The ebb-tide moved along the sea-weedy perches stuck in the mud to mark the fairway. A mist was rising like steam from the top of the water, which moved slower with its weight of surface slush. The slush became clotted, and hardened, and suddenly ceased to move. The star-points dulled. Orion was stripped of his flashing, the green tongue of Sirius was mute, the Swan lost her lustre, the glare of the Bull faded. _Kack!_ croaked Old Nog, flapping up from the fish carcass as a fox slunk down to it. The tips of his open beak were red with the frozen blood of a speared rat, which was sticking in his gullet. In swaying flight, reed-like legs hanging with weakness, the heron set off for the gravel pools of the Shrarshook. _Kack!_ he called to his mate, who was standing in the ebb to her knees, fifty yards beyond the slide. She did not move; nor did the tide. _Krark!_ called Old Nog at dawn, flying over the pill, and calling his mate again. _Hu-ee-ee-ic!_ whistled Tarka to Marland Jimmy, who had not answered since the star-points had suddenly dimmed and vanished off the water. _Hu-ee-ee-ic!_--a thin, hard cry, which Greymuzzle heard among the reeds of the duckpond. _Hu-ee-ee-ic!_ travelling through the ice-blink in the pill, and out across the estuary. Bubu stared down at Tarka walking over to the eastern sea-wall; fanned above him before beating away. The Arctic Owl perched fifty yards below Tarka's slide on something that swayed and creaked to its weight, but bore it upright. Staring around with several complete turns of its head, Bubu fixed orange-rimmed eyes on a mask set stiff before and below it. There was no movement; there was no life. The owl stared round again, and flew away, leaving its narrow perch swaying on reed-like legs, as though nodding to the head of Marland Jimmy gazing film-eyed out of the ice. CHAPTER TEN The little thin cub, on its couch among the reeds frozen and bent like the legs of dead spiders, greeted Greymuzzle with husky mewing whenever it heard her coming, and would not be comforted by tongue caresses. Frost had stricken its eyes. Greymuzzle prowled all day and all night when she was not warming and suckling her cub; and although she was so hungry, she still played with Tarka, sliding headfirst down a snowy hillock. They had to travel to the estuary for food, for every incoming tide piled up its floating floes at the pill-mouth, with grinding shrieks and shuddering booms that sounded far over the Burrows. At low tide the frost welded them in a high and solid barrier. Both otters had blistered their tongues by licking ice, and to ease their thirst, they rasped them against snow on the sea-wall in the middle of the day. Greymuzzle went into the village one night, searching the gardens for food. She found the duckhouse under the chestnut tree in the farmyard above the bridge, and although she sought an entrance for more than an hour, she found none. The smell of the ducks was painful.