which, like the first, caught five minutes before, was swallowed whole.
Where water clawed the stones at the tail of the pool, the peal leapt to save itself from the bigger enemy ever trudging and peering behind it. It fell on the shillets, on its side, and flapped, once, then lay still, moving only its gills. Then a dog-otter was standing by it, holding up his nose to sniff the air when a thin, wavy, snarling cry rose out of the river. It was the bitch’s yinny-yikker, or threat. She ran upon the fish, pulled it away from the dog, who was not hungry, and started to eat it.
While she was chawing the bones and flesh of the head the dog played with a stone, and only when she had turned away from the broken fish did he approach and lick her face in greeting. Her narrow lower jaw dropped in a wide yawn which showed the long canine teeth, curved backwards for holding fish, and kept white by the strength of bites. The yawn marked the end of a mood of anxiety. The dog had caught and eaten a peal on his journey, and was ready for sport and play, but the bitch did not follow him into the river. She felt the stir of her young, snarled at the dog in sudden fear, and turned away from the water.
She ran over the bullocks’ drinking place and passed through willows to the meadow, seeking old dry grasses and mosses under the hawthorns growing by the mill-leat, and gathering them in her mouth with wool pulled from the over-arching blackberry brambles whose prickles had caught in the fleeces of sheep. She returned to
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