drowned some hours. The whistles of otters playing at the fall, during the previous night, had been heard by the water-owner, who had set a gin under the wash of the fall, on a sunken ledge of rock where otters touched after the joyful pounding of the plunge. The otters had come back again.
Iron in the water sinks, and however long cubs call her, a bitch otter cannot swim with three legs for ever.
Tarka heard the clink of the chain as the swollen body rolled; and his bubbles blown of fear rose behind him.
At sunrise he had crossed two miles of woods and fields—stubble with lines of sheaves, stacked in sixes and tied in fours, fields of mangel and sweet turnip, where partridges crouched, and pasture given over to sheep—and found other water below Beggars’ Roost hill. Ducks were paddling by a farm as he walked upstream, passing under a bridge, by which grew a monkey-tree with leaves as sharp as magpies’ beaks. Cottages by the waterside and a mill were left behind, and he came to quiet meadows where only robins were singing. He crossed from side to side, looking for a place to hide during the sunlight. Half a mile above the mill he found a rock in the left bank of the stream, with a wide opening half under water. Hazels grew on the bank above. Their leaves took on the golden-green of spring in the beams of the low autumn sun as Tarka crept under the rock.
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