Plot summary

Tarka the otter is a tale about an otter; it starts off with him as a cub with his mother and fellow siblings. As a cub, he learns how to clean himself, swimming and other things. He learns that fish is food and that with the help of his rudder, he can guide himself through the water as naturally an otter has the potential to do. It was not instinct at first though, as it says that he had to learn confidence in swimming. When his home is attacked by hunters, he and his wild family must abandon it to flee from danger. Joining up with some other otters, the family continue to travel. At some point he loses his family and his mother forgets she even had a cub named Tarka. So at this point he has grown to fend for himself. He continues to be hunted by the hunters and the feared hunting dog Deadlock, and so he is constantly on the run from them. In the end, as he is once again being chased by the pack of hounds, it is then and there that his life is ended in a heroic deathmatch with the dog in his nightmares. In his last throes, he manages to take Deadlock down with him, and thus ends the life of an otter named Tarka.

Henry William Williamson (1 December 1895 – 13 August 1977) was an English soldier, naturalist, farmer and ruralist writer known for his natural history and social history novels, as well as for his fascist sympathies. He won the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 with his book 'Tarka the Otter'.

Henry Williamson is best known for a tetralogy of four novels which consists of 'The Beautiful Years' (1921), 'Dandelion Days' (1922), 'The Dream of Fair Women' (1924) and 'The Pathway' (1928). These novels are collectively known as 'The Flax of Dream' and they follow the life of Willie Maddison from boyhood to adulthood in a rapidly changing world.