Page:Tarka the Otter.djvu/65

Braund’s Hill Wood The struggles of the cub pulled the iron peg out of the ground, and it was able to drag itself out of the ditch and slowly away among the saplings. The bitch whistled to Tarka and the other cub, who ran out from under the faggot and followed her. The mother ran on with them a little way, then returned to the cub that followed so slowly with the gin ripping brambles and clanking against stones and roots. Pheasants in the covert crew from their roosting branches; blackbirds flew from the hollies with wild alarms; wrens and robins complained in the brambles. Hedgehogs rolled themselves into spiny balls, and voles crouched by the withered mosses under the oaks.

Behind the otters came the noise of the keeper crashing through undergrowth, and the retriever’s feet pattering near them. Wough-wough-wough! to its master. Blood ran down the face of the otter where the wounded cub had bitten her as she was trying to free the gin which gripped its rudder. The cub threw itself up and down, writhing and blowing, and not knowing what had happened; it snapped at its mother’s paws, at her ears, at her nose, at her neck. The otter left it to fight the pestering retriever, her eyes yellow and gem-like.

When the keeper came up the cub was gasping with the weight of the iron it had dragged over a hundred yards. He fired at the noise in front of him and the noise ceased. Into the darkness of the wood he fired the second barrel; and listened. He heard stray pellets rattling in the distance and the dragging of the gin as the retriever tried to lift it.