Now Jarrk the seal, who had been searching round the base of the rock, saw an otter rising to the surface, and was swinging up towards him when he saw a conger eel wave out the opaqueness, which was Oylegrin’s blood staining the green gloom. Garbargee held the shag in its jaws. The undersea cloud was scattered by the swirls of flippers as the seal chased the conger. Garbargee dropped the shag, and the cleft of rock received its grey tenant. Jarrk swung up with a bend of his smooth body, and lay under the surface with only his head out, drinking fresh air, and looking at Tarka six yards away. Wuff, wuff, said Jarrk, playfully. Iss iss, cried Tarka, in alarm. The pollack escaped, and soon afterwards was feeding with other fish on the crab-nibbled corpse of the shag.
It was not often that the otters went fishing in daylight; usually they lay in the warm noon-day sun on the sand of a cove behind the Long Rock—a spur of which was the plucking perch of Chakchek the One-eyed, the peregrine falcon. One morning Chakchek half-closed his wings and cut down at Tarka, crying aik-aik-aik! and swishing past his head. It was the cream-breasted tiercel’s cry of anger. He was a swift flyer, and soon mounted to where his mate waited at her pitch in the sky above the precipice, scanning the lower airs for rock-dove, oyster-catcher, finch, or guillemot. When they had swept away down the north side of the headland, Kronk the raven croaked thrice, deeply, and took the air to twirl with his mate in the windy up-trends.
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