estuary by a heron and ejected alive from the crop a quarter of an hour afterwards when the bird, flying up the valley, had been shot by a water-bailiff.
The shape of an otter loomed in the water, and the plaice swam down again in a rapid, waving slant, perceived by a one-eyed eel that was lying with its tail inside a bullock’s skull wedged in a cleft of rock. Thrust through the eel’s blank eye-socket was the rusty barbed point of a hook, the shank of which stuck out of its mouth—a hook almost straightened before the line had broken. Tarka swam up behind the eel on its blind side, and opened his mouth wide to bite across the back.
The eel was longer than Tarka. It lashed its tail round his neck and bit on to his nose, when gripped below the paired fins. Bubbles were blown in two strings, one of them fine as charlock seeds, for the hook-shank was rammed up the otter’s left nostril. Then the strings ceased, and stray bubbles arose, for the eel was throttling the otter. Tarka clawed it with his paws, but the small claws were worn by many weeks’ scratching for trout in granite hides, and the eel’s skin was slippery. Flattened on the pool’s bed, the plaice watched the struggle of its two enemies.
Tarka knocked it with his paws, and scraped himself against stones and rocks, so that he could be free to swim up and eat it. For three minutes, until his breath was gone, he tried to shake ofi the eel. Then he kicked heavily and slowly up to the surface and tried to dimb out by the nearest land—a sheer bank. Its head in the air, the eel
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