Chapter Nine
he otters were alarmed by the coming of the man, and that night they left the headland, returning to the Burrows, and hunting rabbits in the great warren of the sandhills. A cold mist lay on the plains and in the hollows, riming the marram grasses and the withered stems of thistle and mullein, so that in the morning mildew and fungi in strange plant forms seemed to have grown out of the sand. On the coarser hairs of the otters’ coats the hoar remained white, but on the shorter and softer hairs it melted into little balls of water. Everything except the otters and birds and bullocks was white. The sedges and reeds of the duckponds were white, so was the rigging of the ketches in the pill. The hoof-holes of cattle were filmed with brittle ice. In the cold windless air came distinct the quacking of ducks and the whistling of drakes as the wildfowl flighted from the ponds and saltings to the sea, where they slept by day.
The otters lay up near a cattle shippen, among reeds with white feathery tops. A dull red sun, without heat or rays, moved over them, sinking slowly down the sky. For two days and two nights the frosty vapour lay over the Burrows, and then came an icy north wind which poured like liquid glass from Exmoor and made all things distinct. The wind made whips of the dwarf willows, and hissed through clumps of the great sea-rushes. The spines of the marram grasses scratched wildly at the rushing air, which passed over the hollows where larks and linnets crouched from its invisible clutch. Like a spirit freed by the sun’s ruin and levelling all things before a new creation the wind drove grains of sand against the legs and ruffled feathers of the little birds, as though it would breathe annihilation upon them, strip their frail bones of skin and flesh, and grind them until they became again that which was before the earth’s old travail. Vainly the sharp and hard points of the marram grasses drew their circles on the sand: the Icicle Spirit was coming, and no terrestrial power could exorcise it.
The north wind carried a strange thickset bird which drifted without feather sound over the dry bracken of Ferny Hill, where Tarka and Greymuzzle had gone for warmth. Its plumage was white, barred and spotted with dark brown. Its fierce eyes were ringed with yellow, the colour of the lichens on the stone shippens. Mile after mile its soft and silent wings had carried it, from a frozen land where the Northern Lights stared in stark perpetuity upon the ice-fields. The thick-set bird was an Arctic Owl, and its name was Bubu, which means Terrible. It quartered the mires and the burrows, and the gripe of its feathered feet was death to many ducks and rabbits.
Clouds moved over land and sea with the heavy grey drifting silence of the ice-owl’s flight; night came starless, loud with the wind’s rue in the telegraph wires on the sea-wall. As Tarka and his mate were running down to meet the flood-tide in the pill, a baying broke out in the sky; whiskered heads lifted, fixed to harken. For a minute the otters did not move, while the hound-like baying passed over. The long skein of south-wending geese swung round into the wind, flying with slow flaps and forming a chevron that glided on down-held, hollow wings beyond the pill-mouth. Cries of golden plover, twined in the liquid bubble-link of the curlews’ chain-songs, rose up from the saltings.
The white-fronted geese, eaters of grass and clover, had come before the blizzard howling its way from the North Star. A fine powdery snow whirled out of the sky at night, that lay nowhere, but raced over the mossy plains and hillocks, and in the burrows, faster than the grains of sand. Tree, dune, shippen, and dyke—all were hid in whirling white chaos at daylight. The next day thicker snowflakes fell, and out of the storm dropped a bird with white wings, immensely swift in flight, whose talon-stroke knocked off the head of a goose. It stood on the slain, holding by the black sickle-claws of its yellow feet; its hooked beak tore breastbone and flesh together. Its plumage was brown-spotted like the plumage of Bubu—the hue of snow and fog. Every feather was taut and cut for the swiftest stoop in the thin airs of its polar ranging. Its full brown eyes glanced proudly as any Chakchek, for it was a Greenland falcon.
Beyond the shaped and ever-shifting heaps of sand, beyond the ragged horizon of the purple-grey sea, the sun sunk as though it were spent in space, a dwarf-red star quenching in its own steam of decay. The snow fled in the wind, over the empty shells of snails and rabbit skeletons lying bare and scattered, past the white, sand-stripped branches of dead elderberry trees, and the dust of them aided an older dust to wear away the living tissue of the Burrows. Night was like day, for neither moon nor sun nor star was seen. Then the blizzard passed, and the snow lay in its still pallor under the sky.
And the sky was to the stars again—by day six black stars and one greater whitish star, hanging aloft the Burrows, flickering at their pitches; six peregrines and one Greenland falcon. A dark speck falling, the whish of the grand stoop from two thousand feet heard half a mile away; red drops on a drift of snow. By night the great stars flickered as with falcon wings, the watchful and glittering hosts of creation. The moon arose in its orbit, white and cold, awaiting through the ages the swoop of a new sun, the shock of starry talons to shatter the Icicle Spirit in a rain of fire. In the south strode Orion the Hunter, with Sirius the Dogstar baying green fire at his heels. At midnight Hunter and Hound were rushing bright in a glacial wind, hunting the false star-dwarfs of burnt-out suns, who had turned back into Darkness again.
Old Nog the heron, flying over the Ram’s-horn Pond, saw Greymuzzle among the reeds, for she was the only dark thing in the white wilderness below. She was hiding a solitary cub by curling herself round it, so that her chin rested on her flank. During the storm she had not left the couch of bitten reed and floss; the heat of her body melted the snowflakes. For two days and a night she kept the snow from the blind cub; and when the air was clear, a black frost gripped the waters of the ponds, bound the drifts, and hung icicles from drain and culvert. Then Greymuzzle arose, and called to Tarka over the ice. He answered from the northern horn of the pond.
He had kept a fishing hole in the ice, which he bit free as it froze. Fish were hard to see, for the top of the water under the ice was a bad reflector of light to the lower water. As it grew colder, the fish buried themselves in the mud, and when Greymuzzle roved in the brown dim water, she saw only her own vague image following her above. More wildfowl flighted to the estuary, and the cries of birds when the tide was flowing and covering the sandbanks were myriad as the gold flickerings in the night sky. The otters crossed the swift waters to the sandbanks where they were feeding, swimming under the waves and rising to breathe with only their wide nostrils above. Greymuzzle swam up under a duck and seized it, and the change of note in the quacking was heard by the birds, who threw the alarm over the estuary. Thousands of wings whipped jets on the water. The wildfowler creeping up in his narrow boat pulled the trigger of his gun too late—a long red flame sent a blast of shot swishing over the head of Greymuzzle as she dived. She swam to the mouth of the pill with the duck in her jaws, and ate it on an icy litter of twigs and seaweed left by the last high tide.
The next night the fishing hole was sealed, and no longer marked by a ring of scales and bones, for the rats and crows had eaten them. Greymuzzle was scraping at a fish frozen in the ice when the sheet whanged and whined and creaked, then boom!, a crack ran across it, and water spirted in the fissure. When it was still, Orion was reflected there, with the red and green flashes of Sirius; but as Greymuzzle peered the starshine glazed, and mock-trees of the Icicle Spirit grew on the water.
The cold sharpened. To the estuary came sanderlings in white winter dress, who ran at the tide-line like blown sea-foam. Snow buntings followed, and went south with them. The flatfish swam to warmer water beyond the bar, and often when the otters dived in the estuary they rose empty-mouthed to the surface, except perhaps for a green crab. Old Nog the heron grew so thin that he looked like a bundle of grey flags stripped by wind and clinging to two reeds. His inland fishing ponds were frozen, most of the streams ran under plates of ice, and the only food he could spear was to be found at low tide in the pools of the Shrarshook Ridge, where gravel had been dug.
The pans and plains of the Burrows were crossed by a thousand tracks, the prints of larks, finches, wagtails, crows, and gulls; the presses of weasels, rabbits, and stoats; the pads of badgers and foxes; the triple toes of herons and bitterns, like the veining of leaves. Many of the smaller birds were so weak they could not fly, and their bodies were eaten by rats and weasels, which were eaten by the larger owls and hawks.
Other otters from the Two Rivers came down to the estuary, some of them cubs of ten or twelve pounds in weight, who had kept together with their mothers. Families of three and four and one of five—a bitch and four cubs from the boggy moorland hill where the Two Rivers began in the peat—came to the duckpond along the otter path from the saltings, and finding it frozen, went down the pill and out to the coast. Tarka met White-tip with her mate by an overturned hulk one night; she was scratching at the webmark of a widgeon, frozen in the mud with its scent. One look, and they had passed in the darkness.
Many of the dog-otters wandered solitary. Last of all, slow and fatigued, after weeks of hunger, came Marland Jimmy, the old dog with the split ear who had played the funnel-game with Tarka’s mother in the deep clay pit. He limped along the otter-path, which many pads had pressed into ice; the cysts between his toes, inflamed by paraffin, were raw and frostbitten. The tide was ebbing when he crawled over the white sea-wall, and down the dark and hard mud to the water, crackling the brittle ice-forms of the glasswort. Hearing a whistle across the pill, Marland Jimmy walked into the water and swam. He kicked slowly, and the current carried him aslant, amid plates of ice broken off by the last tide. The trickles in the mud channers and salting guts had already ceased. So black and bitter the night that not even the whippering cries of golden plover were heard in the pill. The water ebbed in a blank silence of fixed star-points. Marland Jimmy swam across the pill and crawled out steaming. His breath froze on his muzzle, and his rudder was pointed with an icicle when he reached Tarka, a hundred yards along the bank. Tarka was rubbing his head and the side of his neck against a fish longer than himself, with gaps in its dull-shining length. A week before, Jarrk the seal had chased it over the bar, and as it turned past his head, he had taken a bite out of its belly. The dying salmon drifted with the tides until Greymuzzle and Tarka caught it in the pill. What a feast they had had! As soon as they had carried it steaming out of the sea, ice crystals had glittered on the scales.
Tarka rolled on the crisp snow while the aged otter tore at the fish, breaking off bone and frozen pink flesh. He moved from gills to tail, from tail to gills again, gulping icy mouthfuls, wheezing with hard swallowing, and when he had breathed, yikkering at Tarka to keep away. Tarka, warmed by his fullness, rolled and rolled, until he rolled into the water. Hu-ee-ee-ic; whistled Tarka.
The split-eared dog had gorged himself when Greymuzzle returned for another meal. He quaddled down the hard mud to where Tarka was sliding into the water. With a heavy rippling of his body, he ran to the top of the slide, and holding his legs rigid, slipped down on his ruined feet into the water. Greymuzzle heard the happy whistles of the playing dogs, and slid with them until she heard the squeals of rats fighting by the broken carcass of the salmon. The noise made her remember her cub, for rats had squealed among the scrikkits of bones and scales around Tarka’s fishing hole during the snowstorm. Tarka played on until he was hungry, when he went back to the salmon. Marland Jimmy played alone at the slide.
The ebb-tide moved along the sea-weedy perches stuck in the mud to mark the fairway. A mist was rising like steam from the top of the water, which moved slower with its weight of surface slush. The slush became clotted, and hardened, and suddenly ceased to move. The star-points dulled. Orion was stripped of his flashing, the green tongue of Sirius was mute, the Swan lost her lustre, the glare of the Bull faded.
Kack! croaked Old Nog, flapping up from the fish carcass as a fox slunk down to it. The tips of his open beak were red with the frozen blood of a speared rat, which was sticking in his gullet. In swaying flight, reed-like legs hanging with weakness, the heron set off for the gravel pools of the Shrarshook. Kack! he called to his mate, who was standing in the ebb to her knees, fifty yards beyond the slide. She did not move; nor did the tide.
Krark! called Old Nog at dawn, flying over the pill, and calling his mate again. Hu-ee-ee-ic! whistled Tarka to Marland Jimmy, who had not answered since the star-points had suddenly dimmed and vanished off the water. Hu-ee-ee-ic!—a thin, hard cry, which Greymuzzle heard among the reeds of the duckpond. Hu-ee-ee-ic! travelling through the ice-blink in the pill, and out across the estuary.
Bubu stared down at Tarka walking over to the eastern sea-wall; fanned above him before beating away. The Arctic Owl perched fifty yards below Tarka’s slide on something that swayed and creaked to its weight, but bore it upright. Staring around with several complete turns of its head, Bubu fixed orange-rimmed eyes on a mask set stiff before and below it. There was no movement; there was no life. The owl stared round again, and flew away, leaving its narrow perch swaying on reed-like legs, as though nodding to the head of Marland Jimmy gazing film-eyed out of the ice.