Tarka the otter

Men speak to each other of what they have heard, seen, touched, smelled, tasted. They agree that thunder is terrifying, that the sky is blue, that gorse is prickly, that sulphur...

Dimmity on meadow and water, the eve-star shining over the hill, and Old Nog the heron crying _kra-a-ark!_ as his slow dark wings carried him down to the estuary. A whiteness dr...

In mid-May the buds of the fallen oak began to open hopefully and to show their ruddy leaves. Seven small kingfishers perched on an alder branch outside the entrance of their tu...

The shock-headed flowers of the yellow goat's beard, or John-go-to-bed-at-noon, had been closed six hours when a grey wagtail skipped airily over the sky-gleams of the brook, fl...

Tarka was rolling on his back in the beams of the sun one morning, when he heard the distant note of the hunting horn and soon afterwards the tongues of hounds. The bitch listen...

When Tarka awoke he saw a small eye quizzing him from among the ash-sprays. He stretched up his head and sniffed, and at the movement the eye disappeared. Ticking cries sounded...

Yellow from ash and elm and willow, buff from oak, rusty brown from the chestnut, scarlet from bramble--the waters bore away the first coloured leaves of the year. Beeches prese...

He was alone, a young male of a ferocious and persecuted tribe whose only friends, except the Spirit that made it, were its enemies--the otter hunters. His cubhood was ended, an...

The trees of the riverside wept their last dry tears, and the mud in the tidehead pool made them heavy and black; and after a fresh, when salmon came over the bar, beginning the...

The 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 co...

The little thin cub, on its couch among the reeds frozen and bent like the legs of dead spiders, greeted Greymuzzle with husky mewing whenever it heard her coming, and would not...

Bogs and hummocks of the Great Kneeset were dimmed and occluded; the hill was higher than the clouds. In drifts and hollows of silence the vapour passed, moving with the muffled...

At sunset, as he was crossing a shoal to deep water under an old ash tree, he stopped at the taint of hounds lying on the scour pitted by their feet. Quietly he turned back to t...

The tide was flooding fast in midstream. It carried with it sunken branches that sometimes showed a stick, and turned under again. Tarka passed them as he swam into a riband of...

When the bees' feet shake the bells of the heather, and the ruddy strings of the sap-stealing dodder are twined about the green spikes of the furze, it is summertime on the comm...

He was awakened by the tremendous baying of hounds. He saw feet splashing in the shallow water, a row of noses, and many flacking tongues. The entrance was too small for any hea...

Swimming towards the sunset Tarka found a cleft in the high curved red cliff, and on the crest of a wave rode into the cavern beyond. The broken wave slapped against the dark en...

All day the wind shook the rusty reed-daggers at the sky, and the maceheads were never still. Before sunset the couch was empty. The purple-ruddy beams stained the grass and the...

At half-past ten in the morning a covered motor-van stopped at the bridge below the Dark Pool. From the driver's seat three men got down, and at the sound of their footfalls dee...

Tarka became one with the river, finding his course among the slimy stones so that his back was always covered. He rose beside the middle pier, whose cutwater was hidden by a fa...