Sometimes a swift, cutting the air with alternate strokes of its narrow black wings, dashed a ripple as it sipped and sped on. Willow wrens flitted in the ash-sprays lower down, taking insects on the leaves. A chiffchaff sang its two-note song. By a briar raking the water the otter's head was raised; he listened and swam to the bank. Hounds spoke remotely; he knew Deadlock's tongue among them. He climbed out of the leat, the trout still in his mouth, and pushed through the undergrowth, among nettles and marsh-wort, and over soft damp ground. Robins ticked at him, wrens stittered. Burrs and seeds tried to hook to his hair, finding no hold. Warble flies tried to alight on his back and suck his blood; the rushes brushed them off. He ran in a loop back to the leat, and slipped into the water above the hounds, who had gone down. He swam up for a quarter of a mile, then rested by an alder root and listened to the pack running over his land-trail. He looked round for a stone whereon to eat the fish, but hearing Deadlock's tongue, he lay still. From the wooded hillside above the distant bank of the river came the knock of axes on the trunk of an oak tree, the shouts of woodmen, a sudden crack, the hissing rush and thud of breaking branches, and then quietness, until began the steady knocks of boughs being lopped. After a while Tarka did not hear these sounds--he was listening in another direction. He scarcely heard the shooting buzz of sun-frisked flies over the leat. He felt no fear; all his energy was in listening. _Chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff_ sang the bird among the ash trees. And soon the voices of men, the tearing of brambles against coats, boots trampling and snapping the hollow green stalks of hog-weed and hemlock. Tarka saw their heads and shoulders against the sky, and swam on up the leat. His scent was washed down by the water, and the hounds followed him. He crept out on the other bank, on soft ground littered with dead leaves, which lay under crooked oak trees. He ran swiftly up the slope and entered a larch plantation, where the sky was shut out. The narrow lines of thin straight boles stood in a duskiness as of midsummer night. All sound was shut out; nothing grew under the trees. A wood owl peered down at him as he ran among the brittle fallen twigs; it peered over its back and softly hooted to its mate. The plantation was silent again. Tarka sat by a bole in the middle of the Dark Hams Wood, listening through the remote sough of wind in the branches to the faint cries below. The smell of the sap was strong in his nostrils. He dropped the fish. Sometimes he heard the querulous scream of a jay, and the clap of pigeon-wings as the birds settled in the tree-tops.