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The Crossing Pool nagging. For half an hour she was anxious, ready to take her cubs into the friendly water immediately the jay cries became shorter; which would mean the coming of the greatest enemy, man.

The birds became hungry. The crackeys and ackymals and ruddocksDevon names for wrens and tomtits and robinsflew away when the otters neither heeded nor harmed them. The jays remained; but when a sparrowhawk dashed into the trees in search of a pigeon, they departed and mobbed the hawk, helped by a pair of carrion crows.

Again the spirit of the green place was tranquil, with peaceful doves cooing in the noonday’s rest. All the long day the sun swung over the islet until the hilltops were fiery. Shadows lifted from the waters and moved up the trunks of trees. They faded in evelight. The pool darkened. Over the fields flew a white owl, one of hundreds which like great blunt-headed moths were quartering the pastures and tilth of all the lands served by the Two Rivers. It fanned above the vole-runs, where the craneflies rose in flight from flower and bent. The reeling song of a nightjar on a gatepost ran through the ground mist not high enough to hide the flowers of ragged robin and the hardening seeds of the flowering rush. The pigeons settled at the tops of the ashpoles, and ceased their clapping and flapping of wings.

A drop of water splashed, another and another. The otter had withdrawn her head from the river, wherein she had been harkening