blade because White-tip had touched it in passing. He ran at it and bit the cold bone as though it were White-tip. He played with many things that night as he ran across field and bank.
Following the trail, he came to a pond in a boggy field below a hill. Moorhens hid in terror when he swam among them. He caught and played with an eel, which was found dead next morning on the bank, beside the seals pressed in the mud by his clawed feet, and the hair-marks of his rolling back. Hu-ee-ic! Tarka ran under a culvert that carried a trickle to a smaller pond in the garden of a rectory. Hu-ee-ic! while clouds broke the light of the moon.
He climbed round the hatch of the pond, sniffing the tarred wood, and crept under a gap in the wall which ended the garden. The stream flowed below a churchyard wall and by a thatched cottage, where a man, a dog, and a cat were sitting before a fire of elm brands on the open hearth. The wind blew the scent of the otter under the door, and the cat fumed and growled, standing with fluffed back and twitching tail beside her basket of kittens. The otter was scraping shillets by a flat stone under a fall by the road, where farmers’ daughters crouch to wash chitterlings for the making of hogs’-pudding. An eel lived under the kneeling stone, fat with pig-scrap. Its tail was just beyond the otter’s teeth. White-tip had tried to catch it the night before.
Hu-ee-ic!
The cottage door was pulled open, the spaniel rushed out barking. A white owl lifted itself off the lopped bough of one of the churchyard elms,
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