as far as the first channer in its glidder, partly hid by the broad strongly keeled leaves of river sedge. He followed it into the marsh, and climbing out, ran along a path trodden by cattle, through a gate and down to a lower marsh, hidden from the opposite bank by a tide-wall. The tongue of Deadlock spoke across the river, and Tarka slipped into another gut. He trod through brown mud to a black ooze, in which he moved like an eel. The drain led under the tide-wall to the glidder above the river. It led into darkness, with light coming through the chinks of a circular wooden trap, that kept the tides back from the land. He sniffed at a chink, and waited in the ooze.
For two hours Tarka lay behind the wooden trap, while the noises of hunting moved away into remoteness. Slowly the sound of the low running river was stilled into slack water. Tricklings, the lap and slanting wash of ripple-ends, a turning drift of froth and sticks below the mud—the sea was moving up again. A heron alighted at the bottom of the muddy glidder, and stalked gravely into water to his knees. Flukes were rising off the silt, seeking food. The heron bent down and peered. He stepped forward on one foot, and speared with a swift plunge. Then he stared up the river. A thin-drawn thread of sound in the air, looped to another and another and another; loosed as four gossamers floating by in the wind. It was the re-call to hounds. In the after-quiet the heron stalked to his spearing again. The murky water twired by the knee-joints of his thin green legs. Splash, flicker, and shaken drops—
151
