Every stoat and weasel which heard them ran to watch the fight on the pathway made by the hob-nailed boots of the keeper. Tawny and dwarf owls peered down from branches of oak trees, while from afar a fox listened, and prowled on again. A crow awoke in an ivy-thick holly, muttered _aa-aa!_, and laid its beak among its neck-feathers once more. Tarka circled round the stoats with the other cubs, mewing and yikkering with excitement; and then he smelled the rabbit flesh inside the drainpipe. The youngest cub also smelled it. She was quicker than Tarka, and her head and shoulders were inside one end when he ran in at the other. He had bared his teeth to snatch the flesh when there was a hard snap, a knock of iron on the pipe, a blow on the side of his head, and a loud whimpering and tissing from the cub. Immediately the bitch was by her, running round outside the pipe in her anguish. She panted and blew as she had in the hollow tree when her mate was being worried by hounds, she ran up the ditch and mewed to the cub to follow, she returned and licked its rudder. The green points of light flicked out together. Disturbed by the clatter in the drainpipe, a pheasant crew in the covert, and a cock defied the pheasant from its roost among hens in an apple tree by the keeper's cottage below the wood. The bitch scraped at the sods covering the pipe, blowing and gasping anew when a retriever started to bark. She ran away, whistling the cubs to follow her, but returned to the cry of the cub, who had fallen out of the pipe and was dangling by its rudder. The barking changed to an eager whine when a door of the cottage opened and a man's voice spoke. Sounds came up distinctly from the combe below. While the otter tore with her teeth at the chain, the spring, and the closed jaws of the gin, Tarka and the other cub ran among the oak-saplings, rustling the buff leaves of an old year and breaking the stalks of seeded bluebells whose caps dropped round black seeds on the earth. There were faggots of hazel wands just inside the wood, cut and drying for a thatcher, who would split them and make spears for binding the reed of cottage roofs. They burrowed under the faggot, driving out a vair that had been sucking the blood of an aerymouse or pipistrelle bat. The small weasel made a loud _kak-kak-kak_ of rage at them and vanished with the limp aerymouse in its mouth. A loud barking was coming from the field, with the yikkering of the otter. Tarka heard the yelp of the retriever, but the sound that followed made him tiss, for it was the shout of a man.