Photo F. Frith & Co., Reigate. To face p. 62.
THE WILD COAST-LINE.
After passing the haunted house to which the long avenue led, they came to a cairn with a roofless lookout, so placed as to survey the wild coast-line. Here the wanderers again struck inland until they came to a high wall that threatened to bar their advance. But the otter knew the way and, threading the nettles bordering the stubble, reached the drain that gives easy access to the park. As if glad to be clear of the prickly harvest-field, the little band made down the slope at a gallop, passing between groups of trees that cast deep shadows on the turf. In the herbage of the hollow only their backs showed, but every hair was exposed when they breasted the opposite slope, over whose crest the land dips abruptly to a fishpond. At a headlong pace they dashed between the stems of the pines to the edge of the water, into which they glided as noiselessly as voles. So swift were their movements that almost before their presence was known each otter had seized a white trout and risen to the surface. One came up near the boathouse, another in the shadow of an hydrangea, the third near the only bit of moonlit bank by the overflow; and all three swam towards the island, where they lay under the plumes of the pampas-grass and devoured their take. They ate three or four fish apiece before their hunger was satisfied, and then began chasing one another over the rocks, from which the sea stretched like a plain of beaten silver. Soon they returned along the overflow to the pond, where they gambolled as fearlessly as they had done in the creek and other lone spots in their wanderings.
To the surprise of the cubs, the taint of man on the path caused their mother no disquietude; not once did she stop her play to listen or peer into the bosky gloom about her. Strange disregard of danger in a creature both suspicious and apprehensive, yet not difficult of explanation. For all the demesne within the park wall had long been a sanctuary for bird and beast. Not a gun had been fired there nor a trap set time out of mind; and so confiding had even otters become that they used the drain on the island to litter in, and would lay up in the holt by the moat under the very windows of the mansion.
Behind one of these a light had just before been burning, where the young squire sat recording the day’s sport with his hounds along the stream in which the otter had taught the cubs to fish. But as he wrote he heard the otter whistle. On the instant he dropped his pen, turned down the lamp and, seizing a field-glass, took his seat by the open window. Keen otter-hunter as he was, he was no less keen a naturalist. Deer, foxes, badgers, seals, all interested him, though not to the same degree as the otter. The fascination this creature had for him was wonderful. To him it was the homeless hunter, the Bedouin of the wild, the subtlest and most enduring of quarry, the gamest of the game. Therefore he sat with glass to eye watching the lighted space between two clumps of rhododendrons where he expected the otters would show. His hands shook and his heart beat faster than its wont; for the life of him he could not suppress the excitement he felt. Presently a shadow, a moving shadow, followed by another and yet another, darkened the sward—these were the otters; and without a wink he watched them cross the turf to the ferny border of the moat, where, though he could see them no longer, he could follow their movements by the twitching of the fronds till, a few seconds later, they entered the water and pursued their graceful gambols full in his view. Once the otter, attracted by scent or sound, or both, half rose out of the moat and looked over the low bank; but the moment she saw that the intruders were only a badger and two cubs she fell again to her romps. Later she looked up and scrutinized the strange object at the window. The squire remained as motionless as the gargoyles; her suspicion was allayed, and once more she resumed her frolics. Anon the trio stole away and, passing through the drain beneath the park wall by which the badgers had found an entrance, gained the valley where the weary hounds lay asleep in their kennels. But without a thought of hound or anything else save the marsh to which she was hurrying, the otter made across the barren holdings beyond and, before the squire had given up hope of their reappearance and resumed his pen, she had dropped from the boundary wall of Cold Comfort Farm and set foot on the waste that stretches to the very tip of the promontory.
The wanderers kept near the cliffs, going straight from angle to angle of the indentations that mark the jagged coast-line. Here and there they moved along the edge, so close one behind the other as to look like one creature, presenting even, at times, a snake-like appearance, especially when twisting in and out of the colony of ant-heaps that dotted the long slope within a mile of their destination. Near the top they disturbed a wheatear from amongst some cushions of withered sea-pinks; but not another creature did they see until abreast of the seal rock, where a cormorant stood watching for the dawn. Then, striking the marsh at the end of a finger-like creek, they followed the bank above it till the mere with its reed-beds lay before them. Not a breath ruffled the surface: the array of stems stood motionless as forest-trees: all was strangely still, save that the sea was heaving ominously. After a keen scrutiny of the cottage opposite them and a single glance at the sand-bar to the left, the otter trotted down the bank and, entering the water, swam towards the farther shore. But when near the wall of reeds she half-wheeled, and coasted along the curves of the little bays, skirting the lily-beds where she had disported when a cub.
Till now the finny tenants of the mere had given no sign of their presence; but as the otters drew near the inflow a dace jumped out of the water, and the jaws of a pike showed above the surface within a few inches of it. The sight stirred the hunting instincts of the male cub, and so great was his rage at his mother’s indifference that, when she crossed the current on her way to the creek, he turned back, determined to hover by himself. He landed on a point between two bays and trampled a couch at the food of the reeds. An old otter could not have chosen a kennel seemingly safer, yet scarcely had he curled up when a most alarming noise struck his ears. It was the creak of oars against the thole-pins, and it grew louder and louder till he jumped to his feet to see what was coming. Almost immediately the bow of a boat appeared round a clump of bulrushes, and at the oars bent the old marshman in his reed-plaited hat and guernsey frock, all lit up by the red sun, now just above the bar. The rower shipped the oars, turned round on his seat, and dropped the killick quietly overboard; but the boat still moved forward till the painter stopped the way on it, less than a score of yards from the otter, who looked on at the baiting and setting of the lines, and even the lighting of a pipe before the old man settled down to watch the floats.
Motionless though the fisherman sat, the otter remained on the alert and, whenever the old man rose to land a fish, was on the point of diving and making his escape from so dangerous a neighbour. Thus hour after hour passed, and the morning wore away with no change in the situation, save that a little before noon black clouds rose above the horizon and drifted into the blue spaces of the sky. Intent on his fishing, the marshman took little notice of the sudden change of weather, until a gust of wind shook the reed-bed and big drops of rain began to fall. Then, casting a few uneasy glances to windward, he pulled in his lines, raised the killick, pressed his hat on his head, and rowed away.
CHAPTER VI
THE FAMILY BROKEN UP
Sitting there, the cub watched the lurid afterglow fade, dusk creep over the rough water, and the sky darken till a star appeared in a break between the scudding wrack. Then he rose and listened. The waves broke against the point, the reeds hissed, the breakers thundered on the bar, but no call from his mother reached his eager ears. He was beginning to fear she had deserted him when from across the mere came the shrill summons. Immediately he dived and, rising almost at once, headed at excited pace for the creek, where soon, to his delight, he viewed his mother and sister swimming to meet him. The wild gambols that followed in the midst of the mere did not last long, for there was hunting to be done.