Tarka the Otter

by Henry Williamson

  From the wooded hillside above the distant bank of the river came the knock of axes on the trunk of an oak tree, the shouts of woodmen, a sudden crack, the hissing rush and thud of breaking branches, and then quietness, until began the steady knock of boughs being lopped. After a while Tarka did not hear these sounds – he was listening in another direction. He scarcely heard the shooting buzz of sun-frisked flies over the heat. He felt no fear; all his energy was in listening.

  Chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff sang the bird among the ash trees. And soon the voices of men, the tearing of brambles against coats, boots trampling and snapping the hollow green stalks of hog weed and hemlock. Tarka saw their heads and shoulders against the sky, and swam on up the leat.

  His scent was washed down by the water, and the hounds followed him. He crept out on the other bank, on soft ground littered with dead leaves, which lay under crooked oak trees. He ran swiftly up the slope and entered a larch plantation, where the sky was shut out. The narrow lines of thin straight poles stood in a duskiness as of midsummer night. All sound was shut out; nothing grew under the trees. A wood owl peered down at him as he ran among the brittle fallen twigs; it peered over its back and softly hooted to its mate. The plantation was silent again.

  Tarka sat by the bole in the middle of the Dark Hams Wood, listening through the remote sough of wind in the branches to the faint cries below. The smell of the sap was strong in his nostrils. He dropped the fish. Sometimes he heard the querulous scream of a jay, and the clap of pigeon-wings as the birds settled in the treetops.

  For nearly twenty minutes he waited by the tree, and then the hunting cries swelled in the narrow groves of the wood. The owl flapped off its branch, and Tarka ran down the leat again, passing the hounds nine lines of trees away from them. Sunlight dazzled him when he ran out of the plantation. Then he saw many men and women before him.

  Tally Ho!

  Tarka ran round them and dived into the leat. When first he had swum down, the water had brimmed to the meadow, floating the green plants in its slow-gliding current; now the bank glistened with a sinking watermark, and only the tags of the starwort were waving. Trout darted before him as he swam against the water flowing faster. Often his head showed as he walked half out of water beside the starwort. He reached the square oaken fender, where only a rillet trickled. It rested on the bed of the leat, penning the water above.

  Tally Ho!

  Tarka turned and went down the leat again. He reached water deep enough to cover him before he met the hounds, who, hunting by the sense of smell, did not see him moving as a dark brown shadow through the channels in the weeds. Hounds passed him, for the wash – or scent on the water – was still coming down.

  Tarka swam down to the mill end of the leat, which was dark with the brown stains of stagnant life on its muddy bed. Trees kept the sun from it. A runner, or streamlet, from other woods joined it at this end, and waited in the pool to pass through the grating to the mills. Tarka swam under the culvert of the runner, but finding shallow water he returned and looked for a hole or drain in the banks. Shafts of sunlight pierced the leaves and dappled the water. A broad shade lay before the grating, where oak planks, newly sawn, were stacked over the water. The ringing rasp of a circular saw cutting hard wood suddenly rang under the trees, overbearing the shaken rumble of millstones grinding corn. Specks of wood settled on the water beyond the shade, where Tarka rested, staying himself by a paw on a rusty nail just above the water level.

  He waited and listened. The sawdust drifted past him, and was sucked away between the iron bars of the grating. The noise of the saw ceased. He heard the hounds again, coming down the leat. A voice just over his head cried. One o’clock! Footfalls hurried away from the saw. The hatch was closed, the trundling wheel slowed into stillness. Tarka heard the twittering of swallows; but he was listening for the sound of the horn. Deadlock speaking! Up the leat waterside plants were crackling as feet trod them down. Voices of the whips, one harsh and rating, were coming nearer. Heads and shoulders moved over the culvert. When the leading hound swam into the pool, throwing his tongue, Tarka dived and found a way through the grating, where one iron bar was missing – a space just wide enough for an otter. He drew himself on to the hatch and walked slowly up the wet and slippery wooden troughs to the top of the wheel. He squatted low and watched the grating. Hounds swam along it and Deadlock pushed his black head in the space of the missing bar. His flews pressed the iron and stopped him. He bayed into the cavern where the ancient water-wheel dripped beside the curved iron conduit of the modern water turbine. The place was gloomy; but in a corner, framed in a triangle of sunlight, three ferns hung out of the mortar – spleenwort, wall-rue, and male fern. Five young wagtails filled a nest built on the roots of the male fern; the nestlings crouched down in fear of the baying.

  Drops from the elmwood trough dripped into the plash hollowed in the rock under the wheel. Tarka sat on the topmost trough, his rudder hanging over the rim of the wheel. He heard the shrill yapping of terriers on leash; the shuffle of feet on the road over the culvert; the murmur of voices. Poles were pushed among the layers of planks; feet of hounds pounded the deep water as they swam under the timber baulks. He listened to their whimpers; smelt their breath. After a time the noises receded, and he heard chik-ik, chik-ik – the cries of the parent wagtails, waiting on the roof with beakfuls of river flies. Tarka licked his paws and settled more comfortably in the sodden elmwood trough. Sometimes his eyes closed, but he did not sleep.

  At two o’clock he heard voices in the gloomy wheelhouse. The men were returning to work after dinner. The hatch was lifted. Water gushed in and over the trough. The wheel shuddered and moved. Water gushed in and over each trough as it was lowered on the rim, and the wheel began its heavy splashing trundle. Tarka was borne down into darkness and flung on the rock. Under the troughs he crept, to the shallow stream that was beginning to flow through a lower culvert to the river. Sunlight dazed him. The bridge was ten yards below.

  The parapet before and above him was a smooth line across the sky, except for a wagtail’s pied body, the tops of three polypody ferns, the head and shoulders of an old grey-bearded man in a blue coat, and a black empty beer-bottle.

  Tally Ho!

  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-strings 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 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 underwater, but 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 underwater, 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 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 – hawk-weed, ragwort, and St John’s wort, plants of the land, were growing here. 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 squatted 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 haunting voices of huntsman and whippers-in; the noises of motor-cars moving slowly along the hard-rutted track-way, 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 clenched. 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, stopping 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 dr
y 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!