Page:Tarka the Otter.djvu/148

Cheldon Bridge badger, who was going to drink in the river. The grey waddler, animate granite, whose head was heavier than her whole body, lumbered out of the way. He sought no unnecessary trouble with fitches, and he had eaten up the rabbit under the Seal Stone.

The river hurried round the base of the cleave, on whose slopes stunted trees grew, amid rocks, and scree that in falling had smashed the trunks and torn out the roots of willows, thorns, and hollies. It wandered away from the moor, a proper river, with bridges, brooks, islands, and mills.

Soon the oaks above the river would break into leaf. Magpies had topped their nests with thorns, and buzzards were soaring long after owl-light. Kingfishers and dippers had hatched theirthere was a dipper’s nest, hanging dishevelled like a beard of moss, under nearly every stone bridge spanning the river. The innocent white flowers of the savage blackthorn had withered brown and shaken into the wind. Lent liliesthe wild daffodils of the woods and meadsclasped with their blooms, shrivelled and loving, the seeds of winter’s hope. Already the celandines were old thoughts of the spring, their leaves hid by rising docks and nettles and flowering dog’s-foot mercury. Badger cubs had been taught to use the latrines outside the tunnels. It was mid-April, swallow-time in the West Country. Otter cubs romped in a big stick-heap resting on the nose of an island above a bridge, eager to play with the moon on the water. Their