At dimmit light they went down to the brook again, meeting the fox, who was quietly lapping to quench his thirst made by swallowing the fur of so many mice. He looked at the otter; the otter looked at him. The fox went on lapping until the water was spoiled by their musky scent, when he went up the hill to sniff in his earth. For ten minutes he sniffed and pondered, until his curiosity was satisfied, and then he started his nightly prowl--after a little scratching against his post. The otter took her cubs up the brook and over a field. Away from water her movements were uneasy. Often she stopped in her low running to stare with raised head and working nostrils. A galvanized iron chicken coop in a field caused her to make a wide loop--the scent of man was there. A pair of boots left by a tramp in a hedge made Tarka tiss with fear, turn about, and run away. The cubs were now as active and alert as their mother. At last they reached the ditch remembered by the otter. She leaned down to the brown-scummed water, clinging to the bank by her rudder. Bull frogs had been croaking a moment before she arrived there, but now they were silent and burrowing in the mud. With paw and nose she sought under the weed, nipping them and dropping them on the grass. The cubs seized them and turned away, yikkering; and when she had caught all she could find, the otter ran back to the cubs and began to flay the frogs, for the skins were tough. They left some of the frogs uneaten, for there were eels in the ditch. Iggiwick, the vuz-peg--his coat was like furze and his face like a pig's--found the remains, and was gleefully chewing when a badger grunted near. With a squeak of terror the vuz-peg rolled himself in a ball, but the badger bit through the spines as though they were marram grasses. Iggiwick squealed, like marram grass in flame. Later in the night nothing was left except the trotters, teeth, and spiny coat of poor Iggiwick. They were too far off to hear the dying squeals of the vuz-peg, for during the half-hour before the badger caught him they had travelled a mile up the brook. The otter swam in front, the cubs scrambling behind her. Often a fish would dodge back by her whiskers, missing the snap of teeth by the space of a fin, and the cubs would bump into one another in their eagerness to get it. When this happened, the otter would turn again to her prowling from bank to bank, and leave the fish to be caught by them.