sharpened to music in a singing bird’s throat-strings, came out of the moss, a greeting by the dipper’s mate, who was brooding on five white eggs in her wet nest. When she had swallowed the food, the water-ousel flew away upstream, low over the water, following the bends of the river. As he flew he sang, sipping his song from the stones and the water.
The shadows moved, and the bright green weeds of morning waved darkly in the river. Many times the water-ousels flew to and from the nest, but they did not see Tarka, he slept so still in the rocky cup above them.
Tarka gave chaise to a rabbit during the next night, bolting it from a hillside clitter of rocks in a hollow at the head of a cleave. Near the clitter a tall stone reared head, shoulders, and body above the rocks embedded there, in the outline of a sea-lion, smooth and curved. The rabbit ran as far as a hole in the north-western base of the stone sea-lion, but turned back in terror as it smelt the dreaded smell of a fitch, or stoat. The rabbit’s wits went from it in a thin squealing; its will to run away was gripped in the base of its spine by a feeling of sickly fascination. Its squeals caused an excited chakkering near it, and almost immediately the fitch had it by the side of the neck, and was dragging it into the hole. The fitch, whose name was Swagdagger, was about to kill it when Tarka ran through the opening. Swagdagger loosened his bite to threaten the strange big invader, flicking his black-tipped tail and glaring at Tarka. One kick of the rabbit’s hindlegs, so powerful for running, could have
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