Page:Tarka the Otter.djvu/152

South Molton Road and in pain, but she had found none to suckle, for a badger walking on the ice had dug them out with his long black claws and eaten them. White-tip’s grief had been so keen that soon it had grown less; and she had lain with her mate in the bracken of Ferny Hill.

And now White-tip was grieving again. For two nights, as she travelled down the river with Tarka, she would cease hunting, and run aimlessly on the banks, whining and searching. During the third night she left him and returned to the ash-tree holt, wherein she had been making ready a couch of reeds and grasses. Into the holt she carried a stone, laying it on the couch, and licking it, until a sudden cry called her outside again. She traced the cry to a stone on the shallow, and brought it in her mouth to the holt; soon the couch was filled with wet stones.

Tarka travelled on alone. As the river grew older, so the meadows and cornfields beyond its banks stretched a wider green over the age-long silt filling the valley’s groin. Foxgloves claimed the hillsides wherever the oakwoods were felled, storing in their leaves the green power to raise red-purple spires to the midsummer sky. Seen by day from the hilltops, the river lay in its course like a viper broken by a buzzard’s beak and claws, marked with brown on its twisted and bluish-white coils. Twin burnished lines were set by the river, touching its banks, straitly leaving it to its windings, and crossing it on stone bridges topped by tarred iron girders. Under the girders jackdaws were building their nests of sticks and sheep’s wool and paper picked up in the early