The footprints were clearly marked on the bare ground beneath the low branches, and impressed the Earthstopper as he stooped to examine them in the sombre light, not so much by their unusual size as by a defect in one of the prints, showing that the middle claw of one forefoot was missing. This would make it easy for him to identify the track and so aid him in finding out whether the otter had gone down the coombe to the sea.
Few sportsmen looking down at the lake, in its setting of wild hills, would dream that the poacher, after its night’s work, would trouble to seek the shelter of some distant sea-cave rather than lie up in the snug reedy hovers skirting the creeks.
Tol Pedn Penwith. [Face page 38.
But the Earthstopper knew better. Too often had he seen the hounds follow the trail of an otter down to the edge of the tide, to feel sanguine that it harboured near the lake. Already, indeed, he was fearing, as he forced his way back through the wild luxuriant growth, that it had returned to the cliffs.
How those cliffs haunted him! Did he catch sight of an otter’s seal shortly before a meet, as surely would the picture of the great granite walls with their impregnable fissures and caverns obtrude as it did then.
Leaving the lake, he followed its overflow down the valley, examining the banks of the stream carefully, yet dreading to come across a trace of the beast. You would have thought he had caught sight of an adder, had you seen him start back when he found the downward track in the low-lying plantation under Castle Horneck. It was on the bank just above a high waterfall which it would seem had caused the creature to land, but from there to the beach no trace could he find, though he spent hours in the search. It was possible, he thought, that to conceal its line of retreat, the wily creature might have gone down to the sea along the bed of the stream. This view would perhaps have gained on him, but that in its lowest reach the sluggish water nearly circles round a meadow, and the otter must have taken, as is its wont, the short cut across the neck of the bend, and in so doing must have left its tracks in the marshy ground there.