Bag Leap was a sunken reef stretching about half a mile from the point,
over which the tides raced. Here the currents brought many seals, which
had followed salmon up the Severn Sea, on their return home to Lundy
Island. With them was a grey seal, a stranger who had come down from
the north. For several days the seals fished off the Leap, while Jarrk
roared among them and joined in their favourite game of chasing the
smallest seal, who was not black and yellowish-brown like themselves,
but a rare silvery-white. They would swim round the rocks looking for
her, sometimes remaining under water for nearly a quarter of an hour.
Once when Tarka was searching for a bass in four fathoms he met Jarrk
face to face, and the shock made him blow a big bubble. He turned and
kicked up to the light, while Jarrk swum round him in a spiral. Jarrk
was always gentle, for he had never had an enemy to shock him into
fear, and when Tarka tissed and yikkered at him, the scymitar-shaped
lip-bristles of his broad muzzle twitched, his upper lip lifted off his
lower jaw, he showed his yellow teeth, and barked. _Wuff, wuff_, said
Jarrk, jovially. _Ic-yang_, yikkered Tarka. The seal snorted; then his
back, stretched and gleaming, rolled under like a barrel.
When the seals left Bag Leap for the seventeen-mile swim to their
island home, one remained with Jarrk. She was the stranger grey
seal, and often while the other seals had been romping, she had been
exploring the far dark end of the cave behind the Long Rock, where
was a beach of boulders. Greymuzzle explored the beach for the same
purpose, and sometimes otter and seal passed by each other in the
pools. On one high-tide the seal swam into the cave, and did not return
with the ebb. For three days she hid herself, and then she flapped down
the sand and splashed into the sea, very hungry.
Many times during the rise and fall of tides the bitch-otter ran into
the cave, and on the morning of the grey seal's return to the sea
she swam round the Long Rock and crawled out of the surge among the
limpet-studded rocks of Bag Hole. Three hundred and ten feet above
her, perched on the swarded lip of a sand-coloured cliff, Kronk the
raven watched her running round and over boulders. She reached the
base of the precipice, and scrambled up a slide of scree, which had
clattered down during the rains of autumn. Gulls wove and interwove in
flight below the raven, floating past their roosts in the face of the
cliff. The scree had fallen from under the Wreckers' Path, made during
centuries by the cautious feet of men and women descending after storms
to gather what the sea had thrown on the boulders of the Hole. It was
not much wider than one of the sheep-paths on the headland. Greymuzzle
ran along it, and turning a corner by a lichened boulder, disappeared
from the sight of Kronk. She had climbed here alone several times
during the previous night.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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