beat up splinters of water. The line of otters forced it into the shallow by the lower hurdles. They swam upon it, resting in two feet of water, but it escaped past one of the cubs.
Soon the tide dropped back from the top row of hurdles and the water was cleared of sand. A race poured steadily through a gap in the sand-bank, spreading wider as it drained the lagoon. In the penned and slack upper water the salmon was lying, its fins and tail so still that shrimps rose out of their hiding-places in the sand beside it. While it rested in the water, its gills opening and closing, a dark squat thing was walking on the sand towards it, using its fins as feet. It was the shape of an immense tadpole, covered with tatters of skin like weed. Its head was as broad as a barrel, gaping with a mouth almost as wide. Its jaws were filled with bands of long pointed teeth, which it depressed in the cavern of its mouth when it came near the salmon. Out of the middle of its head rose three stalks, the first of which bore a lappet, which it waved like a bait as it crept forward. It was a sea-devil, called rod-and-line fish by fishermen. During the spring tide it had left the deep water beyond the bar where usuzilly it lived, and moving up the estuary, had been trapped in the hurdle weir.
It crept forward so slowly that the salmon did not know it for an enemy. The close-set eyes behind the enormous bony lips were fixed on the salmon. Chains of bubbles loomed beyond, with otter-shapes; the salmon swirled off the sand, into the cavern of jaws; the teeth rose in spikes and the jaws shut.
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