Page:Tarka the Otter.djvu/119



Many of the dog-otters wandered Last of all, slow and fatigued, after weeks  hunger, came Marland Jimmy, the old dog wit. the split ear who had played the funnel-game with Tarka’s mother in the deep clay pit. He limped along the otter-path, which many pads had pressed into ice; the cysts between his toes, inflamed by paraffin, were raw and frostbitten. The tide was ebbing when he crawled over the white sea-wall, and down the dark and hard mud to the water, crackling the brittle ice-forms of the glasswort. Hearing a whistle across the pill, Marland Jimmy walked into the water and swam. He kicked slowly, and the current carried him aslant, amid plates of ice broken off by the last tide. The trickles in the mud channers and salting guts had already ceased. So black and bitter the night that not even the whippering cries of golden plover were heard in the pill. The water ebbed in a blank silence of fixed star-points. Marland Jimmy swam across the pill and crawled out steaming. His breath froze on his muzzle,