to take it, and knowing nothing of her purpose. He bit off three rootlets, and at the mouth of the cave he ran back to his glass pebble.
The seal watched with bleary eyes the man climbing down, and his spaniel dog sitting threequarters of the way down the path, frightened to follow its master farther. Tarka played with his pebble, hidden behind the orange-lichened and towering wall of the Long Rock. In a scattered and unled flock the gulls drifted above the cliff. Over them Kronk the raven, most powerful and black, cleaved the air on outspread wings; sometimes he twirled on his back, recovering immediately. He was practising the upward or impaling lunge of beak that he had learned from his father one hundred and thirteen years before. High above the raven a small dark star twinkled and swept in its orbit, twinkled and poised on its pitch. Chakchek the One-eyed, slate-blue pinioned and cream-breasted, was aloft. Crr-crr, said Kronk, as sea and greensward turned up and over and upright again. Crr-crr-crr, as the man disappeared round the Long Rock, and Kronk sailed downwind to be over him.
A thousand feet below the raven, Tarka tapped his pebble of glass, green and dim as the light seen through the hollow waves rearing for their fall on the sand. The noise of waves, continuous and roaring on the rocks at low tide, was swelled by the echo beaten back by the cliff, and Tarka saw the man climbing round the Long Rock before he heard him. The man, jumping from boulder to boulder, did not see Tarka; but when he reached the sand he saw the trails of two otters.
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