Then, maddened, wild with rage, the rage of one who expects a walk-over and receives a bad jolt instead, that old she-otter really got to work.  She recoiled like a coiled snake, and the polecat felt fire in one loin.

It looked like the contortions of one big, furry beast twisted with cramp, by the moonlight.  You could not possibly separate the combatants, or tell that there were two.  But the polecat only fought because he dared not expose his flank with the foe facing him.  Now, however, as they both rolled he—­

Hi!  It was done in an instant.  At a moment when the roll brought him on top, and when the otter was shifting her own hold for another, and more deadly, which might have “put him to sleep” forever, he miraculously twisted and writhed, eel-fashion, and with one mighty wrench—­a good strip of his skin and fur had to go in that pull, but it couldn’t be helped—­he had broken the other’s hold, leapt clear of the clinch, and was gone.

The otter was up before you could guess what had happened, and was drumming away on his heels; but she soon pulled up, realizing that a polecat may be slow in the books, but not so slow in real life, with her to assist speed.  Anyway, she seemed slower; and, in any case, she could not hope to follow him in the intricacy of holes and cover he was sure to take to, like a fish to water.  Moreover, she was spitting up blood, result of friend polecat’s neat and natty strangle-hold on her throat, and felt more in need of the egg—­which she had won, at any rate—­than a wild-goose chase.

Like a thin, wavy line through the night, friend polecat betook himself to the sea-bank, to a hole in the sea-bank, to the very depths of that hole; and there, in the shape of two angrily smoldering, luminous orbs shining steadily through the pit-like dark, he stayed.  Most of the time, I fancy, he used up in licking his wounds.  They needed it, for, though clean, the punctures from the otter’s canines had gone deep, and a red trail of drops marked the polecat’s route to his lair—­one of his lairs.

Not, be it noted, that he was entirely ignored.  Blood-trails are always items of interest in the wild, especially in the dark hours while man sleeps.  Thus there once came to the mouth of the hole scufflings, and the noise as of an eager, inquisitive crowd—­rats, who hoped for a chance to get their own back on a detested foe.  But one evil snarl from the wounded beast removed them, convinced that the time was not yet.

Once, also, something sniffed out of the stilly night, and that was a fox; but one snap from within, a perfectly abominable smell, and the narrowness of the accommodation proved too much for brer fox, and he, with an insolent cock of the brush, retired.

Then, too, there was a rabbit, not looking where he was going, who got half-way down the burrow before he realized the awful truth, and went out backwards, like a cat with a salmon-tin on its head.