The chewing of its bony jaws soon made him impatient, and he fixed his teeth into the shoulder and tore away his bite. For five minutes he ate, then stretched up his head, with its spiky neck-hair raised, and assayed the air. _Hu-ee-ic!_ His nostrils opened wide. _Hu-ee-ic!_ White-tip looked over the weir-sill and slid down with the water. _Yinn-yinn-y-y-ikk-r!_ she cried, through her white teeth, and pulled the fish away from Tarka, who rolled on his back and tried to play with her tail. Then he rolled on his pads again and stared down through the rectangular space under the bridge, remembering the other fish. He slid off the rock. White-tip ate two pounds of the mullet. Then she followed Tarka. The leat, with its swift clear water and brown weed--like clusters of stoats' tails--ran parallel to the brook, a few yards away, and past a lime-washed mill with a ruined water-wheel. A fence made of old iron bedsteads was set in the leat's grassy bank, and here White-tip saw the dark shape of Tarka's head against the nobbled lines of framework. He was eating. Seeing her, he whistled. As she ran over the grass, she smelled the scales where he had dragged the fish. _Yinn-yinn!_ she cried again, jumping on the fish and clutching its head in her paws. Tarka watched her. Then he licked the blood from his wounds and ran back to the pill. He was going after more big fish. In the meadow near the lime-washed mill was a dump of house-rubbish, tipped there by dust-carts, and spread about. A sow and her growing litter were routing in the mess of rotten flesh and vegetable food, crunching up egg-shells and bones and cinders with eager delight. Here, while the moon was waning and the low mist was growing white, the otters returned to play a strange game. It was begun by White-tip making a splash before Tarka, to make sure that he would see her leave the water and climb the bank. When he followed, she ran around the meadow and back again, passing close by, but not once looking at him. After a while, they went back to the pill and romped like porpoises. Then they ran up the bank together and wandered off alone, up and down, passing and repassing many times through the squares of the wire fencing, without recognition or purpose, as though they were both mazed. To the water once more, a drink and a search for eels, and again the strange play in the meadow. Each was pretending not to see the other; so happy were they to be together, that they were trying to recover the keen joy of meeting.