NATURAL HISTORY STUDIES 



roving spirit. " The homeless hunter," Mr. Tre- 

 garthen calls it, " the Bedouin of the wild." " It 

 has been known to travel fifteen miles in a night, 

 and not infrequently the hiding-places where it lies 

 up during the day are ten or twelve miles apart." 

 It passes from tarn to stream, from river to shore ; 

 it swims far out to sea and reaches rocky islands ; 

 it wanders along the cliffs and explores the caves ; 

 it crosses the heather-covered hills, and even the 

 mountain passes, sheltering among the bracken 

 or in the heart of a cairn ; it neither stores nor 

 hibernates, but is always on the move a gipsy 

 among carnivores. 



Resourceful is the right word for an otter. For 

 it is equally at home on land and in water, by 

 night and by day, in a dry burrow or on a shelf under 

 a waterfall ; it can enter the water without a splash, 

 swim near the surface with scarce a ripple ; it can 

 dive in a spiral full fathoms five, and lie under the 

 bank of a stream for hours with its nostril in a space 

 between water and earth. It knows its own foot- 

 steps in the thicket and will not retrace them ; it 

 never goes back to a kill, for that way danger lies ; 

 it will carry a water-trap on its shoulders and 

 wrench it off on the alder-roots ; it will dive at the 

 flash of a gun and elude the bullet ; it is an outlaw 

 of matchless alertness and resource. 



The severest of tests is a hard and prolonged frost. 

 At first it gives an added spice to life, for strings of 

 wild-fowl arrive, and the ice on the mere is a rare 

 playground. It is possible for the otter to hunt 

 for pike beneath the ice, for eels and tench buried 



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