scattered by the kicks of his hind-legs. A minute’s swimming and the channer widened into a shallow pit above whose broken banks the heather grew, on sprigs dispread and blasted under the sky. Some still bore the bells of old summer, that made a fine sibilance in the wry wind-music of the moor.
Tarka ran past a heap of turves, set around the base of a post marking Cranmere tarn, now empty, whither his ancestors had wandered for thousands of years. A fox had been walking there during the night, seeking the oval black beetles which, with moths, pipits, wheatears, and sometimes a snipe, were the only food it found in and aroimd the fen. As Tarka ran out of the tarn a bird passed swiftly over his head, gliding on down-curving dark wings and crying go-beck, go-beck, go-beck! when it saw him—one of the few grouse which lived and bred on the lower slopes under the wind. The bird had flown from a hut circle to the south, where seeds of gromwell were to be found. The gromwell had grown from a single seed carried from the lower tilled slopes of the moor on the fleece of a sheep, to which it had hooked itself. Gromwell seeds were the favourite food of the grouse around the source of the Two Rivers.
Tarka watched the bird until it glided below the hill, when he ran on again, finding nothing in the plashes moving only with images of sky and clouds and birds of solitude. Then the sun took the water, breaking brilliant and hot in every plash; the otter galloped with instant joy and sank in bog to his belly. He dragged himself on
131
