romiscuously what he does not eat.
It is, I suppose, a lingering tradition of our old stern game laws that
imposes a severe penalty for poaching when a man picks up a salmon
which an otter has killed and left.

Birds abound on Exmoor; snipe and woodcock, partridge and black-game,
plover and wild-duck. Nothing could more exactly express the
loneliness and wildness of this great open country than, when you are
walking solitary, to hear the harsh, melancholy cry of the bittern from
the reedy, desolate bogs, or in the falling daylight of a cloudy
February afternoon to see the plover rise from the tussocks of brown
grass at your feet, and go flying and wailing above you, in that
broken-winged, broken-hearted way of theirs, or to watch the duck
flying home across the sunset, with their strange honk-honk!

For all that I have said about the barrenness of these great moors,
Exmoor is the land of sweet waters. The Exe, the Barle, the Quarine,
rising near Dunkery Beacon, the Haddes from the Brendon Hills, the Lyn,
the Wear Water, the Badgeworthy (up which little John Ridd fished for
loach), the Parley Water, the Horner, which runs into Porlock Bay, the
East Water, all these beautiful clear, clean streams abound with fish,
and have the freshness and the sparkle of this sparkling upland air.
Wherever there is a fold in the ground there is running water--though
geographically one should put it in the opposite way, that wherever the
water runs there is a fold in the ground--and wherever it runs flowers
and ferns and trees grow in beautiful abundance. I have already
described the luxuriant green of the wooded gorges of the Lyn, the
variety of trees and the luxuriance of ferns and mosses; the Horner
Woods, near Porlock, have the same green loveliness, though a sharper
air blows through them, as they stand nearer the Exmoor heights and
less sheltered by steep rocks than those that overshadowed the Lyn, and
on a summer afternoon there is a sharp smell of resin from the
sun-warmed pines, and the keen air stirs even in the depths of the wood.

And besides these rivers there are numberless little unnamed streams,
everywhere the tinkle and chatter of water, breaking over stones,
slipping through the peaty earth, falling in a thin spray down the face
of the cliffs, spreading out across the white rocks of an encircled
cove, incessant movement and change of colour and light, a ceaseless
ripple and gleam of reflected water across the lichen