As she watched, the ream became a swirl. The otter on land heard the instant hiss of breath in the nostrils before they sank. Immediately she slipped into the river with the least ripple tracing where she had entered. The dog-otter had sniffed the scent of a fish.
Bubbles began to rise in the pool, making two chains with silver-pointed links, which moved steadily upstream. Twenty yards above the swirl, which lingered as the sway of constellations between black branches, a flat wide head fierce with whiskers looked up and went under again, the top of a back following in the down-going curve so smooth that the bubbles rising after it were just rocked. Time of breathing-in was less than half a second.
The bubbles, eking out of nostrils, ran over pate and neck and shook off between the shoulders, to rise in clusters the size of hawthorn peggles; the dog-otter was swimming with his forelegs tucked against his chest. Near the bridge the bubbles rose large as oak-apples; he was kicking four webs together, having sighted the fish. The bubbles ended in another swirl by a weed-fringed sterling, and a delicate swift water-arrow shot away between the two piers of the middle arch—the peal, or sea-trout, had gone down, passing three inches off the snapt jaws.
The river became silent again, save where it murmured by root and rock. Old Nog the heron alighted by a drain behind the sea-wall of the marsh two miles below Halfpenny Bridge, whither he had straightly flown. The white owl had just caught by an old straw rick its second mouse.
8
