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Bag Leap Near Sandy Cove was the Cormorants’ Rock, where five cormorants squatted during most of the daylit hours, digesting their cropfuls of fishes. Each cormorant, as it arrived with steady black flight, would pass the rock about fifty yards, swing round and fly back into the wind, alighting uneasily among its brethren, some of whom had the tails of fishes sticking out of their gullets. They held out their wings and worked their shoulders to ease the fish down into their crops. The top of Cormorants’ Rock, where they sat, was above the highest wave.

Bag Leap was a sunken reef stretching about half a mile from the point, over which the tides raced. Here the currents brought many seals, which had followed salmon up the Severn Sea, on their return home to Lundy Island. With them was a grey seal, a stranger, who had come down from the north. For several days the seals fished off the Leap, while Jarrk roared among them and joined in their favourite game of chasing the smallest seed, who was not black and yellowish-brown like themselves, but a rare silvery-white. They would swim round the rocks looking for her, sometimes remaining under water for nearly a quarter of an hour. Once when Tarka was searching for a bass in four fathoms he met Jarrk face to face, and the shock made him blow a big bubble. He turned and kicked up to the light, while Jarrk swum round him in a spiral. Jarrk was always gentle, for he had never had an enemy to shock him into fear, and when Tarka tissed and yikkered at him, the scymitar-shaped lip-bristles of his broad muzzle