Now Jarrk the seal, who had been searching round the base of the rock,
saw an otter rising to the surface, and was swinging up towards him
when he saw a conger eel wave out the opaqueness, which was Oylegrin's
blood staining the green gloom. Garbargee held the shag in its jaws.
The undersea cloud was scattered by the swirls of flippers as the seal
chased the conger. Garbargee dropped the shag, and the cleft of rock
received its grey tenant. Jarrk swung up with a bend of his smooth
body, and lay under the surface with only his head out, drinking fresh
air, and looking at Tarka six yards away. _Wuff, wuff_, said Jarrk,
playfully. _Iss iss_, cried Tarka in alarm. The pollack escaped and
soon afterwards was feeding with other fish on the crab-nibbled corpse
of the shag.
It was not often that the otters went fishing in daylight; usually
they lay in the warm noonday sun on the sand of a cove behind the Long
Rock--a spur of which was the plucking perch of Chakchek, the One-eyed,
the peregrine falcon. One morning Chakchek half-closed his wings and
cut down at Tarka, crying _aik-aik-aik!_ and swishing past his head. It
was the cream-breasted tiercel's cry of anger. He was a swift flyer,
and soon mounted to where his mate waited at her pitch in the sky above
the precipice, scanning the lower airs for rock-dove, oystercatcher,
finch, or guillemot. When they had swept away down the north side of
the headland, Kronk the raven croaked thrice, deeply, and took the air
to twirl with his mate in the windy uptrends.
Near Sandy Cove was the Cormorants' Rock, where five cormorants
squatted during most of the daylit hours, digesting their cropfuls of
fishes. Each cormorant, as it arrived with steady black flight, would
pass the rock about fifty yards, swing round and fly back into the
wind, alighting uneasily among its brethren, some of whom had the tails
of fishes sticking out of their gullets. They held out their wings and
worked their shoulders to ease the fish down into their crops. The top
of Cormorants' Rock, where they sat, was above the highest wave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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