Tarka the Otter

by Henry Williamson

  Above the next bridge the leading fish rushed back and scurried by him, missing his snap by a curve that gleamed all its side, and a flack of its tail that filled Tarka’s mouth with air. It escaped with six of its grey brethren, but the last two were headed again. Tarka drove them up the straight and narrowing pill, through the collar of the tide and into still water, which was strange to the mullet, it was so clear and shallow.

  Tarka was now a mile from the pillmouth. The image of the bright moon rolled in shaken globules in the hollows of the brook’s swift waters, blending as quicksilver. Every ten yards two clusters of small bright beads arose out of the blackness and vanished in a dipping streak. Sometimes a delicate silver arrow pointed up the brook and was tangled in a fishtail swirl. Every ten yards the whiskered head looked up for direction – only the immediate foreground was visible underwater – and smoothly vanished. Tarka swam with all his webs thrusting together against the swift current, just above the bed of the brook, ready to leap up and snap should the fish try to pass him.

  He swam under a bridge of the small-gauge railway, whose shadow darkened the water. As he thrust up his head to vent, Tarka saw beyond the shadow-bar the white blur of water sliding over the sill of a weir. Underwater again, he looked from side to side more quickly, for in this dark place the fish might easily slip by him, although the water was not two feet deep.

  When midway through the shadow, his rudder swished up sickle-shaped, slanting his body. His hindlegs touched stones; he sprang. The scales of the two fish coming straight towards him in the darkness reflected only the darkness, but he had seen a hair of faintest light where the ream of a back-fin had cut the surface and glimmered with the moon-frosted slide. His teeth tore the tail of the leading fish, which escaped – his rudder lashed for another turn, his body screwed through the water, and struck upwards with teeth into the mullet’s gorge. Tarka swam into moonlight and dragged the five-pound fish (despite its beats and flaps) on to a shillet heap under the spillway of the slide. He gripped it with his paws and stood over it and started to eat it, while its gills opened and closed, and it tried feebly to flap.

  The chewing of its bony jaws soon made him impatient, and he fixed his teeth into the shoulder and tore away his bite. For five minutes he ate, then stretched up his head, with its piky neck-hair raised, and excitedly assayed the air … Hu-ee-ic! His nostrils opened wide. Hu-ee-ic! White-tip looked over the weir-sill and slid down with the water. Yinn-yinn-y-y-ikk-r! she cried, through her white teeth, and pulled the fish away from Tarka, who rolled on his back and tried to play with her tail. Then he rolled on his pads again and stared down through the rectangular space under the bridge, remembering the other fish.

  He slid off the rock. White-tip ate two pounds of the mullet. Then she followed Tarka.

  The leat, with its swift clear water and brown weed-like clusters of stoats’ tails – ran parallel to the brook, a few yards away and past a limewashed mill with a ruined water-wheel. A fence made of old iron bedsteads was set in the leat’s grassy bank, and here White-tip saw the dark shape of Tarka’s head against the nobbled lines of framework. He was eating. Seeing her, he whistled. As she ran over the grass, she smelled the scales where he had dragged the fish. Yinn-yinn! she cried again, jumping on the fish and clutching its head in her paws. Tarka watched her. Then he licked the blood from his wounds and ran back to the pill. He was going after more big fish.

  In the meadow near the limewashed mill was a dump of house-rubbish, tipped there by dust-carts, and spread about. A sow and her growing farrow were routing in the mess of rotten flesh and vegetable food, crunching up egg-shells and bones and cinders with eager delight. Here, while the moon was waning and the low mist was growing white, the otters returned to play a strange game. It was begun by White-tip making a splash before Tarka, to make sure that he would see her leave the water and climb the bank. When he followed, she ran around the meadow and back again, passing close by, but not once looking at him. After a while, they went back to the pill and romped like porpoises. Then they ran up the bank together and wandered off alone, up and down, passing and repassing many times through the squares of the wire fencing, without recognition or purpose, as though they were both mazed. To the water once more, a drink and a search for eels, and again the strange play in the meadow.

  Each was pretending not to see the other; so happy were they to be together, that they were trying to recover the keen joy of meeting.

  On the seventh round White-tip ran near a young pig that on sniffing her scent jumped and grunted and squealed and then stood still. Every black jowl lifted from the pleasant garbage. Hot ears ceased to flap. White-tip moved, and ten pigs jumped, and squealed, and hurriedly bolted. The sow, a ponderous and careful animal with eyes sunken in fat, that had eaten two rats and a cat besides twenty pounds of other food that night, pointed her ringed snout at the troublesome smell and moved her big shaking body towards it. White-tip threatened her, crying Is-iss-iss! If the sow had caught her, White-tip would have been eaten by sunrise, since she weighed only fourteen pounds and the sow weighed seven hundred pounds. She whistled to Tarka, who ran at the sow.

  Seven hundred pounds of flesh returned from the fence with pricked ears and a tail-tip gone; and Tarka ate grass blades, although he was not hungry. He wanted to get the taste out of his mouth.

  All night the swifts had been racing over the valley, so high that not even the owls had heard their whistling screams. When these birds saw the golden fume of the sun rising out of the east, they poured down in three funnels to the lower airs of the valley. Their narrow wings made a whishing noise as they fell. Tarka and White-tip in the weir-pool lay on their backs and watched them as they linked into chains and chased away, some up the valley, others to the estuary. Suddenly the otter heads lifted, looked round, and sank together – they had heard the otter-hounds baying in the kennels on Pilton Hill.

  In daylight they drifted down the mill-leat that drew out of the pool, passing from grassy banks to concrete, above which were walls and windows of houses and lofts where pigeons sat and croodled. Some of the older pigeons were already cocking red-rimmed eyes at the sky, for it was near the time of year when the peregrine falcons wheeled aloft the town of Barum, coming from the cliff eyries of Bag Hole, Hercules Promontory, and the red cliffs along the Severn Sea.

  A stag-bird, or farmyard cock, saw the otters from its perch on a bough over the leat, and cried Wock-wock-wock-wick, while its comb became redder. Then it saw nothing but water, and crowed in triumph among the hens. Tarka had not forgotten the time when a cock had crowed before.

  The leat flowed under a road, and under a brick cliff that was one wall of the town mills, swirled back from the locked wheel and gushed under a penstock and through a culvert to the pill, from which the sea was ebbing. Tarka and White-tip swam over the drowned white flowers of scurvey-grass to the bend where timber lay, and climbing out, sought a hiding-place among the pile of oaken trunks. As they crept along a rough bole a rat squeaked, another squealed, and soon all the rats of the timber stack were squealing. An old buck saw Tarka and fled away, followed by others, who were either bucks or does without young. Some of the rats dived into the water, others ran to farther wood stacks, where lived families that fought with the invaders. Their squeals came out of the planks all the morning, while the ringing rasp of circular saws was loud in the sunlight. These rats were heard by the sawyers, and during the dinner-hour one went off to fetch his ferrets.

  Tarka and White-tip were lying in a hollow trunk, curled side by side, their heads close together. The hollow was damp; its crevices still held skulls and leg-bones of mice and sparrows, that had looked at Tarka when he was very young. There were also fish-bones with a faint smell, but even these were beyond memory. In the autumn, long after the cubs had left its friendly hollow, the tree had been cut off from its roots and dragged by horses across the meadow and taken away, with other trees, to the saw mills.

  Hidden in the pile of trunks, the otters h
eard the grumbling of the grist mill across the creek, with the noises of traffic and the voices of men. During the morning Tarka shook his ears, tickled by the irritant buzzing of a bluebottle-fly caught and fanged in a spider’s web outside the hollow. Long after the fly was dead Tarka heard the buzzing, but without twitching his ears; for similar sounds now came from the bridge, where the motor-traffic crossed two roads. The noises were quieter when the sun was on the top of the sky, and the otters heard distinctly the chirping of sparrows. Then the chirping grew less, for the birds had flown to feed in the quieter roadways. Tarka ceased to listen for footfalls, and slept.

  White-tip awakened before Tarka, by the time of an eyeblink. Light from a crevice above, between the trunks resting on the old tree, made two eyes to gleam like no eyes the otters had seen before. They were pink as some blossoms of the balsam, a flower that rose tall by the sides of the Two Rivers every summer. The pink eyes blinked and moved nearer, above a white body. The creature’s strong smell, blent with the smell of man, its bold silence, its likeness to an otter, yet so curiously small, made him move uneasily. It peered with its pallid eyes, and sniffed at the tip of Tarka’s rudder. Tarka followed White-tip who was more nervous than he was. As they were moving along a trunk, a rat jumped upon Tarka’s back and clung to his hair, while screwing up its eyes and yinnering through its bared teeth. It was crying aloud its fear, not of the otter, but of the ferret. This tamed animal of the weasel tribe, whose name was Zippy, followed the rat in a quiet fury, and while Tarka was climbing up through a gap between the first and second layer of trunks, it leapt and bit the rat through the neck, dragging it from its clutch on the bark and shaking it as it drank its blood. Hearing another squeal, Zippy left the limp and dying rat and rippled after the squealer.

  When White-tip looked from under the pile of trunks, she saw a dog peering bright-eyed, its head on one side, above her. A man stood beyond with a cudgel. The dog stepped back three paces as she ran out and yapped as the man struck at her with his cudgel. White-tip turned back, meeting the sharp face of the ferret under a log. She ran round the stack.

  The broad sky, grey with heat beating down on the dusty peninsula, dazed the eyes of Tarka, who was stiff with wounds and bruises. He ran to the grassy bank above the creek, slower than the man, who struck him a glancing blow. The blow quickened Tarka, and the man, eager to kill him, threw the ground-ash stick at his head. It twirled past Tarka and scored a groove in the hot and hardening mud. Tarka ran over the cracks beginning to vein the glidder, and sank into the water. He was seen from the bridge, moving round the larger stones like a brown shadow, slowly stroking with his hindlegs and never once rippling the waterflow, which was just deep enough to cover an old boot.

  At night Tarka whistled in the creek, but heard no answer. He returned twice to the bend by the silent timber yard, where the eyes of rats were pricked in vanishing moonlight, but White-tip was not there. The flood-tide took him two miles up the river again to the railway bridge where a pair of dwarf owls had their eggs in a stolen jackdaw’s nest. These owls, scarcely bigger than thrushes, flew both by day and night, feeding on flukes and shrimps, frogs, snipe, oak-webs or cockchafers, worms, rats, mice, butterflies, and anything small they could catch and kill. When they saw Tarka under the bridge they wauled like Shaggery the ram-cat, they barked like foxes, they coughed like sheep, they croaked like bull-frogs. They flew over him as he walked up the gut that emptied a small brook from the east-lying valley beyond, blaking like herring gulls a yard above his head. When he was driven away from their eggs they hooted with soft pleasure, and left him.

  Tarka walked under the road and climbed into a mill-pond, where three eels died. Travelling up the brook, under the mazzard orchards growing on the northern slope of the valley, he reached a great hollow in the hill-side, shut in with trees and luminous as the sky. Tarka saw two moons, one above trees, the other level and in front of him, for the hollow was a flooded limestone quarry. Hu-ee-ic! The sweet whistle, like the cry of the golden plover, only softer, echoed from the face of rock across the water. He swam down and down, and could not touch bottom. The sides of the quarry dropped sheer down into the still depths, except at the far end, where was a little bay under a knuckle of land.

  He found no fish in the pit, and ran past the deserted lime-burners’ cottages and kilns to the brook again. Climbing the right bank he ran over grass-grown hillocks of deads, or rejected shillets of slaty rock, to another drowned quarry. Sombre brakes of blackthorns grew in the slag-heaps near the ivy-covered chimney of the ruinous furnace, and willows bound with mosses leaned in the water, which was dark and stagnant. A tree-creeper had her nest in a crack of the tall chimney, which rocked in every gale, for only the ivy, whose roots had made food and dust of nearly all the mortar between the stones, held it upright against the winds. Every April for five years the tree-creepers’ young had been reared within the crack, in a nest that always looked like a chance wind-wedging of dry grasses and little sticks. The crows and magpies never found the nest, so cunningly was it made each year.

  Fish, big and slow-swimming, lived in the sombre waters of the pit, and Tarka chased one down to the mud forty feet under the surface, where it escaped. It was a carp, more than fifty years old, and so wise for a fish that it knew the difference between a hook baited with dough-and-aniseed and one baited with dough-and-aniseed and cottonwool. Its habit, when it found a baited hook, was to expel through its mouth a flume of water on the dough until it was washed off and then it would swallow it; but dough stiffened with cottonwool was left alone.

  Hu-ee-ic!

  The sky was growing grey. Tarka could not catch a carp, and he was hungry. He went back to the brook.

  Hu-ee-ic!

  Only his echo replied, and he wandered on.

  Chapter Fourteen

  WHEN the bees’ feet shake the bells of the heather, and the ruddy strings of the sap-stealing dodder are twined about the green spikes of the furze, it is summertime on the commons. Exmoor is the high country of the winds, which are to the falcons and the hawks: clothed by whortleberry bushes and lichens and ferns and mossed trees in the goyals, which are to the foxes, the badgers, and the red deer: served by rain-clouds and drained by rock-littered streams, which are to the otters.

  The moor knew the sun before it was bright, when it rolled red and ragged through the vapours of creation, not blindingly rayed like one of its own dandelions. The soil of the moor is of its own dead, and scanty; the rains return to the lower ground, to the pasture and cornfields of the valleys, which are under the wind, and the haunts of men.

  The moor is to the deer, the badgers, the foxes, the otters, the falcons, and the hawks, pitiless despoilers of rooted and blooded things, which man has collected and set apart for himself; so they are killed. Olden war against greater despoilers began to end with the discoveries of iron and gunpowder; the sabre-toothed tigers, the bears, the wolves, all are gone, and the fragments of their bones lie on the rock of the original creation, under the lichens and grasses and mosses, or in the museums of towns. Once hunted himself, then hunting for necessity, man now hunts in the leisure of his time; but in nearly all those who through necessity of life till fields, herd beasts, and keep fowls, these remaining wildlings of the moors have enemies who care nothing for their survival. The farmers would exterminate nearly every wild bird and animal of prey, were it not for the landowners, among whom are some who care for the wildlings because they are sprung from the same land of England, and who would be unhappy if they thought the country would know them no more. For the animal they hunt to kill in its season, or those other animals or birds they cause to be destroyed for the continuance of their pleasure in sport – which they believe to be natural – they have no pity; and since they lack this incipient human instinct, they misunderstand and deride it in others. Pity acts through the imagination, the higher light of the world, and imagination arises from the world of things, as a rainbow from the sun. A rainbow may be beautiful and heavenly, but i
t will not grow corn for bread.

  Within the moor is the Forest, a region high and treeless, where sedge grasses grow on the slopes to the sky. In early summer the wild spirit of the hills is heard in the voices of curlews. The birds fly up from solitary places, above their beloved and little ones, and float the wind in a sweet uprising music. Slowly on spread and hollow wings they sink, and their cries are trilling and cadent, until they touch earth and lift their wings above their heads, and poising, loose the last notes from their throats, like gold bubbles rising into sky again. Tall and solemn, with long hooped beaks, they stalk to their nestlings standing in wonder beside the tussocks. The mother-bird feeds her singer, and his three children cry to him. There are usually but three, because the carrion-crows rob the curlews of the first egg laid in each nest. Only when they find the broken empty shell do the curlews watch the crows, black and slinking, up the hillside.

  Soon the curlew lifts his wings and runs from his young, trilling with open beak; his wings flap, and up he flies to fetch song from heaven to the wilderness again.

  A tarn lies under two hills, draining water from a tussock-linked tract of bog called The Chains. The tarn is deep and brown and still, reflecting rushes and reeds at its sides, the sedges of the hills, and the sky over them. The northern end of the tarn is morass, trodden by deer and ponies. Water trickles away under its southern bank, and hurries in its narrow course by falls, runnels, pools, and cascades. One afternoon Tarka climbed out of the rillet’s bed, scarcely wider than himself, and looked through green hart’s-tongue ferns at the combe up which he had travelled. Nothing moved below him except water. He walked up the hill, and saw the tarn below him. He heard the dry croaking of frogs, and ran down the bank that dammed the dark peat-water. A yard down the slope he stopped.