Greymuzzle returned to the duckpond with only seaweed and shell-fish to nourish herself and her cub. Unsteadily it dragged its little body towards her, and opened its mouth to greet her. No sound came from its mouth. Its legs trembled and could not carry its head, which hung over the couch of reeds. Its paws were frost-bitten, its eye-sockets empty. Greymuzzle stared at it, before lying down and giving the shelter of her body. She spoke to it and took it in her paws and licked its face, which was her only way of telling her love. The cub tottered away, and sought the milk which it could not find. Afterwards it slept, until she left again to seek food in the wide daylight, following the slot of deer across the snow. The hind, which had come down from the high ground with a herd and wandered away with her calf that had been with her since its birth the previous May, caught the scent of the otter and ran away, the calf beside her. The otter followed, but turned away when she saw a small bird crouching on the snow, unable to fly further. She ate the fire-crested wren--a thimbleful of skin, bone, and feather. After a vain prowl round the garden of the marshman, she returned to the duckpond, crossing the pill three hundred yards below the place where men were breaking up, for firewood, the hulk of an old dismasted ketch. In the field she picked up the skull of a sheep and carried it a few yards before dropping it. She had picked it up and dropped it many times already. The ice-talons set harder in the land. No twitter of finch or linnet was heard on the Burrows, for those which remained were dead. Vainly the linnets had sought the seeds locked in the plants of the glasswort. Even crows died of starvation. The only noises in the frore air were of saws and axes and hammers, men's voices, the glassy sweep of wind in the blackened thistles, the cries of lambs and ewes, ravens' croaking, and the dull mumble of breakers on the bar. Every day on the Burrows was a period of silence under a vapour-ringed sun that slid into night glowing and quivering with the zones and pillars of the Northern Lights. More wild red deer from Exmoor strayed to the Great Field, which even the rats had quitted. The deer walked into the gardens of the village, some to be shot stealthily, others to sleep into death. The shepherd of the marsh-grazing stamped at night round his fire, clad in the skins of sheep, and swinging his arms. Beyond the straw-and-sack-stuffed hurdles, foxes, badgers, and stoats slunk and prowled and fought for each others' bodies. Over the lambs in the fold flew Kronk the raven, black and croaking in the moonlight. _Ck!_ cried Old Nog, tottering to the Shrarshook from the sandhills, where he hid shivering during the time of high-tides. The wind whined in the skeleton of his mate, broken at the knees, near the skull of Marland Jimmy gaping at the crown, eyeless and showing its teeth in ice.