On the moonlit bank, beside the black-and-red smoking rags, they tried to bind their wounds; and the uninjured man was bending down to pick up his empty sack when the lurcher dog began to growl. Its snarls increased; it ran forward; it yelped with pain and ran back past them, followed by two yellow, glowing eyes. "Fine li'l brown dog you zee'd in the daggers," growled the poacher called Shiner, who had lost a finger-joint. "Us may as well keep whoam when they sort o' dogs be about!" CHAPTER SIX Yellow from ash and elm and willow, buff from oak, rusty brown from the chestnut, scarlet from bramble--the waters bore away the first coloured leaves of the year. Beeches preserved their tawny form in rain and hail, but yielded more and more to the winds. Sandmartins and warblers deserted their old haunts; kingfishers and herons remained. The reeds sighed in the songless days, the flags curled as they withered, and their brittle tops were broken by the rains. Eels began to pass down to the sea. They were the females, travelling from ponds and lakes, from dykes and ditches and drains, from the hill streams of Dartmoor where the Two Rivers had their ancient source. The eyes of the eels grew larger as they were swept down in the turbid waters, as they writhed over wet grass, along cart ruts and drains. These eels were urged seawards by a common desire--to meet the smaller males in the estuary, where each female would attract four; and after the meeting each female would swallow her four and begin a journey to where the shallow bed of the ocean broke off and dropped deep to its grave. Here among hulks rotting in seaweed, where strange fish carrying lights moved in the heaviest darkness, the eels of the world laid their eggs, and here they died, far under the floating weed of the Sargasso Sea whence as transparent, flat, ribbon-shaped creatures, they had set out for the inland waters. After journeying for three years the elvers had reached the mouths of rivers and passed up to ponds and ditches, where those that were not killed by man, otter, heron, gull, waterfowl, cormorant, kingfisher, dwarf owl and pike, lived and grew until desire and instinct moved them to seek the eels' birthplace in the grave of the Atlantic. The eels of the Two Rivers were devourers of the spawn and fry of salmon and trout, and the otters were devourers of eels. Tarka stood on the shillets of the shallow stream while they twisted and moved past his legs. At first he ate a small portion of each capture near the tail, but when his hunger was gone he picked them up, bit them, and dropped them again. The more he killed the more he wanted to kill, and he chopped them until his jaws were tired. It was slimy sport, and afterwards he washed for nearly half an hour, quatting on a mossy rock.