and praised its courage and virtue in the Railway Inn, telling how it had warned him and how it had tracked the “girt mousey-coloured fitches’ to the shed, where one escaped through a hole behind the sacks. He forebore to say how noisy his dog had been afterwards, deeming this a point not in its favour, for how was he, his natural senses dulled by civilization, to have known that an otter had remained all night in the farmyard, waiting for the mate that never came.
Tarka was gone in the mist and rain of the day, to hide among the reeds of the marsh pond—the sere and icicled reeds, which now could sink to their ancestral ooze and sleep, perchance to dream;—of sun-stored summers raising the green stems, of wind-shaken anthers dropping gold pollen over June’s young maces, of seeds shaped and clasped and taught by the brown autumn mother. The south wind was breaking from the great roots the talons of the Icicle Spirit, and freeing ten thousand flying seeds in each brown head.
Water covered the pond ice, deep enough to sail a feather, and at night every hoof-hole held its star.
After seven sunrisings the mosses were green on the hillocks, lapwings tumbled and dived and cried their sweet mating cries, the first flower bloomed in the Burrows—the lowly vernal whit-low grass, with its tiny white petals on a single leafless stalk. Under the noon sun sheep grazing in the marsh had silver outlines. Linnets sat on the lighthouse telegraph wire, wing to wing, and
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