had run along before fields were ploughed; before wild men hunted them for their skins with spears of fire-hardened wood. These paths were older than the fields, for the fields were once the river’s wider bed, in the mud of which the heavy rudders had whilom dragged. They floated under Half-penny Bridge, and lay by day in the reeds of the old canal bed. A dog disturbed them, and the next night they travelled inland, and sought a resting place in the hillside earth of badgers. The white-arrowed faces of the Brocks only peered and sniffed at them. A few dawns previously a fox had crept into the same earth among the hillside pines, but the badgers had turned him out, as he stank, and his habits were displeasing to their tidy ways. Had the fox crept there during the day, and his wheezing told them that he was being hunted by hounds, he would not have been bitten and driven out, but given shelter, for man was their common enemy.
The Brocks allowed the otters to sleep in one of their ovens—as countrymen call the chambers connecting the tunnels, for they were the size and shape of the cloam ovens wherein some Devon farmwives still baked bread. The otters were clean, and washed themselves before sleeping, and so the badgers were agreeable. At fall of night they left the earth together, Tarka keeping close to his mother, for the size and appearance of the old boar who had been snoring during the day on his bed of bitten grass and moss in the next oven made him uneasy. The badgers waddled down their paths trodden through the spindleberry shrubs and blackthorns, but the
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