The parapet before and above him was a smooth line across the sky, except for a wagtail's pied body, the tops of three polypody ferns, the head and shoulders of an old grey-bearded man in a blue coat, and a black empty beer-bottle. _Tally-ho!_ CHAPTER NINETEEN Tarka became one with the river, finding his course among the slimy stones so that his back was always covered. He rose beside the middle pier, whose cutwater was hidden by a faggot of flood sticks. Under the sticks was dimness, streaked and blurred with sunlight. Tarka hid and listened. His paws rested on a sunken branch. The water moved down, clouded with the mud-stirrings of the leat. He lay so still that the trout returned to their stances beside the stone sterlings. _B'hoys, b'hoys! Com' on, ol' fellars! Leu in, ol' fellars. Com' on, all 'v yer!_ The stain spread into the pool below the bridge. Hounds whimpered and marked at the stick-pile. Their many tongues smote all other sounds from Tarka's ears. He knew they could not reach him in his retreat, and so he stayed there even when a pole, thrust into the heap, rubbed against his flank. Then over his head the sticks began to crack and creak, as a man climbed upon them. The man jumped with both feet together on the heap. Tarka sank and turned downstream. Cries from the lower parapet; thudding of boots above. The chain of bubbles drew out downstream. Tarka swam to the left bank, where he touched and breathed. He heard, in the half-second his head was out of water, the noise that had terrified him as a cub--the noise as of an iron-shod centipede crossing the shallows. Way down the river was stopped by a line of upright figures, standing a yard apart and stirring the water with poles. Tarka heard the noise under water, but he swam down until he saw before him the bright-bubbled barrier. He swung round and swam upstream as fast as three-and-a-half webbed feet could push him. He swam under the heap of sticks again, enduring the massed tongues of marking hounds until the creaking and thudding over his head drove him to open water again. He swam under an arch, turned by the lower sterling, and swam up another arch, to a backwater secluded from the main stream by the ridge of shillets made by the cross-leaping waters of the runner in flood. An ash tree grew over the backwater, but Tarka could find no holding in its roots. He swam past the legs of swimming hounds and went down again. _Tally Ho!_