The leat flowed under a road, and under a brick cliff that was one wall of the town mills, swirled back from the locked wheel and gushed under a penstock and through a culvert to the pill, from which the sea was ebbing. Tarka and White-tip swam over the drowned white flowers of scurvey-grass to the bend where timber lay, and climbing out, sought a hiding-place among the pile of oaken trunks. As they crept along a rough bole a rat squealed, another squealed, and soon all the rats of the timber stack were squealing. An old buck saw Tarka and fled away, followed by others, who were either bucks or does without young. Some of the rats dived into the water, others ran to farther wood stacks, where lived families that fought with the invaders. Their squeals came out of the planks all the morning, while the ringing rasp of circular saws was loud in the sunlight. These rats were heard by the sawyers, and during the dinner-hour one went off to fetch his ferrets. * * * * * Tarka and White-tip were lying in a hollow trunk, curled side by side, their heads close together. The hollow was damp; its crevices still held skulls and leg-bones of mice and sparrows, that had looked at Tarka when he was very young. There were also fishbones with a faint smell, but even these were beyond memory. In the autumn, long after the cubs had left its friendly hollow, the tree had been cut off from its roots and dragged by horses across the meadow and taken away, with other trees, to the saw mills. Hidden in the pile of trunks, the otters heard the grumbling of the grist mill across the creek, with the noises of traffic and the voices of men. During the morning Tarka shook his ears, tickled by the irritant buzzing of a bluebottle-fly caught and fanged in a spider's web outside the hollow. Long after the fly was dead Tarka heard the buzzing, but without twitching his ears; for similar sounds now came from the bridge, where the motor-traffic crossed two roads. The noises were quieter when the sun was on the top of the sky, and the otters heard distinctly the chirping of sparrows. Then the chirping grew less, for the birds had flown to feed in the quieter roadways. Tarka ceased to listen for footfalls, and slept.