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Fortunately for Lutra, the arch of the boulders below was shaped so peculiarly that the scent of her breath and body was sucked into a cavity and carried down-stream, and, passing beneath the stone, mingled, at the raging cataract near the rock, with air in the bubbles formed by the tumult of the waters.
Had the old man taken one false step he would have entered on a struggle for life compared with which my own adventure after hooking the grilse would have been insignificant. For several months free, happy Lutra made her daytime abode in a "holt" among the alder-roots fringing this pool.
And, according to a similar method, stoats and polecats, whenever possible, seize their victims near the base of the brain. In yet another way Lutra proved her relationship to the weasel tribe: just as our miniature land-otters eat only small portions of the rabbits they kill, so the cub was content with a juicy morsel behind the salmon's head a morsel known among sportsmen as "the otter's bite."
Suddenly, however, our ragamuffin hounds struck the line of nobler game: Lutra, the otter, was astir in the pool.
When Lutra had attained her full size and strength she was wooed and won by a young dog-otter of her own age, and lived with him in a "holt" among the great rocks of Alltycafn. Now, again, the Hunt arrived in the neighbourhood. It was a lovely morning in May. The sun shone brightly; the leaves were breaking from their sheaths; the birds sang blithely in the trees.
But, less familiar than Lutra with the strength of the current, they left the water as they approached the fall, and crept through the deep shadows of the alder-roots till they reached a point at some distance beyond the pool. These events of the night were of the utmost importance to the otters as connected with the events of the morrow.
There were times in the second summer of her existence when Lutra, like the wild ducks, seemed to abandon every thought of the possibility of danger.
When Lutra was nine months old she caught her first salmon; and, though the fish was only a small "kelt," returning, weak from spawning, to the sea, the capture was a fair test of the cub's prowess and daring. It happened thus. She was walking up the river-bed one boisterous night, when she saw a dark form hovering close to the surface in the middle of a deep pool.
To Lutra, lonely like the thrush, and, like the thrush, not yet aware of pain and hunger, the world seemed bright and filled with happiness. At first, like a young fox that, till he learns the fear of dogs and men, steals chickens from a coop near which an old, experienced fox would never venture, she was, perhaps, a little too indifferent to danger.
For a time no sign of a living creature was visible; then a brown rat crept along the bank beneath my hiding place; a dim form, which from its size I concluded was that of Lutra, the otter, crossed a spit of sand about a dozen yards above the reed-bed, where a moonbeam glanced through the alders; and a big brown owl, silhouetted against the sky, flew silently up-stream, and perched on a low, bare branch of a Scotch fir beside the grass-grown path.
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