lifted its bite on the otter’s bleeding nose and sank away down. Immediately Tarka sprang half out of the water and with a plop! like a round stone went after it, catching it below the vent. The eel lashed again, and Tarka unbit. He swam under and bit it at the back of the neck, and again released it. The eel tried to wobble down to the bullock’s skull, but Tarka dragged it back; and so he played with it, always avoiding the bite of its big jaws. At len^h it grew feeble, and he took it to a shallow, where, after walking round it and pretending it was not there, he ate what he wanted of the tail-end.
When he had washed his face he went back into the pool, harrying the dace until many score of the silvery fishes floated away on their sides. He harried them until the moon sank imder the hill and he grew tired of his sport. Then spreading his legs, he drifted away out of the pool, past an island that divided the river—a narrow island, shaped like an otter, with a rudder of mud carved at its lower end by the swift waters. Alders and willows grew on the idand, many broken by uprooted trees lugged down by floods.
Two hours later Tarka was hungry again, and eating a two-pound trout, fat with easy feeding on mullyheads, taken under the third railway bridge after the Junction Pool. Below the bridge, on the right bank, the river passed part of its old course, now dry save for green-sciommed pools, left by March risings, among the shillets. The law of life was also the law of water—everlasting change. It had carved this deserted bed through the centuries, raised it with shillets, and turned
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