himself, and that its roots, bared by floods, were thin legs bent at wooden knees and fixed in the water. The brook was determined to drown the giant, who was burrowing his toes for a hold. The maid grew tall and beautiful, but still the old giant sat cooling his thirteen legs, and every June, when she passed by with her father, following the otter hounds, he wore a fresh green wig.
Many otters had slept in the cave behind the roots; some had died there, and the floods of the brook had taken their bones away.
Mother and cubs curled up together against the dry earth of the holt’s end, five feet away from the water. The cubs fell into a deep sleep, tom with dreams wherein an immense black face showed its long fangs. Tarka slept with his small paws on the neck of his mother, and her paw held him there. They snuggled warm in the holt, but the bitch did not sleep.
At dimmity, when day and night hunters see each other between the two lights, she heard the blackbirds scolding the wood owls; and when the blackbirds were silent, roosting in thorn or ivy with puffed feathers, she heard a badger drinking and grunting as he swallowed. The owls’ bubbling quaver settled into the regular hunting calls; then the otter yawned and slept.
She awoke when the wood owl had made a score of journeys with mice to its nestlings in the old eyrie of a trapped buzzard, when the badger had walked many miles from its earth in the oakwood. She was hungry. Leaving her cubs asleep, she crept out of the holt. At the water edge she listened nearly a minute. Then
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