r, when the pigeons left their roosting
places in the pines, an old, decrepit woman tottered down the steps from
the cottage door to the rock at the brim of the pool, and filled her
pails with water. But the creatures felt little alarm: they had become
accustomed to her presence in the dawn. Lonely and childless and poor,
she knew more than any one else of the otters; but she kept their
whereabouts a secret, for the creatures lent an interest to her
cheerless, forsaken life, and recalled to her halting memory the long
past days when her husband told her tales of hunting and fishing as she
sat, a young and pretty girl, at her spinning wheel in the light of the
flickering "tallow-dip."

Warm, cloudy weather continued from the late autumn through the
winter--except for a few days of frost and snow in December--so that
food was never scarce, and Lutra thrived and grew. The great migration
of salmon took place, but she was not sufficiently big and strong to
grip and hold these monster fish. Her own weight hardly exceeded that of
the smallest of them, so she had to be content with a mixed diet of
salmon-fry and trout, varied with an occasional slug or snail that she
chanced to find in the meadow. For a brief period after the fall of snow
in December, the frost fettered the fields, and the moon shone nightly
on a white waste through which the river flowed, like a black, uneven
line, between its hoar-fringed banks. Then Lutra, bold in the unbroken
stillness of Nature's perfect sleep, climbed the steps leading to a
village garden, and searched the refuse heap for scraps discarded from
the cottager's meagre board. She even wandered further, crossed the
road, and passed under a gate into the fields near the outlying stables
of the inn. Here some birds had roosted in the hazels by the fence, and
the cub stood watching them, like the fox beneath the desired but
distant grapes.

A rough, mongrel sheep-dog, having missed his master, who had been
carousing in the inn that evening, chanced to be trotting homeward to
the farm on the hill, and, sniffing at the gate, discovered the cub in
the hedgerow. With a mad yell the dog tore through the briars at the
side of the gate-post; but Lutra was equally quick, and by the time her
enemy was in the field she had dodged under the bars and was shuffling
away, as quickly as her short legs permitted, down the garden to the
river. The dog turned, crashed back through the briars, and gained
rapidly