of the zooming raven would always wake him, and he would either run along the bank or swim by the reeds to play with the bird. One morning five ravens flew over the tarn, the hen leading three smaller ravens in line and the father behind them—a black constellation of Orion. They lit on the turf of the dam. The youngsters sat on the bank and watched their mother dapping for frogs. Tarka ran along the bank, amid guttural squawks and cronks, to play with them, but the parents stabbed at him with their beaks, beating wings in his face, and hustling him back to water. They flew over him when he bobbed for breath, and worried him so persistently that he never again went near a raven.
When the wind had blown the seeds of the cotton grass and the sedge drooped tawny under the sun, the curlews flew away to the seashore and the rivers. Little jerky flights of pipits crossed over the hollow in the hills, their twittering passed on, and the tarn lay silent as the sky. One afternoon in early September the silence stirred, and along the tawny hillcrest moved something like a leafless top of an oak-branch. It became a stag hastening with tongue a-loll to the wooded valleys of the south. Silence settled on the moor until the hill-line was broken by a long and silent file of staghounds running down from The Chains on the line of a deer, Tarka stood on his bed of rushes and watched them until they loped into the sky. When he had settled again, a blackcock hurtled down the western hill and flew over the tarn, followed by a grey hen with her two heath poults. Two horsemen in red
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