Above the next bridge the leading fish rushed back and skurried by him, missing his snap by a curve that gleamed all its side, and a flack of its tail that filled Tarka's mouth with air. It escaped, with six of its grey brethren, but the last two were headed again. Tarka drove them up the straight and narrowing pill, through the collar of the tide and into still water, which was strange to the mullet, it was so clear and shallow. Tarka was now a mile from the pill-mouth. The image of the bright moon rolled in shaken globules in the hollows of the brook's swift waters, blending as quicksilver. Points of shining rested on the black bubbles riding on the crests of hollows. Every ten yards two clusters of tiny silver beads arose out of the blackness and vanished in a silver streak. Sometimes a delicate silver arrow pointed up the brook and was tangled in a fish-tail swirl. Every ten yards the whiskered head looked up for direction--only the immediate foreground was visible under water--and smoothly vanished. Tarka swam with all his webs thrusting together against the swift current, just above the bed of the brook, ready to leap up and snap should the fish try to pass him. He swam under a bridge of the small-gauge railway, whose shadow darkened the water. As he thrust up his head to vent, Tarka saw beyond the shadow-bar the white blur of water sliding over the sill of a weir. Under water again, he looked from side to side more quickly, for in this dark place the fish might easily slip by him, although the water was not two feet deep. When midway through the shadow, his rudder swished up sickle-shaped, slanting his body. His hind legs touched stones; he sprang. The scales of the two fish coming straight towards him in the darkness reflected only the darkness, but he had seen a hair of faintest light where the ream of a back-fin had cut the surface and glimmered with the moon-frosted slide. His teeth tore the tail of the leading fish, which escaped--his rudder lashed for another turn, his body screwed through the water, and struck upwards with teeth into the mullet's gorge. Tarka swam into moonlight and dragged the five-pound fish (despite its beats and flaps) on to a shillet heap under the spillway of the slide. He gripped it with his paws and stood over it and started to eat it, while its gills opened and closed, and it tried feebly to flap.