High over the shed rose the chestnut tree, black and bare and suffering, with one of its boughs splitten by frost. Other creatures had been to the duckhouse before her.
Fang-over-lip had started to dig a hole under the rotten floor boards, but returning the night after, he had smelt that during the day the hole had been deepened and a gin tilled there to catch him by the paw. When he had gone Bloody Bill Brock had grunted to the duckshed, and putting head between paws, had rolled on the metal tongue holding the jaws apart. The gin had clacked harmlessly against his grey hairs. The badger had scratched farther down and up again, reaching the floorboards by daylight; and departed, to return in the next darkness and to see a gin l3nng there with jaws as wide as his back—a, gin unhidden and daring him, as it were, to roll across it. The gin’s rusty jaws were open in an iron leer, its tongue sweated the scent of man’s hand. Bloody Bill Brock, who had sprung many gins in his life, grunted and went away.
There were no stars that night, for clouds loured in the sky. As Gre3miuzzle walked on the ice upstream, snow began to fall in flakes like the breast-feathers of swans. From the estuary the scambling cries of thousands of gulls, which had returned with the south-west wind, came indistinctly through the thick and misty air. The South was invading the North, and a gentle wind was its herald. The dreadful hoot of Bubu was heard no more, for the Arctic Owl had already left the Burrows.
Greymuzzle walked under the bridge, and
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