Page:Tarka the Otter.djvu/61

Braund’s Hill Wood speedy little brown birds, white-breasted, who in flight were like drab kingfishers. A tawny owl perching against the trunk of a larch tree also saw the otters coming up the stream, and its eyes, soft with light as the dark blue sloe is soft with bloom, watched them until they crept into a rocky cleft below a fall, where royal ferns cast their great shadows and water-violets were cooled by dripping mosses.

After sunset a swarm of cockchafers whirred and flipped about the top of the larch, and the owl, hungry after huddling still for fifteen hours, flapped up through the maze of cone-knotted twigs and caught two in its feet. It ate them in the air, bending to take them in its beak; and when it had caught and swallowed a dozen, it let out a quavering hoot to its matefor the tawny owls liked to be near each other in their huntingand, perched on a low branch of another tree, listened and watched for a young rabbit. After a few moments, its head was tilted sharply down-ward: the otter and cubs were going through the wood.

At midnight the western sky was pale blue and hollow like a mussel-shell on the seashore. The light lingered on the hill-line, where trees were dark. Under the summer stars a hundred swifts were screaming as they played away the night, two miles above the earth; in fine weather they kept on the wing for many days and nights together, never roosting. Their puny screams were heard by Tarka as he rubbed his neck against the grassy mound of an ants’ nest.

While he was enjoying the feeling, a loud