short half hour of warmth,
were hatched at the margin of the stream. Lutra and her companion
followed the fish, and afforded a rare, unexpected sight as, bold with
hunger, they ascended to breathe between the sheets of ice in the pool
by the village gardens. At night the otters wandered over the snow, and
sometimes visited the hillside farms. There, among rotting refuse-heaps,
they discovered worms and insects sheltering in genial warmth. When
exceptionally hungry, Lutra and her mate would dig into the chambers of
the mole and the field-vole in the meadows, and search ravenously for
the inmates. Among the roots of the spreading oaks, the otters found,
also, such tit-bits as the larvae of moths and beetles. A starved pigeon
fallen from the pine-boughs; an occasional moorhen weak and almost
defenceless; a wild duck that Lutra had captured by darting from beneath
a root while the indiscreet bird was feeding, head downwards, at the
river's brink--these were among the varied items of the hungry otters'
food. Life was indeed hard to maintain. And, to crown the misfortunes of
the ice-bound winter, Lutra's matrimonial affairs were once more cruelly
disturbed: her mate was caught in a steel trap that Ned the blacksmith
had baited and laid in the meadows near the village bridge. He had
marked the otters' wanderings by their footprints in the snow, and had
then matured his plans.

The calamity occurred one morning, just before daybreak, as the otters
were returning to the river from a visit to a hen-coop, where they had
found an open door and a solitary chicken. The trap was placed on the
grass by the verge of the stream. A light fall of snow had covered it,
but had left exposed the entrails of a chicken which, by coincidence,
formed the tempting bait. Distressed and perplexed, Lutra stayed by the
dog-otter, trying in vain to release him from his sufferings. The
trapped creature, beside himself with rage and fear and pain, attempted
to gnaw through his crunched and almost severed foot; but as the dawn
lightened the east, and before the limb could be freed, Ned the
blacksmith was to be seen hurrying to the spot. Lutra dived out of
sight, and, unable to interpose, watched, for a second time, a riverside
tragedy. Her attachment, however, had not been of so ardent a nature
that bereavement left her disconsolate. Before April she forgot her
trapped friend, and was mated again.

Lutra's new spouse had his home in the tributary stream