sunrise, when she returned to the couch in the reeds of the duckpond. She winded him and ran him, and although he was chased by the marshman’s dog when she had left off pursuit, the fox returned, knowing that she had young somewhere in the reeds. His name was Fang-over-lip, and he had wandered far in his hunger.
While the pallor of day was fading off the snow, a skein of great white birds, flying with arched wings and long stretched necks, appeared with a measured beat of pinions from the north and west. Hompa, hompa, hompa, high in the cold air. Greymuzzle and Tarka were eating seaweed and shellfish on the Shrarshook, but when the swans splashed into the estuary, they slipped into the tideway and drifted with the flow to where the wild swans were floating. Fang-over-lip licked out some of the mussel shells they had dived for, and cracked up a crab’s claws, before following along the beach.
The beams of the lighthouse spread like the wings of a star-fly above the level and sombre sands. Across the dark ridge of the Shrarshook a crooked line of lamps winked below the hill. In one of the taverns a sailor was singing a shanty, the tune of which came distinctly over the Pool. The swans moved up with the tide, the otters after them. They were thin and weak; for mussels, winkles, and sometimes a sour green crab were poor nourishment for an otter who, in careless times, had eaten a three-pound sea-trout at a sitting and been hungry two hours afterwards.
The tide beyond the tail of the Shrarshook was
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