

THE OTTER AND HIS WAYS. 319 



hang to him when killed and suspended from a tree. But as 

 to drawing the hovers and drains of their own accord and 

 helping to find him, that is at once a rare and most valuable 

 quality. The writer has tried to enter, first and last, scores of 

 terriers, most of which would readily go to ground and mark a 

 fox or badger well ; yet four were all he ever owned that for find- 

 ing and bolting an otter were worth a handful of meal. One of 

 them, called Prince, would traverse a wet drain for a quarter of 

 a mile, was often pounded by water, and as often rescued by 

 the spade. Nothing would induce Tip to enter a drain, but he 

 would follow its course above ground, searching for rats' holes, 

 and so find his otter. Fox spoke freely on the trail, and would 

 hunt an otter under a clitter of rocks like a spaniel driving a 

 rabbit through a furze brake. 



But no one perhaps has ever possessed more remarkable 

 terriers than the present (the eighth) Duke of Beaufort, who kept 

 otter hounds for many years. One, called Billy, was so keen and 

 so clever that, if he caught wind of an otter through a rat's hole 

 on the bank, he would first search for an entrance, and if he did 

 find one above water, would go under to a depth of eighteen 

 inches or two feet : then shortly after ecce signum a chain of 

 silver bubbles rises to the surface, and Billy, triumphant, comes 

 up again. Two others acquired this very rare accomplishment 

 from Billy, and like him were occasionally saved by the spade. 

 It is highly probable that on big rivers like the Severn and the 

 Wye, otters grow heavier and bigger than they do on smaller 

 streams, just as trout do. In Devonshire, for instance, the top 

 weight for an old dog-otter is twenty-six pounds ; but on the 

 Trothy, a confluent of the Wye, his Grace killed in the same 

 week a brace of otters, the first scaling twenty-nine and the other 

 twenty-eight pounds. ' In floods,' he writes, * I have found otters 

 far above the water ; once, taking the drag from my own front 

 door at Troy House, the hounds carried it for six miles up the 

 flooded Trothy, and then found him high in a wood overhang- 

 ing a small rivulet. At first I feared it was a fox, but down he 

 came bundling best pace into the brook. Hoping to head him 



