"There's no reason why he shouldn't, if it amuses him," Carroll replied.
"When I first met him, he'd have been more careful of his clothes."
A little later the dogs were driven in again, and this time the whole of the otter's head was visible as it swam up-stream. The animal was flagging, and on reaching shoaler water it sprang out altogether now and then, rising and falling in the stronger stream with a curious serpentine motion. In fact, as head and body bent in the same sinuous curves, it looked less like an animal than a plunging fish. The men guarding the rapid stood ready with their poles, and more were wading and splashing up both sides of the pool. The otter's pace was getting slower; sometimes it seemed to stop; and now and then it vanished among the ripples. Carroll saw that Evelyn's face was intent, though there were signs of shrinking in it.
"I'll tell you what you are thinking," he said. "You want that poor little beast to get away."
"I believe I do," Evelyn confessed. "And you?"
"I'm afraid I'm not much of a sportsman, in this sense."
They watched with strained attention. The girl could not help it, though she dreaded the climax. Her sympathies were now with the hard-pressed, exhausted creature that was making a desperate fight for its life. The pursuers were close upon it, the swimming dogs leading them; and ahead lay a foaming rush of water which seemed less than a foot deep, with men spread out across it. The shouting from the bank had ceased, and everybody waited in tense expectancy when the otter disappeared. The dogs reached the rapid, where they were washed back a few yards before they could make headway up-stream. Men who came splashing close upon them left the water to scramble along the bank; and then they stopped abruptly, while the dogs swam in an uncertain manner about the still reach beyond. They came out in a few minutes and scampered up and down among the stones, evidently at fault, for there was no sign of the otter anywhere. Incredible as it seemed, the hunted creature, an animal that would probably weigh about twenty-four pounds, had crept up the rush of water among the feet of those who watched for it and vanished unseen into the sheltering depths beyond.
Evelyn sighed with relief.
"I think it will escape," she said. "The river's rather full after the rain, which is against the dogs, and there isn't another shallow for some distance. Shall we go on?"
They strolled forward behind the dogs, which were again moving up-stream; but they turned aside to avoid a bit of woods, and it was some time later when they came out upon a rocky promontory dropping steeply to the river. Just there, the water flowed through a deep gorge, down the sides of which great oaks and ashes straggled. In front of Carroll and his companion a ragged face of rock fell about twenty feet; but there was a little soil among the stones below, and a dense growth of alders interspersed with willows, fringed the water's edge. The stream swirled in deep black eddies beneath their drooping branches, though a little farther on it poured tumultuously between scattered boulders into the slacker pool. The rock sloped on one side, and there was a bank of underbrush near the foot of the descent.
The hunt was now widely scattered about the reach. Men crept along slippery ledges above the water and moved over dangerously slanting slopes, half hidden among the trees; a few were in the river. Three or four of the dogs were swimming; the others, spread out in twos and threes, trotted in and out among the undergrowth.