An otter-path lay across the next bend, and he followed it to the middle of the field, where he hesitated. Strange smells lay in the dew. He scraped at a place in the grass where paper had been rammed by a pole, near orange peel covered by a loose tuft. He walked on, nose to ground, and smelt man, where hobnailed boots had pressed the turf and crushed cigarette-ends. He turned back, and would have gone straight to water if he had not heard the cry of a bitch-otter at the far end of the path. _Hu-ee-ee-ic!_ he answered, and ran along to find her. Near the middle of the meadow he stopped as though he had trod on a gin. The taint of hounds lay thick with the scent of otter. Grasses were smeared with blood and spittle. His hair rose on his back. He blew through open mouth, swung his head about as though looking for hounds, and was gone, silent as his low moon shadow. The river flowed darkly to the bend, where it broke shallow over shillets that scattered the moonlight. Tarka saw a movement at the tail of the shoal, where an otter was listening. She ran to him and licked his face, then she mewed, and ran on alone by the riverside. Tarka followed her. She was draggled and miserable. She caught a trout and called him, but when he reached her she yikkered and started to eat it herself. She mewed again, and ran into the water. And following her, Tarka returned to the scour opposite the ash-tree holt where that morning the hounds had plunged and bayed. All the way upstream she had been calling, and searching under banks, and on the beds of pools. At length she crawled on the scour with something in her mouth, and dropped it on the stones. She licked it from head to tail, and mewing again, sank back into the water and returned with another, which she laid with the first-found. Perhaps she could not count beyond two; perhaps White-tip had not known in her terror how many cubs she had dropped in the water, when the terrier had driven her out of her holt. The Master had seen them, sinking in the pool, lit by a sun-shaft; and hounds were whipped off. They drew on up the river, and found the dog-otter, her mate, and killed him three hours later as he tried to cross a meadow to the wooded hillside. The old dog and White-tip had wandered together since Tarka had been driven from her in the autumn. Her first litter had been born in January, when the river had frozen, and one day White-tip, returning to the holt, had found them gone. She had called them, seeking everywhere, and in pain, but she had found none to suckle, for a badger walking on the ice had dug them out with his long black claws and eaten them. White-tip's grief had been so keen that soon it had grown less; and she had lain with her mate in the bracken of Ferny Hill.