Tarka The Otter Quotes

For within himself, be he clairvoyant and articulate, he will find latent the divisions of the mind of European man, and their opposing impulses.

Tarka the otter,

When the bees’ feet shake the bells of the heather, and the ruddy strings of the sap-stealing dodder are twined about the green spikes of the furze, it is summertime on the commons. Exmoor is the high country of the winds, which are to the falcons and the hawks: clothed by whortleberry bushes and lichens and ferns and mossed trees in the goyals, which are to the foxes, the badgers, and the red deer: served by rain-clouds and drained by rock-littered streams, which are to the otters.

Pity acts through the imagination, the higher light of the world, and imagination arises from the world of things, as a rainbow from the sun.

Though the birds scolded, the foxes snarled, and his own kind drove him away, Tarka had many friends, whom he played with and forgot – sticks, stones, water-weeds, slain fish, and once an empty cocoa-tin, a bright and curious thing that talked strangely as it moved over the shallows, but sank into the pool beyond, sent up three bubbles, and would play no more.

The rising sun silvered the mist lying low and dense on the meadow, where cattle stood on unseen legs. Over the mist the white owl was flying, on broad soft wings. It wafted itself along, light as the mist; the sun showed the snowy feathers on breast and underwings and lit the tallow-gold and grey of its back. It sailed under the middle arch of the bridge and pulled itself by its talons into one of the spaces left in the stone-work by masons. Throughout the daylight it stood among the bones and skulls of mice, often blinking, and sometimes yawning.

Hu-ee-ic! The sky was growing grey. Tarka could not catch a carp, and he was hungry. He went back to the brook. Hu-ee-ic! Only his echo replied, and he wandered on.

The tarn is deep and brown and still, reflecting rushes and reeds at its sides, the sedges of the hills, and the sky over them.

... but in nearly all those who through necessity of life till fields, herd beasts, and keep fowls, these remaining wildings of the moors have enemies who care nothing for their survival. The farmers would exterminate nearly every wild bird and animal of prey, were it not for the land-owners, among whom are some who care for the wildings, because they are sprung from the same land of England, and who would be unhappy if they thought they country would know them no more. For the animal they hunt to kill in its season, or those other animals or birds they cause to be destroyed for the continuance of their pleasure in sport - which they believe to be natural - they have no pity; and since they lack this incipient human instinct, they misunderstand and deride it in others. Pity acts through imagination, the higher light of the world, and imagination arises from the world of things, as a rainbow from the sun. A rainbow may be beautiful and heavenly, but it will not grow corn for bread.

They were among birds what the Irish are among men, always ready in a merry and audacious life to go where there is trouble and not infrequently to be the cause of it.

The icy casings of leaves and grasses and blades and sprigs were glowing and hid in a mist of sun-fire. Moor-folk call this morning glory Ammil.

The first otter to go into deep water had felt the same fear that Tarka felt that night; for his ancestors, thousands of years ago, had been hunters in woods and along the banks of rivers, running the scent of blooded creatures on the earth, like all the members of the weasel race to which they belonged. This race had several tribes in the country of the Two Rivers. Biggest were the brocks, a tribe of badgers who lived in holts scratched among the roots of trees and bushes, and rarely went to water except to drink. They were related to the fitches or stoats, who chased rabbits and jumped upon birds on the earth; and to the vairs or weasels, who sucked the blood of mice and dragged fledgelings from the nest; and to the grey fitches or polecats, so rare in the forests; and to the pine-martens, a tribe so harried by men that one only remained, and he had found sanctuary in a wood where a gin was never tilled and a gun was never fired, where the red deer was never roused and the fox never chased. He was old; his canine teeth worn down. Otters knew the ponds in this wood and they played in them by day, while herons stalked in the shallows and nothing feared the old lady who sometimes sat on the bank, watching the wild creatures which she thought of as the small and persecuted kinsfolk of man.

Many of the salmon that reached the sea alive were taken in the nets of fishermen rough-fish-catching, in the estuary Pool, to be knocked on the head and thrown back - for the fishermen hated the water-bailiffs who upheld the Conservancy Bye-laws protecting salmon out of season, and secretly killed the fish because of their hatred. The fisherman did not believe that salmon spawned in fresh water, where the rivers were young, but regarded it as a story told to prevent them fishing for salmon throughout the year.

In a curious parallel to Warlock and Moeran’s rowdy tenure at Eynsford, on the other side of the country in North Devon the village of Georgeham had been intruded upon by another outside artistic presence. Novelist Henry Williamson moved to a cottage there in 1921 and proceeded to outrage local decency with a string of louche girlfriends, naked swimming displays, throwing apples at neighbouring farmers, dressing like a proto-hippy in loose clothing and bare feet. Best known as author of the children’s book Tarka the Otter, Williamson’s many books, including his fifteen-volume fictionalised memoir A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, testify to a quasi-mystical relationship with nature and the English landscape, while his reputation was later severely tarnished because of his vocal support of the Hitler Youth and Oswald Mosley’s British fascist movement. His son Harry, born in 1950, was destined to become an associate of hippy progressive rockers Gong in the early 1970s, and was part of the collective that organised the earliest free festivals at Stonehenge (see Chapter 16). Already, in the unconventional lifestyle choices of the likes of Warlock, Moeran and Williamson, the pre-echoes of a later British counter-cultural pattern are faintly detectable.