  He saw fish-shapes in the water beyond and above him, and headed them again as they would dash back to the estuary. The mullet swam away from him at thrice his speed, but he followed surely. The springtide was now flowing at six knots and the mullet went up with the press of water. Tarka drove them under another bridge, past which, by some steps in the quay, water from a mill-leat was splashing under a culvert. Above this the walls of stone ended, and rows of weed-hung stakes leaned over the mud glidders. Following the westward curve of the pill, Tarka passed by a timberyard, and after a minute’s swimming, swung north again and then east. The creek was like a great hollow slug filling with water.