Tarka watched the bird until it glided below the hill, when he ran on again, finding nothing in the plashes moving only with images of sky and clouds and birds of solitude. Then the sun took the water, breaking brilliant and hot in every plash; the otter galloped with instant joy and sank in bog to his belly. He dragged himself on to a tussock of grass, rolled, shook himself, and set off again, roaming around the fen until he heard again the cry of running water. The cry came out of a hollow, whose sides were scarred by the sliding of broken hummocks--the faint cry of a river new-born. Through a winding channel in the turf, no wider than the otter and hidden by grasses growing over it, the little thread hastened, seeking its valley to the sea. It fell over its first cascade and cast its first bubbles; and through a groove between hills it found a marsh where a green moss grew with rushes. Beyond the marsh, it ran strong and bright over its bed of granite gravel, everywhere glinting and singing. Over and under and past boulders of granite, splashing upon mosses whose browny-red seeds on the tall stalks were like bitterns standing with beaks upheld. Lichens grew on other boulders: silver with black undersides, and curled like strange pelts curing: grey-green in the shapes of trees and plants: bones with scarlet knuckles: horns of moose: shells and seaweeds. The lichens fastened to the granite were as the fantastic and brittle miniatures of strange and forgotten things of the moor. By pools and waterfalls and rillets the river Taw grew, flowing under steep hills that towered high above. It washed the roots of its first tree, a willow thin and sparse of bloom, a soft tree wildered in that place of rocks and rain and harsh grey harrying winds. A black-faced sheep stood by the tree, cropping the sweet grass; and when a strange, small, flashing, frightening head looked out just below its feet, the sheep stamped and bounded away up the hill to its lamb asleep by a sun-hot boulder. Tarka had caught a trout, the first in a mile of river; he ate it, drank, and slipped away with the water.