By day the otters slept in the reeds of a duck-pond which they reached by drifting with the tide up the other horn of the estuary, and turning into the Branton pill, where ketches and gravel barges were moored. At dawn they left the salt water and ran over the eastern sea-wall to the duckpond shaped like a ram's horns. In the brackish waters of the duckpond the otters took mullet which had been washed in when the sea-wall had broken years before, and rainbow trout put there by the owner. Old Nog fished these waters, and at night many kinds of wildfowl flapped and quacked besides the reeds; mallard, wigeon, teal, coot, dabchick, and strays of the duck family--shoveller, pochard, and golden eye. On the fourth night of the otters' arrival at the Ram's-horn duckpond the swallows which settled among the reed-maces at sunset did not sleep. They twittered among themselves when the first stars gleamed in the water, for they had received a sign to leave the green meadows they loved so well. They talked in their under-song voices--which men seldom hear, they are so soft and sweet--while clinging to the unburst heads of the reed-maces. They talked of white-and-grey seas, of winds that fling away the stroke of wings, of great thunder-shocks in the sunwhitened clouds under, of wild rains and hunger and fatigue to come before they saw again the sparkles in the foam of the African strand. But none talked of the friends who would fall in the sea, or be slain in France and Spain and Italy, or break their necks against the glass of lighthouses, for the forktailed birds of summer had no thoughts of these things, or of death. They were joyous and pure in spirit, and alien to the ways of man. During the day Tarka had been watching them, being curious. He had watched them sweeping above him with a windy rush of wings that darkened the sky, and had listened to their sharp cries as they dipped and splashed in the wind-ruffled water. As he was stretching himself before leaving his couch at sunset they flew like a great sigh up to the stars. _Krark! Krark! Krark!_ cried Old Nog, standing grave and still in the shallow water at the pond's edge. It was the last English voice many of them would hear, the blue winged ones of summer, who had begun the weary migration from the land of thatched homesteads and old cob linhays. Some days after the swallows had gone, Tarka heard a strange flute-like whistle while playing in the Ram's-horn duckpond. The five otters ceased their play and listened. The whistle came again, and Tarka's mother answered. The answering whistle was keen and loud. The bitch swam towards it, followed by Greymuzzle and White-tip. The whistle made Tarka cry in rage, _Ic-yang_, and when a dog-cub has cried thus he is no more a cub, but a dog-otter.