Chapter 3

Lutra sometimes noticed, while she drifted with the current, that the scent of her kindred lay strong at the surface not far from her "holt." One still, moonlit night the scent indicated that several full-grown otters had at intervals come from the trout-reaches down-stream, and had landed in a reed-bed at the lower end of the pool. It led away from the river through the valley, along by a number of stagnant ponds in an old garden near the farm, and thence to a point beyond a bend where the river flowed almost parallel to its course at the pool. As the otter, inquisitively following the line of the scent, came to the ponds, she heard the croaking of countless frogs hidden in the duckweed that lay over the entire surface of the water. Lutra made ample use of the opportunity for a feast--frogs were the greatest delicacies known to her, and she had never before found them to be so plentiful. Dawn was breaking when, in her onward journey, she reached the river; so she drifted around the bend, dived over the fall, and returned to her home beneath the alder-roots.

It happened that the otters whose "spur" (footprints) Lutra had followed to the frog-ponds retraced their steps towards the pool, and in doing so suddenly discovered that the scent of a man lay strong on the trodden grass. A villager, knowing the eagerness with which otters seek for frogs, and that they often cross a narrow neck of land at the bend of a stream, had for a time kept watch at the lower end of the old farm garden. He was anxious that the hounds, which, on the previous day, had arrived at the village, should enjoy good sport during their stay in the neighbourhood. But he saw nothing of the animals he had come to watch; as soon as they detected his whereabouts they retreated hastily to the pond at the upper end of the garden, gained the river, and, like Lutra, swam homewards around the bend. But, less familiar than Lutra with the strength of the current, they left the water as they approached the fall, and crept through the deep shadows of the alder-roots till they reached a point at some distance beyond the pool.

These events of the night were of the utmost importance to the otters as connected with the events of the morrow. During the early morning the villager paid a second visit to the garden, and examined closely the soft mud at the margin of the ponds. The remains of the otters' feast--the skins and the eyes of frogs--lay in several places, and, near the largest of the ponds, the otters' "spur" showed clearly that the animals had for some time been busy there. Taking a straight course to the river above the pools, the watcher again detected the marks of the otters on the sloping bank. By the riverside below the garden, however, he failed to observe any further sign, and so concluded that the animals had probably left the water at the opposite bank.

When, later, the Hunt crossed the bridge on its way up-stream, the villager told his story to the Master, who immediately led his hounds over the hill-top in the direction of the ponds. This unexpected movement drew the followers of the Hunt away from the river; they imagined that the hounds were to be taken across country to a well known gorge where, during a previous season, good sport had been obtained.

At the farm, the Master, leaving the hounds to the care of the whippers-in, waited till the villagers and the farmers had congregated in the yard. He then addressed the crowd, telling them that otters had visited the garden during the night and probably were still in hiding there, and that, if good sport were desired, it would be wise for his followers to form two groups and watch the fords above and below the river-bend, while he, alone, accompanied the hounds to the garden; his chief reason, he said, for pointing out to them the advisability of leaving him was that if an otter still remained near the pond it should be given every chance of reaching the river without molestation. The crowd, recognising the wisdom of the Master's remarks, moved off with the whippers-in to the fords; and, when all was in readiness, the pack was led into the garden. One, and another, and yet another of the "young entry" soon gave tongue; then, after a minute's deliberation, an old, experienced hound raised his head from the rushes, uttered a single deep, clear note, climbed the garden hedge, and galloped across the meadow towards the river.

The rest of the hounds speedily found the line of the "drag," but all came to a check at the water's edge. They were taken back to the ponds, and thence to the pool by the farm, but the scent was weak above the waterfall. They again "cast" to the upper end of the garden, and onward to the river. Carefully searching every hole and corner in the bank, they drew down-stream around the bend, and at last struck the scent of the otters among the reeds below the pool. Lutra heard them tearing madly past, heard also the dull thud of human footsteps above her "holt," but she discreetly remained close-hidden in her sleeping chamber. For hours, in a pool beyond the trout-reach, her visitors of the previous night were hustled to and fro, and frequent cries of "Gaze! gaze!" and "Bubble avent!" mingled with the clamour of the hounds. Then the commotion seemed suddenly to subside. After an interval the hounds splashed by once more among the alder-roots, and the thud of human footsteps resounded in the "holt." In the silence that followed, Lutra, reassured, dived from her "holt," and, paddling gently to the surface, saw the last stragglers of the Hunt climbing the slope towards the farm.

That night no otter from the down-stream trout-reach wandered to the salmon-pool beneath the farm. The water-voles and the moorhens were unusually alert as they swam hither and thither in the little bays along the edge of the current. The fear of man and his loud-tongued hounds rested, like a spell, on the creatures of the river. Even Lutra felt its power; but when the scent of her foes became so faint as to be lost in the fragrance of the meadow-sweet along the river-bank, she ventured into the old garden, and, on returning to the pool, played again in the raging water by the fall.

III.

THE GORGE OF ALLTYCAFN.

When Lutra had attained her full size and strength she was wooed and won by a young dog-otter of her own age, and lived with him in a "holt" among the great rocks of Alltycafn. Now, again, the Hunt arrived in the neighbourhood. It was a lovely morning in May. The sun shone brightly; the leaves were breaking from their sheaths; the birds sang blithely in the trees. Suddenly the otters, resting in their "holt," were awakened by a loud commotion--the sounds of hurrying feet, reverberating in the chamber among the boulders, and then the music of the shaggy hounds, varied occasionally by the yap-yap of the terriers. The noise drew rapidly nearer. Presently a man, in red stockings and vest, blue breeches and coat, and a blue hunting cap bearing an otter's "pad" mounted in silver, poked among the boulders with a steelshod pole. The dog-otter was now thoroughly alarmed. He rushed from his lair, dived straight into the stream, headed through the seething current, and rose in the adjoining pool. Threatened by a hound, he dived again, walked over the gravel, and swam under the gnarled roots of an oak. The members of the Hunt stood watching the bubbles, filled by his breath, as they floated up and broke. The hounds swam pell-mell in hot pursuit, and the otter was forced to turn up-stream. Moving cautiously under the rocky ledges, he regained the "holt," where his terrified mate awaited his return. Sorely pressed, the dog-otter hid close, hoping to baffle his relentless pursuers. But a bristling, snarling terrier soon came down the shaft from the bank. Maddened, and courageous with the fury of despair, Lutra seized the intruder by the muzzle, and, in the combat that ensued, sorely mangled her assailant's lips and nostrils. Then, as her mate dived out once more and swam down-stream, she also left the chamber. She rose immediately among the surrounding boulders, and hid in the furthest recess. With nostrils, eyes, and ears raised slightly above the surface of the water, she stayed there, unseen and hardly daring to breathe, and, with strained senses watched closely every movement of hounds and hunters.

Fortunately for Lutra, the arch of the boulders below was shaped so peculiarly that the scent of her breath and body was sucked into a cavity and carried down-stream, and, passing beneath the stone, mingled, at the raging cataract near the rock, with air in the bubbles formed by the tumult of the waters. These bubbles, instead of bursting, were drawn into the vortex of a little whirlpool; and the keen-nosed hounds, though suspicious, could form no definite opinion as to the presence of a second otter among the rocks. The terrier knew the secret, but he had been put out of action and sent off, post haste, to the nearest veterinary surgeon. Lutra saw her tormentors--some of them of the pure otter-hound breed, some half otter-hound, half fox-hound, and others, again, fox-hounds trained for otter-hunting--rushing backwards and forwards in the water and on the bank. Another terrier, led by a boy, strained at his leash near the river's brink. Women, dressed, like the men, in smart scarlet and blue, and as ready to wade into the stream as the huntsman himself, stood leaning on their otter-poles not far away. At the fords above and below the "pool," the dog-otter's egress was barred by outposts of the enemy standing and splashing, in complete lines, from bank to bank. Once, in despair, the otter actually tried to break through the human chain; but a hunter "tailed" him for a moment, and then dropped him into the deeper water beyond the ford.

The sound of horn, the shouts of men, the deep-toned notes of great hounds, the shrill yapping of eager terriers, and the splashing and the plunging on every side, almost bewildered Lutra. Fearing to move from her shelter, she floated in the deep basin of the hidden pool beside the cataract, till at last the commotion gradually subsided, and hounds and hunters passed out of sight down-stream.

Lutra awaited her mate's return, but in vain. Not till night did she venture from her hiding place. When, however, the stars appeared, she swam wearily from pool to pool, calling, calling, calling. She explored each little bay, each crevice in the rock. She walked up the dry bed of a tributary brook, and searched among the gnarled roots and the dry, brown grass fringing the gravelly watercourse. She skirted the meadows and the rocks where the hunters had beaten down the gorse and the brambles near her home; thence she returned to the pool. Hitherto she had loved the placid night; to her the stillness was significant of peace. But now that stillness was full of sadness, and weariness, and monotony. The shadows were deep within the gorge; from the distant woods the hoot of an owl mocked her loneliness. She heard no glad answering cry. Still calling, calling, calling, she floated through the shadows, and out into the moonlight shimmering on the placid water below the gorge; but she sought and called in vain.

Lutra spent the rest of that year in widowhood. In consequence of her fight with the terrier, and also because of her grief, her two little cubs were still-born.

Midsummer came, and the shallows were almost choked with weeds. The countryside experienced a phenomenal period of drought, and for weeks the river seemed impure and almost fetid. Night after night, and steadily travelling westward, Lutra took short cuts across country from pool to pool. Late in July she reached the estuary of the river; and for the remaining months of summer fished in the bay, finding there a pleasant change in her surroundings. Once she was chased by some men in a boat, who shot at her as she appeared for an instant to breathe. Quick and watchful, she dived at the flash, and the pellets fell harmlessly overhead. Again she rose, and again she dived just in time to avoid the leaden hail. Then she doubled back towards the estuary, and the baffled sportsmen sailed away across the bay. As autumn came once more she returned to the river, and fed chiefly on the migrating eels that swarmed in the hollows near the bank. Presently, by many a nightly journey, she gained the upper reaches, where she lived, till the following spring, close to her old home.

The winter was long and severe. In January, the fields were buried in snow, the roads were as smooth and hard as glass, and the well-remembered pool beneath the pines was almost covered with a great sheet of ice. At this time another young dog-otter began to show Lutra considerable attention. The village children often saw the pairing otters, for the animals, hard pressed, had perforce to fish by day instead of by night. All night the trout lay dormant under the stones in the bed of the river, and only at noon did they rise to the surface on the lookout for hardy ephemerals that, in a short half hour of warmth, were hatched at the margin of the stream. Lutra and her companion followed the fish, and afforded a rare, unexpected sight as, bold with hunger, they ascended to breathe between the sheets of ice in the pool by the village gardens. At night the otters wandered over the snow, and sometimes visited the hillside farms. There, among rotting refuse-heaps, they discovered worms and insects sheltering in genial warmth. When exceptionally hungry, Lutra and her mate would dig into the chambers of the mole and the field-vole in the meadows, and search ravenously for the inmates. Among the roots of the spreading oaks, the otters found, also, such tit-bits as the larvæ of moths and beetles. A starved pigeon fallen from the pine-boughs; an occasional moorhen weak and almost defenceless; a wild duck that Lutra had captured by darting from beneath a root while the indiscreet bird was feeding, head downwards, at the river's brink--these were among the varied items of the hungry otters' food. Life was indeed hard to maintain. And, to crown the misfortunes of the ice-bound winter, Lutra's matrimonial affairs were once more cruelly disturbed: her mate was caught in a steel trap that Ned the blacksmith had baited and laid in the meadows near the village bridge. He had marked the otters' wanderings by their footprints in the snow, and had then matured his plans.

The calamity occurred one morning, just before daybreak, as the otters were returning to the river from a visit to a hen-coop, where they had found an open door and a solitary chicken. The trap was placed on the grass by the verge of the stream. A light fall of snow had covered it, but had left exposed the entrails of a chicken which, by coincidence, formed the tempting bait. Distressed and perplexed, Lutra stayed by the dog-otter, trying in vain to release him from his sufferings. The trapped creature, beside himself with rage and fear and pain, attempted to gnaw through his crunched and almost severed foot; but as the dawn lightened the east, and before the limb could be freed, Ned the blacksmith was to be seen hurrying to the spot. Lutra dived out of sight, and, unable to interpose, watched, for a second time, a riverside tragedy. Her attachment, however, had not been of so ardent a nature that bereavement left her disconsolate. Before April she forgot her trapped friend, and was mated again.

Lutra's new spouse had his home in the tributary stream of a neighbouring valley. So, when the snows had melted and the rime no longer touched with fairy fingerprints the tracery of the leafless boughs, and when Olwen the White-footed had come once more into the valley called after her name, Lutra forsook the broad river in which she had spent her early life, and, with her companion and a promising family, lived contented under the frowning Rock of Gwion, secure in peace and solitude, at least for a season, from the shaggy otter-hounds.

THE WATER-VOLE.

I.

OUR VILLAGE HOUNDS.

Not many years ago the pleasures of life among my neighbours here in the country were simpler and truer than they are to-day. Perhaps in that bygone time money was more easily made, or daily need was met with smaller expenditure. It may be, too, that family cares were then less pressing, or that a prolonged period of general prosperity had been the privilege of rich and poor alike in this green river-valley around my home. In those days, to which I often look back with regretful yearning, everybody seemed to have leisure; the ties of friendship were not severed by malicious gossip; old and young seemed to realise how good it was to have pleasant acquaintanceships and to be in the sunshine and the open air. Fathers played with their children in the street: one winter morning, when, after a heavy fall of snow and a subsequent frost, the ground was as slippery as glass, I watched a white-haired shopkeeper, lying prone on a home-made toboggan, with his feet sprawling behind for rudder, steer a load of merry youngsters full tilt down a steep lane behind his house. The sight was so exhilarating that I also forgot I was not a child; and on the second journey I joined the sportive party, and came to grief because the shopkeeper kicked too quickly at a turn in the course and sent me with a double somersault into the ditch.

It happened in those days that in the miscellaneous pack of mongrels our village sportsmen gathered together when they went rabbit-shooting among the dense coverts of the hillsides were two exceptionally clever dogs--a big, shaggy, bobtail kind of animal, and a little, smooth-coated beast resembling a black-and-tan terrier.

The big dog, Joker, lived at a farm in the village, and, during the leisure of summer, when rabbiting did not engage his attention, took to wandering by the river, joining the bathers in their sport and poking his nose inquisitively under the alder-roots along the bank. While, one sultry noon, the fun in the bathing pool was at its height, Joker routed an otter from a hiding place near which the bathers were swimming with the current, and a terrific fight took place in the shallows before the _dwrgu_ made good his escape. The dog was found to have been severely worsted in the fray, and was taken home to be nursed till his wounds were healed. Meanwhile, Joker's fame as an otter-hound was firmly established in the village, and he was regarded as a hero.

The little dog, Bob, lived at the inn, and for years his droll ways endeared him to every villager, as well as to every angler who came to "the house" for salmon-fishing. He loved nothing better than a friendship with some unsuspecting fisherman whom he might afterwards use to further his own ends. The sight of a rod placed by the door in the early morning was sufficient promise of a day's continuous enjoyment; the terrier assumed possession of the rod at once, and kept all other curs at a distance. On the appearance of the sportsman, he manifested such unmistakable delight, and pleaded so hard for permission to follow, that, unless the sportsman happened to be one whose experiences led him to dislike the presence of a fussy dog by the riverside, the flattery rarely failed of its object. Once past the rustic swing-bridge at the lower boundary of the waters belonging to the inn, Bob left the sportsman to his own devices, and stole off into the woods to hunt rabbits. Unfailingly, however, he rejoined his friend at lunch.

On Sundays, knowing that the report of a gun was not likely then to resound among the woods, and depressed by the quietness and disappointed by the nervous manner with which everybody well dressed for church resented his familiarities, he lingered about the street corners--as the unemployed usually do, even in our village--till the delicious smells of Sunday dinners pervaded the street. The savoury odours in no way sharpened his appetite, for at the inn his fare was always of the best; but they indicated that the time was approaching when the watchmaker and the lawyer set out together for their long weekly ramble through the woods. Bob knew what such a ramble meant for him. The watchmaker's dog, Tip, was Bob's respected sire, and Tip's brother, Charlie, dwelt at a house in "The Square." Bob, scenting the Sunday dinners, went at once to call for Charlie, and in his company adjourned to the lane behind the village gardens, till the watchmaker and the lawyer, with Tip, were ready for their customary walk.

When the water was low and anglers seldom visited the inn, Bob, during the summer week-days, followed Joker's course of action, and attached himself to a bathing party frequenting a pool below the ruined garden on the outskirts of the village. There, like Joker, he searched beneath the alder-roots, but without success as far as an otter was concerned. However, he vastly enjoyed himself digging out the brown rats from their holes along the bank not far from a rick-yard belonging to the inn, and then hunting them about the pool with as much noise and bustle as if he were close at the tail of a rabbit in the furze. He was so fond of the water that he became a rapid, untiring swimmer; and the boys trained him, in intervals of rat-hunting, to dive to the bottom of the river and pick up a white pebble thrown from the bank. Like Joker, also, he gained a name for pluck and ability; and one night the village sportsmen, at an informal meeting in the "private room" of the inn, decided to hunt in the river on Wednesday evenings, with Bob and Joker at the head of a pack including nearly every game-dog in the near neighbourhood, except certain aristocratic pointers and setters likely to be spoiled by companionship with yelping and excited curs.

A merrier hunting party was never in the world. They would foregather in the meadow below the ruined garden: the landlord, whose home-brewed ale was the best and strongest on the countryside; the curate, whose stern admonitions were the terror of evil-doers; the farmer, whose skill in ferreting was greater than in ploughing; the watchmaker, whose clocks filled the village street with music when, simultaneously, they struck the hour; the draper, whose white pigeons cooed and fluttered on the bridge near his shop; the solicitor, whose law was for a time thrown to the winds; and a small crowd of boys ready to assist, if required, in "chaining" the fords. There they would "cry" the dogs across the stream till the valley echoed and re-echoed with shouts and laughter.

The first hunt was started in spirited fashion; the men walked along the bank thrusting their sticks into crevices and holes; but only Joker and Bob entered the water, and rats and otters for a while remained discreetly out of view. Near a bend of the stream, however, Bob surprised a rat secreted by a stone, and, forcing it to rush to the river, followed with frantic speed. Here, at last, was a chase; the other dogs all hurried to the spot, and the landlord, swinging his otter-pole, waded out to perform the duties of huntsman with the now uproarious pack. His action proved infectious--watchmaker, draper, lawyer, and curate splashed into the shallows to help in keeping the rat on the move; and fun was fast and furious till the prey, fleeing from a smart attack by Bob, was captured by a spaniel swimming under a big oak-root between the curate and the bank.

I hardly think I have enjoyed any sport so well as those Wednesday evening hunts in the bygone years, when life was unshadowed and each sportsman of us felt within him the heart of a child. So great was our amusement that the village urchins instituted a rival Hunt in the brooks on Saturdays; they notched their sticks for every "kill," and boasted that they beat us hollow with the number of their trophies.