Page:Tarka the Otter.djvu/80



from ash and elm and willow, buff from oak, rusty brown from the chestnut, scarlet from bramblethe waters bore away the first coloured leaves of the year. Beeches preserved their tawny form in rain and hail, but yielded more and more to the winds. Sandmartins and warblers deserted their old haunts; king-fishers and herons remained. The reeds sighed in the songless days, the flags curled as they withered, and their brittle tops were broken by the rains.

Eels began to pass down to the sea. They were the females, travelling from ponds and lakes, from dykes and ditches and drains, from the hill streams of Dartmoor where the Two Rivers had their ancient source. The eyes of the eels grew larger as they were swept down in the turbid waters, as they writhed over wet grass, along cart ruts and drains. These eels were urged seawards by a common desireto meet the smaller males in the estuary, where each female would attract four; and after the meeting each female would swallow her four and begin a journey to where the shallow bed of the ocean broke off and dropped deep to its grave. Here among hulks rotting in seaweed, where strange fish carrying lights moved in the heaviest darkness, the eels of the world laid their eggs, and here they died, far under the floating weed of the Sargasso Sea whence as transparent, flat, ribbon-shaped creatures, they had set out for the inland waters. After journeying for three years the elvers had reached the mouths of rivers and passed up to