often at night they were disturbed by the pailfuls of rubbish flung over by the natives. Once a pailful of hot ashes came down, burning both Tarka and White-tip.
By day the otters slept in the reeds of a duckpond which they reached by drifting with the tide up the other horn of the estuary, and turning into the Branton pill, where ketches and gravel barges were moored. At dawn they left the salt water and ran over the eastern sea-wall to the duckpond shaped like a ram’s horns. In the brackish waters of the duckpond the otters took mullet which had been washed in when the seawall had broken years before, and rainbow trout put there by the owner. Old Nog fished these waters, and at night many kinds of wildfowl flapped and quacked besides the reeds; mallard, wigeon, teal, coot, dabchick, and strays of the duck family—shoveller, pochard, and golden eye.
On the fourth night of the otters’ arrival at the Ram's-horn duckpond, the swallows which settled among the reed-maces at sunset did not sleep. They twittered among themselves when the first stars gleamed in the water, for they had received a sign to leave the green meadows they loved so well. They talked in their undersong voices—which men seldom hear, they are so soft and sweet—while clinging to the unburst heads of the reed-maces. They talked of white-and-grey seas, of winds that fling away the stroke of wings, of great thunder-shocks in the sun-whitened clouds under, of wild rains and hunger and fatigue to come before they saw again the sparkles in the foam of the African strand. But
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