smelling the ducks, climbed up the bank. As she was walking past the beehives, she heard a sound that made her stop and gasp—the ic-clack! of a sprung gin. Tarka was rolling and twisting and jerking the heavy gin and chain off the ground. It held him. He lay still, his heart throbbing, blowing and tissing and slavering. The sight closed Greymuzzle’s nostrils, so that she breathed through her open mouth. She called to him. The gin clanked, the chain clinked. She ran round him until Tarka’s leaps, that wrenched the sinews of his leg, ceased in weakness, and he sank across the long rusty spring, blowing bubbles of blood out of his nostrils. A duck quacked loudly, and when its strident alarm was finished, the air held only the slight sounds of snowflakes sinking on the roof of the shed. They floated to rest on Tarka’s fur, gently, and shrunk into drops of water. The chestnut tree suddenly groaned, and the corpse of a sparrow frozen for weeks to one of its twigs fell to the earth. It dropped beside Greymuzzle, and was flicked against the duck- shed by a swish of her rudder as she stood over Tarka, gnawing in a fury the iron jaws of the gin.
Far away in the estuary gulls were running on the sandbanks through the yellow froth of wave- let-lap. Their jubilant and sustained cries told the winter’s end. Under the tree Greymuzzle rasped the bone of the trapped paw with the sharp stumps of her broken teeth. A rat passed near, brought by the smell of blood; it fled when it saw whose blood was wasting. Greymuzzle’s face was torn, but Tarka did not know that he had bitten her.
