CHAPTER TEN
The little thin cub, on its couch among the reeds frozen and bent like the legs of dead spiders, greeted Greymuzzle with husky mewing whenever it heard her coming, and would not be comforted by tongue caresses. Frost had stricken its eyes. Greymuzzle prowled all day and all night when she was not warming and suckling her cub; and although she was so hungry, she still played with Tarka, sliding headfirst down a snowy-hillock. They had to travel to the estuary for food, for every incoming tide piled up its floating floes at the pill-mouth, with grinding shrieks and shuddering booms that sounded far over the Burrows. At low tide the frost welded them in a high and solid barrier.
Both otters had blistered their tongues by licking ice, and to ease their thirst, they rasped them against snow on the sea-wall in the middle of the day. Greymuzzle went into the village one night, searching the gardens for food. She found the duckhouse under the chestnut tree in the farmyard above the bridge, and although she sought an entrance for more than an hour, she found none. The smell of the ducks was painful.
A fox slunk near her, passing with drooping brush and ears laid back, pad, pad, pad in the snow.
Unable to get the ducks, she walked down the frozen pill to the estuary, meeting Tarka at the pill-mouth, near the salmon-fishers’ hut built on the shillet slope of the sea-wall. The fox followed her, hoping to get another meal of salmon. He followed her until the dawn, and was near her at
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