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Down End had run the same way when alarmed by the same dog. The trail took him under a gate and into a field, over a bank where straight stalks of mulleins were black in moonlight, to land that had forgotten the plough, a prickly place for an otter’s webs. Sea-wind had broken all the bracken stalks. Suddenly he heard the mumbling roar of surf and saw the lighthouse across the Burrows. He galloped joyfully down a field of arrish, or stubble. He travelled so swiftly that soon he stood on the edge of sandy cliffs, where spray blew as wind. He found a way down to the pools by a ledge where grew plants of great sea stock, whose leaves were crumbling in autumn sleep.

The trail led over the sandhills with their thin stabbing marram grasses, and to the mossy pans behind them, where grew privet bushes and blunt-head club-rushes. The way was strewn with rabbit skulls and empty snail shells. Tarka crossed the marsh of Horsey Islandwhere grew Russian thistles, sprung from a single seed blown from the estuary off a Baltic timber ship years beforeuntil he came to the sea-wall, and below the wall, to the mouth of the Branton pill. The tide took him slowly in a patch of froth which the meeting waters had beaten up, the gossip of the Two Rivers. He ran over the eastern sea-wall, and along the otter path to the Ram’s-horn pond.

Hu-ee-ic!

He swam to the wooden bridge by the boat-house, and to the withies on the islet.

Hu-ee-ic!