He swam to the wooden bridge by the boathouse, and to the withies on the islet. _Hu-ee-ic!_ He hunted the brackish waters until the stars were dimmed by dawn, when he pressed through the reeds by a way he had trodden before, but forgotten, and slept on an old couch where lay bones, and a little skull. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 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 thistles of the meadow, and the tiles of the cattle-shippen under the sea-wall were the hue of the sky. Westward the marshman's cottage, the linhays, the trees, the hedges, the low ragged line of the Burrows, were vanishing in a mist of fire. The tide was ebbing, the glidders grey, with ruddy tricklings. In the salt turf below the sea-wall great cracks wandered with the fire of the sky. Ring-plover and little stints ran by the guts, and their slender peering images quenched the flame in the water. Bunches of war-weed on each sodden perch dripped their last drops among the froth and spinning holes of the gliding tide. The mooring buoys rolled and returned, each keg gathering froth that the current sucked away under its lowest stave. By an old broken wicker crab-pot, only its rib-tops up, a small head showed without a ripple, moving with the water. Men were walking on the deck of a ketch below; other men were sitting at oars in a boat under the black hull waiting for their mates. A dog began to bark, then it whimpered, until it was pushed over the gunwale. It met the water in a reddish splash. Men climbed down to the boat, oars were dipped, and the dog swam astern, breathing gruffly and whining. The otter head, drifting nearer, sank when a man pointed with his pipe-stem. Fifty yards below, by the chain sagging and lifting from the bows of the riding ship, the head looked up again beside the broken wickerwork. "Artter," said the man who had pointed, and forgot it. They were going to drink beer in the Plough Inn. Their voices became faint as they walked on the wall. Flocks of ring-plover and little stint flickered and twisted over the mud and the water. A late crow left the saltings, as a sedge-owl swept on long wings over the drooping yellow grass of the wall, and slunk away across the water.