Page:Tarka the Otter.djvu/206

Woolcombe Sands Hu-ee-ic! He galloped up the sand, nose between paws. He ran up into the sandhills, where his passing sowed round orange-red seeds from the split dry pods of the stinking iris. Over a lonely road, among old stalks of ragwort and teasel, and up a steep bank to the incult hill, pushing among bracken, furze, and brambles, following the way of White-tip. He found the head of a rabbit which she had caught, and played with it, whistling as he rolled it with his paws.

Already larks were ceasing to sing. When he reached the top of Pickwell down, eastern clouds were ruddy and Hoaroak Hill, seventeen miles away as the falcon glides, was as a shadow lying under the sky. He descended to a gulley in the hills, a dry watercourse marked by furze bushes, and thorns, and hollies, growing down to sandhills by the sea. The gulley lay south-west; the trees lay over to the north-east, bitter and dwarfed by salt and wind. Under a holly bush, bearer of ruined blossoms and spineless leaves, whose limbs were tortured by ivy thicker in trunk than its own, the otter crawled into a bury widened by many generations of rabbits, and lay down in the darkness.

The wind rushed up the gulley, moving stiffly the blackthorns which squeaked as they rubbed against each other. Dry branches of elderberries rattled and scraped as though bemoaning their poverty. Gulls veered from hilltop to hilltop, calling the flock standing far below on the sands that gleamed with the dull sky. The dark base of the headland lying out in the Atlantic was flecked along its length with the white of breaking waves.