Page:Tarka the Otter.djvu/220

Beam Weir grey beneatha great northern diver in winter plumage. When Tarka saw it first it was rolling from side to side and stretching out first one wing then the other. The otter on the bank alarmed the diver, who tipped up and vanished quick as the flash of a turning fish, hardly leaving a ripple. When it appeared again the otter was gone. It lay in the water, nearly a yard long, with head and neck stretched out, and swam rapidly up-river. At the top of the pool it saw another otter, and uttering a wailing cry of alarm, it splashed along the water to rise, making a dozen oar-like dips with the tips of its wings. With neck out-stretched it took the air and flew round the curve of the river, with wing-beats quicker than a heron’s.

Tarka and White-tip had come from the wood in daylight, lured to play by the sun and the flood. Tarka dropped over the sill, the whitey-yellow turmoil bumped and tossed him below. A minute later a narrow lead-coloured shape pushed slowly up the concrete spill-way, and behind it the darker, sturdier shape of an otter. Fish and animal made slow and laborious head-way; they seemed to be hanging in the warp; and then White-tip dropped over in the smooth and glistering water’s bend. They instantly disappeared. The racing chum carried them on its top to the bank thirty yards below, and there left them on stones; and there, an hour later, a thirty-pound fish, clean-run, its gills crusty with ocean shellfish, was found by the water-bailiff, with bites tom from behind its shoulderthe mating feast of otters.