Page:Tarka the Otter.djvu/89

Ram's-horn Pond none talked of the friends who would fall in the sea, or be slain in France and Spain and Italy, or break their necks against the glass of lighthouses, for the forktailed birds of summer had no thoughts of these things, or of death. They were joyous and pure in spirit, and alien to the ways of man.

During the day Tarka had been watching them, being curious. He had watched them sweeping above him with a windy rush of wings that darkened the sky, and had listened to their sharp cries as they dipped and splashed in the wind-ruffled water. As he was stretching himself before leaving his couch at sunset they flew like a great sigh up to the stars. ''Krark! Krark! Krark!'' cried Old Nog, standing grave and still in the shallow water at the pond’s edge. It was the last English voice many of them would hear, the blue winged ones of summer, who had begun the weary migration from the land of thatched homesteads and old cob linhays.

Some days after the swallows had gone, Tarka heard a strange flute-like whistle while playing in the Ram’s-horn duckpond. The five otters ceased their play and listened. The whistle came again, and Tarka’s mother answered. The answering whistle was keen and loud. The bitch swam towards it, followed by Greymuzzle and White-tip. The whistle made Tarka cry in rage, Ic-yang, and when a dog-cub has cried thus he is no more a cub, but a dog-otter.

The night before, the otters had fished in the estuary by the sea-weedy hurdles and posts of a silted-up salmon weir, where in former times