CREATURES OF THE NIGHT

“THE BROAD RIVER, IN WHICH SHE HAD SPENT HER EARLY LIFE.”
(See p. 50.)
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CREATURES OF THE NIGHT

A BOOK OF WILD LIFE IN
WESTERN BRITAIN

BY ALFRED W. REES

AUTHOR OF
“IANTO THE FISHERMAN”

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1905

PREFACE.

The Editors of The Standard have kindly permitted me to republish the
contents of this book, and I tender them my thanks.

The original form of these Studies of animal life has been extensively
altered, and, in some instances, the titles have been changed.

I am again greatly indebted to my brother, R. Wilkins Rees. His wide and
accurate knowledge has been constantly at my disposal, and in the
preparation of these Studies he has given me much indispensable advice
and assistance.

Similarity in the habits of some of the animals described has made a
slight similarity of treatment unavoidable in certain chapters.

I may also remark that, in unfrequented districts where beasts and birds
of prey are not destroyed by gamekeepers, the hare is as much a creature
of the night as is the badger or the fox.

ALFRED W. REES.

CONTENTS.

THE OTTER.
I.
THE HOLT AMONG THE ALDERS.
	PAGE
Late fishing—A summer night—River voices—A master-fisher— The old mansion—Lingering beauty—The otters’ “oven”—Observant youngsters—Careful motherhood—The meadow playground—Falling leaves—A swollen river—Dabchick’s oar-like wings—Mysterious proceedings—Migrating salmon—Hoar-fringed river-banks—An adventure with a sheep-dog—Slip-shod builders—Signs of spring—A change of diet—Fattening trout—The capture of a “kelt”—“The otter’s bite”—Lone wanderings.	1-23
II.
THE POOL BENEATH THE FARMSTEAD.
A song of autumn—The salmon pool—Angling difficulties—Bullying a sportive fish—An absent-minded fisherman—At dawn and nightfall—A deserted home—Practical joking—A moorhen’s fate—Playfulness of youth—The torrent below the fall—The garden ponds—Feasting on frogs—A watcher of the night—Hounds and hunters—Lutra’s discretion—The spell of fear	24-40
III.
THE GORGE OF ALLTYCAFN.
The Hunt again—Fury of despair—A “strong place”—The terrier’s discomfiture—Lutra’s widowhood—Summer drought—Life at the estuary—Returning to the river—Scarce provender—A rare and unexpected sight—The blacksmith’s baited trap—The Rock of Gwion—Peace	41-50

THE WATER-VOLE.
I.
OUR VILLAGE HOUNDS.
Quiet life—Leisure hours—A winter pastime—A miscellaneous pack—The bobtail, and his fight with an otter—The terrier, and his friendship with fishermen—A family party—Expert diving—Hunt membership, and the landlord as huntsman—Fast and furious fun—A rival Hunt—The bobtail’s death—The terrier’s eccentricities—A pleasant study begins—Brown rats—Yellow ants—Brighteye’s peculiarities—Evening sport	51-67
II.
THE BURROW IN THE RIVER BANK.
At dusk—A picturesque home—Main roads and lanes of the riverside people—A heron’s alertness—A rabbit’s danger signal—The reed-bed—The vole in fear—The wildest of the wild—Tell-tale footprints—The significance of a blood-stain—A weasel’s ferocity—Maternal warnings—A rat-hunting spaniel—An invaded sanctuary—The terrier’s opportunity—The water-vole chatters and sings—A gladsome life—Dangers sharpen intellect	68-82
III.
WILD HUNTING.
An otter-hunt—Fading afterglow—Spiritual influence of night—Lutra and Brighteye—Brighteye’s song—Chill waters—A beacon in the gloom—A squirrel’s derision—A silvery phantom—An old, lean trout—Restless salmon—Change of quarters—Brighteye’s encounter with a “red” fish	83-98
IV.
SAVED BY AN ENEMY.
The “redd” in the gravel—In company with a water-shrew—Ravenous trout—The salmon’s attack—An otter appears—Brighteye’s bewilderment—Increasing vigilance—Playful minnows—A new water-entrance—The winter granary—Careful harvesting—The dipper’s winter carol—The robin and the wren at vespers—Unsafe quarters—Rats on the move—A sequestered pool—Icebound haunts	99-115
V.
THE COURAGE OF FEAR.
The dawn—Restlessness of spring—A bold adventurer—A sharp fight—Cleared pathways—Differences of opinion—A tight snuggery—In defence of home—A monster rat—Temporary refuge—The voles and the cannibal trout—Family troubles—A winter evening in the village	116-129

THE FIELD-VOLE.
I.
HIDDEN PATHWAYS IN THE GRASS.
A pleasant wilderness—Pitying Nature—Hedgerow sentinels—The story of the day—Familiar signs—An unknown scent—The agony of fear—A change of mood—The weasel’s raid—A place of slaughter—Autumn preparations—A general panic—Hibernation—Winter sunshine—The red bank-voles—Owls and hawks	131-150
II.
THE VALLEY OF OLWEN.
The last of winter’s stores—Renewed activity—The field-vole’s food—A lively widow vole—An unequal encounter—First fond passion—Ominous sounds—A clumsy rabbit—An unimportant “affair”—An elopement—Nesting time—A fussy parent—A fox pays a visit—Also a carrion crow—Repairing damages	151-166
III.
A BARREN HILLSIDE.
A secluded pasture—Poachers and owls—An astute magpie—The vole a sire of many families—Plague—Nature’s caprice—Privation and disease—Unexpected destroyers—A living skeleton—Starvation and death—An owl once more	167-175

THE FOX.
I.
THE LAST HUNT.
A baffled marauder—The flesh of breeding creatures tough and tasteless—An unsavoury rat—The arrival of the Hunt—The fox sees his foes—The view-halloo—No respite, no mercy, no sanctuary—The last hope—A fearless vixen—Defiant to the end	177-193
II.
A NEW HOME.
Life in an artificial “earth”—Longing and despair—Contentment of maternity—Prisoners—A way of escape—Careless infancy—A precocious cub—First lessons—An obedient family—A fox’s smile—Inborn passion for flesh—Favourite food of fox-cubs—The huntsman’s desire	194-209
III.
THE CUB AND THE POLECAT.
Patience and watchfulness—How to capture field-voles—Winding trails—Ill-luck—A painful surprise—A fresh line of scent—Cost of a struggle—A luckless fortnight—The old hound and the “young entry”—A curiously shaped monster—Pursued by a lurcher— Desertion—A vagrant bachelor	210-223
IV.
A CRY OF THE NIGHT.
The hunting call—A recollection—A joyous greeting—A woodland bride—The sting of a wasp—Preparation of a “breeding earth”—Meddlesome jays and magpies—A rocky fastness on the wild west coast—Vulp’s retreat—The end of a long life—The fox’s mask—Memories	224-240

THE BROWN HARE.
I.
THE UPLAND CORNFIELD.
Midsummer—The leveret’s birth—First wanderings—Instinct and teaching—The “creeps”—In the stubble—Habits change with seasons—The “sweet joint” of the rye—Lessons from a net and a lurcher—Rough methods—The man-scent—On the hills above the river-mists	241-260
II.
MARCH MADNESS.
March winds—Reckless jack-hares—Courtship and rivalry—Motherhood—A harmless conflict—An intruding fox—The faithless lover—Maternal courage—The falcon’s “stoop”—The “slit-eared” hare—Countryside superstitions—On the river island—Patience rewarded—The hare as a swimmer—Bloodless sport—Habits of the hare in wet weather—The “form” in the root-field—Bereavements—Increasing caution— Productiveness in relation to food—A poacher’s ruse	261-277
III.
THE CHASE.
The basset-hound—Mirthful and dignified—A method of protecting hares—A suggestion—Formidable foes—“Fouling” the scent—A cry of distress—The home in the snow-drift—The renegade cat—An inoffensive life—A devastating storm	278-291

THE BADGER.
I.
A WOODLAND SOLITUDE.
Haunts of a naturalist—Why certain animals are unmolested—Means of security—Fear of dogs and men—A place of interest—The “nocturnal” instinct—Droll revelry—Serious pastimes—Teaching by reward and punishment—Animals study the disposition of their young—Voices of the wilderness	293-309
II.
HOME DISCIPLINE.
Unwelcome attentions—An old badger’s watchfulness—A clever trick—A presumptuous youngster—Instructions in selfishness—Harsh measures—The badger and the stoat—A long ramble	310-324
III.
FEAR OF THE TRAP.
Wisdom in Nature’s ways—The laggard of the family—A salutary lesson—Hand-scent and foot-scent—An old Welsh law—The lesson of a “double” scent—The sorrel as medicine—A wild bees’ nest—“In grease”	325-339
IV.
THE WINTER “OVEN.”
The vixen and the hounds—The wounded rabbit—Old inhabitants of the wood—In touch with enemies—Twilight romps—Brock’s quarrel with his sire—A bone of contention—Prompt chastisement—A mournful chorus—Wild fancies of a bachelor—A big battle—The terror of the flock—Unwarranted suspicion—Caught in the act	340-356
V.
HILLSIDE TRAILS.
The backward “drag”—Loyalty tested—A spiteful spouse—Spring cleaning—Carrying litter to the “set”—A numerous family—An eviction—Vulpicide—Important news—Old traditions of sport revived—A long day’s toil—The secret history of a “draw”—An old burrow	357-373

THE HEDGEHOG.
I.
A VAGABOND HUNTER.
The nest in the “trash”—Quaint wildlings—Neighbours and enemies—A feast—Spines and talons—The gipsy boy—A vagabond’s sport—The nest in the wild bees’ ruined home—Insects killed by frost—Winter quarters of the lizard and the snail	377-391
II.
AN EXPERIENCE IN SNAKE-KILLING.
An iron winter—March awakening—A coat of autumn leaves—The Rip Van Winkle of the woods—Sunshine and strength—Faulty eyesight—The hedgehog and the viper—Worsting an enemy—The moorhen’s nest—Antics of weasels and snakes—The hedgehog’s bleat—Odd and awkward courtship	392-406

NIGHT IN THE WOODS.
I.
HAUNTS OF THE BADGER AND THE FOX.
Wild life at night—Long watching—A “set” with numerous inhabitants—The vixen and her cubs—Tolerant badgers—Vigilance—A moorland episode—“Chalking the mark”—Fox-signs—A habit of voles and rabbits—Patience, in vain—Sulky badgers—The vixen’s lair—Foxes at play	407-426
II.
THE CRAG OF VORTIGERN.
Difficulties of night watching—Powers of observation in wild creatures—Night wanderers dislike rain—Eager helpers—A tempting invitation—Cry of young owls—Philip, the silent watcher—The fern-owl’s rattle—The leaping places of the hare—Night gossip—The meaning of the white and black markings on a badger’s head—The secrets of the cave	427-443
Index	445-448

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FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

From Drawings by

Florence H. Laverock.

“THE BROAD RIVER, IN WHICH SHE HAD SPENT HER EARLY LIFE.” See p. 50		Frontispiece.
“AN OPPORTUNITY CAME, WHICH, HAD SHE BEEN POISED IN THE AIR, COULD SCARCELY HAVE BEEN MISSED.”	To face p.	88
“THE BIG TROUT, IN HIS TORPEDO-LIKE RUSH TO CUT OFF BRIGHTEYE FROM SURE REFUGE.” See p. 105	”     ”	104
“SHE WAS HOLDING ONE OF HER OFFSPRING BY THE NECK, IN PREPARATION FOR FLIGHT.” See p. 139	”     ”	138
“HE RETIRED TO A ROCKY FASTNESS ON THE WILD WEST COAST.”	”     ”	238
“WHEN THE EARLY AUTUMN MOON ROSE OVER THE CORN.”	”     ”	290
“HE CLIMBED FROM HIS DOORWAY, AND STOOD MOTIONLESS, WITH UPLIFTED NOSTRILS, INHALING EACH BREATH OF SCENT.”	”     ”	364
“AS HE MEASURED HIS FULL LENGTH AGAINST THE TREE.” See p. 419	”     ”	418

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Top

THE OTTER.

[Pg 3]

I.

THE HOLT AMONG THE ALDERS.

I first saw Lutra, the otter-cub, while I
was fishing late one summer night. Slow-moving
clouds, breaking into fantastic shapes
and spreading out great, threatening arms
into the dark, ascended from the horizon
and sailed northward under the moon and
stars. Ever and anon, low down in
the sky, Venus, like a clear-cut diamond
suspended from one of its many twinkling
points, glittered between the fringes of the
clouds, or the white moon diffused soft
light among the wreathing vapours that
twisted and rolled athwart the heavens.
In the shelter of the pines on the margin[Pg 4]
of the river, a ringdove, awakened by a
bickering mate, fluttered from bough to
bough; and his angry, muffled coo of
defiance marred the stillness of the night.
The gurgling call of a moorhen, mingling
with the ripple of the stream over the
ford, came from the reeds at a distant
bend of the river. Nearer, the river, with
varying cadence, rose and fell in uneven
current over a rocky shelf, and then came
on to murmur around me while I waded
towards the edge of a deep, forbidding
pool. In the smooth back-wash beyond the
black cup of the pool a mass of gathered
foam gleamed weirdly in the dark; and,
further away, broad tangles of river-weed,
dotted with the pale petals of countless
flowers, floated on the shallow trout-reach
extending from the village gardens to the
cornfields below the old, grey church.

In one of the terraced gardens behind
me a cottager was burning garden refuse;
tongues of flame leaped up amid billows of
smoke, and from the crackling heap a myriad
sparks shot out on every side. While
the cottager moved about by the fire, his
shadow lengthened across the river, which,[Pg 5]
reflecting the lurid glare, became strangely
suggestive of unfathomable depths. The
moorhen called again from the reeds near
the ford, then flew away over the fire-flushed
river and disappeared into the gloom; and a
water-vole dropped with a gentle plash into
the pool.

Casting a white moth quietly over the
stream, I noticed beyond the shadows a
round mass rising from the centre of the
current, moving against the flood, and sinking
noiselessly out of sight. There could be no
doubt that the shape and motion were those
of an otter. To continue my sport would
have been in vain with such a master-fisher
in the pool, so I reeled in my line, and stood
still among the ripples as they circled,
muttering, around my knees. Presently
the dim form of the otter reappeared a
little further up-stream, and I caught sight
of a glistening trout in the creature’s
mouth.

The otter swam, with head just above
water, towards the alders skirting the opposite
bank, and then, turning sharply, was lost
to sight near the overhanging roots of a
sycamore. Immediately afterwards, a strange,[Pg 6]
flute-like whistle—as if some animal, having
ascended from the depths of the river, had
blown water through its nostrils in a violent
effort to breathe—came from the whirlpool
in the dense shadows of the pines: the
otter’s mate was hunting in the quiet water
beyond the shelf of rock. Then a slight,
rattling sound on the pebbly beach of a
little bay near the sycamore indicated that
the animal had landed and was probably
devouring the captured fish. The leaping
flames of the cottager’s fire had been
succeeded by a fitful glow, but the moon
glided from behind the clouds and revealed
a distinct picture of the parent otter standing
on the shingle, in company with Lutra, her
little cub.

---

A deserted mansion—to whose history, like
the aged ivy to its crumbling walls, clung
many a fateful legend—nestled under the
precipitous woods in the valley. Time,
taking advantage of neglect, had made a
wilderness of the gardens, the lawns, and
the orchards, which, less than a century
ago, surrounded with quiet beauty this[Pg 7]
home of a typical old country squire. A
few garden flowers still lingered near the
porch; but the once well tended borders
were overgrown with grass, or occupied
with wild blossoms brought from the fields
by the hundred agents employed by Nature
to scatter seed. Owls inhabited the outhouses,
and bats the chinks beneath the
eaves. A fox had his “earth” in the
shrubbery beyond the moss-grown pathway
leading from the door to the gate at
the end of the drive. A timid wood-pigeon
often flew across from the pines and
walked about the steps before the long-closed
door. Near the warped window of
the dismantled gun-room the end of a
large water-pipe formed a convenient burrow
for some of the rabbits that played at dusk
near the margin of the shrubbery. This
water-pipe led to the river’s brink; and
there, having been broken by landslips
resulting from the ingress of the stream
during flood, one of the severed parts of
the tube formed, beneath the surface of
the water, an outlet to a natural chamber
high and dry in the bank. The upper
portion of the pipe was choked with earth[Pg 8]
and leaves washed down from the fields
by the winter rains.

In this hollow “oven,” on a heap of hay,
moss, and leaves, brought hither by the parent
otters through an opening they had tunnelled
into the meadow, Lutra was born. Her
nursery was shared by two other cubs. Blind,
helpless, murmuring little balls of fur, they
were tended lovingly by the dam.

Soon the thin membrane between their
eyelids dried and parted, and they awoke to
a keen interest in their surroundings. Their
chamber was dimly lit by the hole above;
and the cubs, directly they were able to
crawl, feebly climbed to a recess behind the
shaft, where they blinked at the clouds that
sailed beneath the dome of June, and at
the stars that peeped out when night drew
on, or watched the limpid water as, flowing
past the end of the pipe below, it bore
along a twirling leaf or rolled a pebble down
the river-bed. Occasionally a salmon-pink
wandered across from the shallows; for a
moment or two the play of its tiny fins
was seen at the edge of the pipe; and the
cubs, excited by a sight of their future prey,
stretched their necks and knowingly held[Pg 9]
their heads askew, so that no movement of
the fish might escape their observation.

Among flesh-eating mammals of many
kinds, the females display signs of intelligence
earlier than the males. Lutra being the
only female among the cubs, she naturally
grew to be the most keenly observant, and
often identified the finny visitor before her
brothers ventured to decide that it was not
a moving twig.

The dam spent most of the day asleep in
the “holt,” and most of the night fishing
in the pools. Inheriting the disposition
of their kind, the cubs also were more
particularly lively by night than by day.
Directly the cold dew-mist wreathed the
grass at the entrance of the burrow, they
commenced to sport and play, tumbling
over each other, grunting and fighting in
mimic anger, or pretending to startle their
mother directly she entered the pipe on
returning at intervals from fishing.

One night, while the cubs were rougher
than ever in their fun, Lutra slipped off the
platform and fell headlong down the pipe
into the stream. But almost before she
had time to be frightened she discovered[Pg 10]
that to swim was as easy as to play; and
she rose to the surface with a faint, flute-like
call. She splashed somewhat wildly,
for her stroke was not yet perfected
by practice. Hearing the commotion and
instantly recognising its meaning, the dam
dived quietly and swiftly right beneath the
cub, and bore her gently back to the platform,
where the rest of the family, having
missed their companion, had for the moment
ceased to romp and fight.

A few nights after this incident, the mother
commenced in earnest to educate her young.
Tenderly taking each in turn, she carried
the nurslings into the water, and taught
them, by a method and in language
known only to themselves, how to dive and
swim with the least possible exertion and
disturbance.

Henceforward, throughout the summer,
and till the foliage on the trees near the
pool, chilled by the rapid fall of the
temperature every evening, became thinner
in the breath of the early autumn wind,
the otter-cubs fished, and frolicked, and
slept, or were suckled by their dam. Sometimes
the whole family, together with the[Pg 11]
old dog-otter, adjourned to the middle of
the meadow, and in the tall, dew-drenched
grass skipped like kittens, though with comical
clumsiness rather than with the agility they
displayed in the water. Like kittens, too,
the cubs played with their mother, in spite
of wholesome chastisement when they nipped
her muzzle rather more severely than even
long-suffering patience could allow. The
dam was at all times loath to correct her
offspring, but the sire rarely endured the
familiarity of the cubs for long. Directly
they became unduly presumptuous he
lumbered off to the river, as if he considered
it much more becoming to fish than to
join in the sport of his progeny. Perhaps,
indeed, he deemed a change of surroundings
essential that he might forget the liberties
taken with him by his disrespectful youngsters.

When about three months old, Lutra
began to show promise of that grace of
form and motion which in later life was
to be one of her chief distinctions. Her
body, tail, and head gradually lengthened;
and, as her movements in the water became
more sinuous and easy, she tired less rapidly
when fishing.[Pg 12]

Autumn passed on towards winter, the
nights were long, the great harvest of
the leaves fell thickly on the meadow
and the stream, the mountain springs were
loosed in muddy torrents, and the river
roared, swollen and turbid, past the “holt”
under the trailing alder-twigs. The moorhens
came back from the ponds where they
had nested in April and May; the wild
duck and the teal flew south from oversea,
and in the night descended circling to the
pool; a dabchick from the wild gorge
down-river took up his abode in the sedges.

The quick jerk of the dabchick’s oar-like
wings caused much wonder to Lutra, when,
walking on the river-bed, she looked up
towards the moonlit sky, and saw the
little grebe dive like a dark phantom
into the deep hole beneath the rocky
ledges of Penpwll. Once the otter-cub,
acting under an irresistible impulse, swam
towards the bird and tried to seize him.
She managed to grip one of his feet, as
they trailed behind him while he dived,
but the grebe escaped, leaving in the
assailant’s mouth only a morsel of flesh
torn from a claw.[Pg 13]

In the warm evenings of late summer
and the first weeks of autumn, the angler
usually visited the shingle opposite the
water-pipe, and waded up-stream casting
for trout. The otter-cubs, grown wiser
than when the angler saw them near the
sycamore, discreetly stayed at home, for
they had been taught to regard this
strange being, Man, known by his peculiar
footfall and upright walk, as a dreaded
enemy scarcely less formidable than the
hounds and the terriers that at intervals
accompanied him for the express purpose
of hunting such river-folk as otters and
rats.

As yet Lutra had never seen the hounds,
nor, till the following summer, was she
to know the import of her instinctive
timidity. Roaming, hungry, and venturesome,
she had chanced at nightfall to
catch a glimpse, during an occasional gleam
of moonlight, of a large trout struggling
frantically on the surface of the water not
far from the angler, had heard the click of
the reel and the swish of the landing net,
and had concluded that these mysterious
proceedings gave cause for fear.[Pg 14]

The end of October drew nigh; and,
when the last golden leaves began to
fall from the beeches, the angler ceased
to frequent the riverside. Henceforward,
except when a sportsman passed with his
gun, the otters’ haunt remained in peace.

Always at break of day, however, 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[Pg 15]
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.[Pg 16]

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 on
the otter. He reached her just as she
gained the top of the wall that, on a level
with the garden, formed a barrier against
the river-floods. Lutra felt a sharp nip on
her flank, and was bowled over by the
impetuous rush of her foe; but she regained
her feet in an instant, and jumped without
hesitation into the water. The river was
shallow where she fell; the dog followed
her; and for a moment she was in deadly
peril. But before the sheep-dog recovered
from his sudden plunge, Lutra swam into
the deep water and dived straight for[Pg 17]
home, leaving the plucky mongrel standing
in the ripples, with a look of almost
human disgust and astonishment on his
intelligent face. He may have reasoned
thus: “Surely I caught that otter. But
stay, I must have been dreaming. ‘Tis
queer, though: I’m in the river instead of
on the road to the farm.” This, for Lutra,
was perhaps the only noteworthy episode
of her early life.

The otter-cub was about nine months old
when spring came to the valley. The water-weed
grew in long filaments from the gravelly
shallows. The angler, who had ceased to
frequent the riverside at the approach of
winter, returned to the pool, but only by
day, and then Lutra dozed in her retreat.
In the pines on the margin of the river the
blue ringdoves were busy constructing the
rude makeshift that was to serve the purpose
of a nest. Instead of seeking how to
construct a perfect dwelling place, these
slipshod builders spent most of their hours
in courtship. Sometimes, owing to the
carelessness of the lackadaisical doves, a dry
stick released by bill or claw would fall
pattering among the branches, and drop,[Pg 18]
with a plash, into the river, where it would
be borne by the current past the otter’s lair.
From every bush and brake along the
sparkling stream the carols of joyous birds
floated on the morning mists. The first
green leaves of the bean peeped in the
gardens; the first broods of the year’s
ducklings launched forth, like heartstrong
adventurers, into the shallows by the cottage
walls. In the sunny glades the big, fleshy
buds of the chestnut and the light-green,
tapering sprouts of the sycamore expanded
under the influence of increasing warmth.
Finches and sparrows, on the lookout for
flies, hovered above the ankle-deep drifts of
leaf-mould in the lane below the trees, or
crossed and re-crossed between the budding
boughs. Only a few of these many signs
were observed by Lutra, it is true, for she
spent the day in hiding. But at dusk she
heard the bleating of the lambs, and the
musical note of a bell that had been slung
round the neck of the patriarch of the flock
in order to deter foxes from meddling with
the new-born weaklings then under the big
ram’s care. She was made aware of the
presence of spring by the “scent in the[Pg 19]
shadow and sound in the light.” The
hatching of countless flies in the leaf-mould
was not watched by the birds only: Lutra
also knew that the swarms had arrived;
and spring was welcome if only for this.

For months she had fed on lean and
tasteless trout exhausted by spawning. Now,
instead of lying under stones or haunting
the deep basin of the pool, the trout
rose to the surface and wandered abroad
into the shallows. There the languid fish
became fit for food again, and more capable
of eluding the occasional long, stern chases of
the otter. But Lutra was never disconcerted
by the fact that the fish were strong and
active; as with all carnivorous creatures, her
sporting instincts were so highly developed
that she revelled in overcoming difficulties,
especially because she felt her own strength
growing from day to day. During winter
the trout had fed on worms and “sundries.”
Now, their best and heartiest meals were of
flies. Daily, at noon, swarms of ephemerals
played over the water, and the trout rose
from the river-bed to feed. At first they
“sported” ravenously, rising quick and sure
to any insect their marvellous vision might[Pg 20]
discern. Afterwards they fed daintily,
disabling and drowning with a flip of the
tail many an insect that fluttered at the
surface, and choosing from their various
victims some unusually tasty morsel, such
as a female “February red” about to lay
her eggs. At this time, also, the plump,
cream-coloured larvæ of the stone-fly in the
shallows were growing within their well
cemented caddis-cases and preparing for
maturity. So the trout fattened on caddis-grubs
and flies, and the otter-cub, in corresponding
measure, became sleek, well-grown,
and spirited.

In the winter Lutra had imperceptibly
acquired the habit of swimming and diving
across-stream, just as an old fox, when
hunting in the woods, quarters his ground
systematically across-wind, and so detects the
slightest scent that may be wafted on the
breeze. Nature had been specially kind to
her; she was fashioned perfectly, and in
the river reigned supreme. Her body was
long, supple, and tapering; her brown fur
was close and short, so that the water never
penetrated to her skin and her movements
were not retarded as they would have been[Pg 21]
had she possessed the loose, draggling coat
of an otter-hound. She seemed to glide
with extraordinary facility even against a
rapid current. Her skin was so tough that
on one occasion when, by accident, she was
carried down a raging rapid and thrown
against a jagged rock, a slight bruise was
the only result. Her legs were short and
powerful, her toes webbed, and her tail
served the purpose of a rudder. Nostrils,
eyes, and ears—all were small and water-tight,
and set so high on the skull that,
when she rose to breathe, little more than
a speck could be seen on the surface, unless
she felt it safe to raise her head and body
further for the sake of ease in plunging deep.

When Lutra was nine months old she
caught her first salmon; and, though the
fish was only a small “kelt,” returning,
weak from spawning, to the sea, the capture
was a fair test of the cub’s prowess and
daring. It happened thus. She was walking
up the river-bed one boisterous night, when
she saw a dark form hovering close to
the surface in the middle of a deep pool.
Her eyes, peculiarly fitted for watching
objects immediately above, quickly detected[Pg 22]
the almost motionless fish. The eyes of the
salmon were also formed for looking upwards,
and so Lutra remained unnoticed by her prey.
She stole around the hovering fish, that the
bubbles caused by her breathing might make
no noticeable disturbance as they rose to the
surface, and then, having judged to a nicety
the strength of the stream, paddled with
almost imperceptible motion towards the
salmon. Before the fish had time to flee
it was caught in Lutra’s vice-like jaws and
borne, struggling desperately and threshing
the water into foam, to the bank. There
the otter-cub killed her victim by severing
the vertebræ immediately behind its gills.

Otters well nigh invariably destroy large-sized
fish by attacking them in this
particular part. And, according to a
similar method, stoats and polecats, whenever
possible, seize their victims near the
base of the brain. In yet another way
Lutra proved her relationship to the weasel
tribe: just as our miniature land-otters eat
only small portions of the rabbits they kill,
so the cub was content with a juicy morsel
behind the salmon’s head—a morsel known
among sportsmen as “the otter’s bite.”[Pg 23]

Soon after the cub had killed her first
salmon she separated from her parents
and brothers, travelled far down-river, and
wandered alone. In the human character,
development becomes especially marked
directly independence of action is assumed;
henceforward parental guidance counts for
comparatively little. And so it was with
Lutra.

II.

[Pg 24]

Top

THE POOL BENEATH THE FARMSTEAD.

Last year, in autumn mornings, when the
big round clouds sailing swiftly overhead
reminded me of springtide days and joyous
skylarks in the heavens, but when all parent
birds were silent, knowing how dark winter
soon would chill the world, a thrush, that
not long since had been a fledgling in his
nest amid a shrubbery of box, came to
the fruit-tree near my window, and, in
such low tones that only I could hear
them, warbled that all in earth and sky
was beautiful.

To Lutra, lonely like the thrush, and, like
the thrush, not yet aware of pain and
hunger, the world seemed bright and filled
with happiness. At first, like a young fox
that, till he learns the fear of dogs and
men, steals chickens from a coop near[Pg 25]
which an old, experienced fox would never
venture, she was, perhaps, a little too
indifferent to danger. In her perfect health
and irresponsible freedom, she paid but
slight attention to the alarm signals of other
creatures of the night.

Up-river, at a bend below a hillside farmstead
some distance from our village,
is a broad, deep salmon-pool, fringed
with alders and willows. Right across
the upper end of this pool stretches a
broken ledge of rock, over which, in flood,
the waters boom and crash into a seething
basin whence thin lines of vapour—blue
and grey when the day is dull, or gleaming
with the colours of the rainbow when the
sun, unclouded, shines aslant the fall—ceaselessly
arise, and quiver on the waves of
air that catch their movement from the
restless swirls beneath. But in dry summer
weather the ledge is covered with green,
slippery weed, the curving fall is smooth as
glass, and the rapid loses half its flood-time
strength.

This pool, though containing some of
the finest salmon “hovers” in the river, is
nowadays but seldom fished. Since the[Pg 26]
old generation of village fishermen has
passed away it seems to have gradually
lost its popularity. The right bank of
the river above and below the pool is for
miles so thickly wooded that anglers prefer
to pass up-country before unpacking their
rods. From the left bank it is useless for
any angler who has not made a study of
the pool to attempt to reach the “hovers.”
Under far more favourable conditions than
these, the throw necessary to place a fly on
even the nearest of the “hovers” would be
almost the longest that could with accuracy
be made. But the angler is baffled at the
outset by the presence of a steep slope
behind him.

I well remember two instances when I
was tricked by the self-conceit which led
me to suppose that my skill in casting was
of no mean order. Once, while the river
was bank-high after flood, I happened to
be throwing an unusually long line, with
careless ease, over the lower end of a pool,
where, before, I had never seen a fish. I
was, no doubt, thinking of something quite
unconnected with fishing, otherwise I should
not have wandered thus far from the spot[Pg 27]
where I generally reeled in my line. A
salmon effectually aroused me by a terrific
rush at my fly. I “struck” hard, and the
fly, after a momentary check, flew up into
the air. I am not one of those anglers who
give rest to a salmon in the belief that, after
rising, he requires time to recover from his
disappointment at having failed to catch
the lure. I believe in “sticking to” a fish,
perhaps because the first I ever hooked was
one I had bullied ceaselessly during the whole
of a spring evening. And so I tried hard and
often to tempt that sportive fish again; but
after the careless, easy casting which resulted
in the rise, I could not by any means throw
satisfactorily over the tail of the pool. However
I tried to do so, the line would double
awkwardly as it reached the water, or would
curl back into the rapid on the near side of
the “hover,” or the fly would splash in a
most provoking manner as it alighted on
the stream. So at last I left the riverside.

Henceforth, I attempted the same long
cast whenever I passed the pool. I lost
many flies, and never again rose a fish.
But I was convinced that I had discovered
a “hover” new to the village fishermen,[Pg 28]
till my old friend Ianto chaffed me
into the belief that the salmon I had seen
was a “passenger,” and, probably, a “spent
kelt” in such a weak condition that for it
to stay in the rough water higher up the
pool was impossible.

On another occasion, in early days when
my ignorance of the river and of fishing
sorely troubled both Ianto and myself,
as I was wading down-stream along the
edge of a pool a grilse rose, “head and
tail,” about twenty yards below my fly.
Using my long gaff-handle as a staff, I
walked slowly towards the fish, casting
carefully all the way. I was so absorbed
in my work that I did not know I was
moving into deep water till I found that
my wading stockings had filled. I then
stopped, and, lengthening my line at each
successive “throw,” sent my fly nearer and
still nearer to the grilse.

How I managed the long, straight cast
that presently resulted in my fly passing
down the “hover,” I do not know. The
grilse rose sharply at the lure, but I “struck”
too late. I reeled in my line, and after a
few minutes began once more to cast. Now,[Pg 29]
however, try as I might, I could not get
the line out to the distance required; it
would not fall straight and true. In desperation
I endeavoured to overcome the difficulty
by sheer strength. I swung my arms aloft;
my old hickory rod creaked and groaned
with the increasing strain, then snapped
immediately the tension was released with
the return of the line; and, a second afterwards,
the grilse took my fly and bolted
away down-stream.

All caution left me; I was “into a fish”—that
was enough. In haste to catch my
rod-top as it slipped down the line from
the butt, I made one step forward, and fell
over head and ears into a deep hole beneath
the shelf of rock on which I had been
standing. When I recognised what had
happened I was clinging to an alder-root
near the bank; thence, breathless, I lifted
myself till I was safe on a tree-trunk above
the pool. My rod and cap were drifting
rapidly away; but, after divesting myself of
half my dripping garments, I recovered the
rod in a backwater below the neighbouring
wood. All my line had been taken out,
the gut collar had been snapped, and the[Pg 30]
fly had undoubtedly been carried off by the
grilse.

In those old days of which I have elsewhere
written,[1] Ianto and I often resorted
to the wide, deep pool under the farm.
Sometimes, during summer, we were there
before daybreak, fishing for the salmon
that only then or in the dusk would
deign to inspect our “Dandy” fly. And
there, in the summer nights, we frequently
captured, with the natural minnow, the big
trout that wandered from the rapids to feed
in the quiet waters by the alders. Ianto
knew the pool so well that even in the
darkest night he would wade along the
slippery, weed-grown shelf near the raging
fall, to troll in the shadows above him. Had
the old man taken one false step he would
have entered on a struggle for life compared
with which my own adventure after hooking
the grilse would have been insignificant.

For several months free, happy Lutra
made her daytime abode in a “holt”
among the alder-roots fringing this pool.
She loved in the long winter nights to[Pg 31]
hear the winnow-winnow of powerful wings
as the wild ducks circled down towards
the pool, the whir of the grey lag-geese
far in the mysterious sky, and the whistle
of the teal and the gurgle of the moorhens
among the weeds close by the river’s brim.

Crouched on a grassy mound beside the
rapids, she could see each movement on the
surface of the pool. The wild ducks
splattered and quacked as they paddled busily
hither and thither, visiting each little bay
and reed-clump at the water’s edge. Sometimes,
surrendering themselves wholly to
sport and play, they formed little groups
of two or three; and now one group, and
then another, would race, half-swimming,
half-flying, from bank to bank or from
the rock to the salmon “hover” at the
lower end of the pool. The otter remembered
her experience with the dabchick,
and believed that to capture a full-grown
duck would tax her utmost strength and
cause a general alarm. Once, however,
excited by the wild ducks’ sport, she
slipped quietly from the mound, dived
deep, and from the river-bed shot up in the
midst of the birds just as they had congregated[Pg 32]
to settle a point of difference in
a recent event, and to discuss a second
part of their sports’ programme for the night.

As the birds, panic-stricken, scattered on
every side, and, following each other in
two long lines that joined in the form of
a wedge, flew up into the starlit sky, Lutra
watched them eagerly for a few moments;
then, without a ripple, she sank below the
surface and returned to her watch on the
mound. For a while after the ducks had
left the pool, nothing could be heard but the
ceaseless noise of falling water. But as the
night drew on, a moorhen ventured from
the shelter of the alders, and, like a tiny,
buoyant boat, launched out into the pool.
The otter, with appetite whetted by recent
sport among the ducks, again left her
hiding place and silently vanished into the
stream. Borne by the current, she reached,
with scarcely an effort, a point in the swirling
depths from which she could catch a
glimpse of the dim outline of the floating
bird. Then, rising swiftly, she gripped the
moorhen from beneath, dived across to the
“hover,” and, having killed and skinned
her prey, feasted at leisure.[Pg 33]

There were times in the second summer
of her existence when Lutra, like the wild
ducks, seemed to abandon every thought of
the possibility of danger. Simply for the
love of exercise and in enjoyment of the
tranquil night, she played about the pool
till the dawn peeped over the hills; then,
tired of her frolic, she sought her secret
“holt,” and, curling her tail about her face
and holding her hind-paws closely between
her fore-paws, fell asleep.

While she gambolled in the water, even
her quickest movements were as graceful as
those of a salmon stemming the rapids
and leaping into the shallows above the
rock. Diving into the depths, she avoided
with scarcely an effort the tangled roots
and branches, that, washed thither by
the floods, had long been the dread
of anglers when heavy fish were hooked.
Ceasing all exertion as she turned into
the current, she floated to the surface and
was borne away down-stream. She swam
at highest speed from the tail to the
throat of the pool, and drifted idly back
to the place from which she had started;
then, changing her methods, she skirted[Pg 34]
slowly the edge of the current, and with
one long, straight dive shot down from the
head of the rapids to the still water near
her “holt.”

From playing thus about the pool, the
otter learned the power of the current, and
how it hastened or retarded her while she
pursued her prey. But most of all, during
the hours of the placid night, she delighted
to frolic in the torrent immediately below the
rock, where, matching her strength against
that of the river, she leaped and dived and
tumbled through the foam, or, lying on
her back amid a shower of spray, stretched
wide her limbs and suffered the whirlpool
to draw her, unresisting, into its vortex
deep beneath the fall.

Lutra sometimes noticed, while she drifted
with the current, that the scent of her
kindred lay strong at the surface not far
from her “holt.” One still, moonlit night
the scent indicated that several full-grown
otters had at intervals come from the
trout-reaches down-stream, and had landed
in a reed-bed at the lower end of the
pool. It led away from the river through
the valley, along by a number of stagnant[Pg 35]
ponds in an old garden near the farm, and
thence to a point beyond a bend where the
river flowed almost parallel to its course at
the pool. As the otter, inquisitively following
the line of the scent, came to the ponds,
she heard the croaking of countless frogs
hidden in the duckweed that lay over the
entire surface of the water. Lutra made
ample use of the opportunity for a feast—frogs
were the greatest delicacies known to
her, and she had never before found them to
be so plentiful. Dawn was breaking when,
in her onward journey, she reached the river;
so she drifted around the bend, dived over
the fall, and returned to her home beneath
the alder-roots.

It happened that the otters whose “spur”
(footprints) Lutra had followed to the frog-ponds
retraced their steps towards the pool,
and in doing so suddenly discovered that
the scent of a man lay strong on the
trodden grass. A villager, knowing the
eagerness with which otters seek for frogs,
and that they often cross a narrow neck of
land at the bend of a stream, had for a
time kept watch at the lower end of the
old farm garden. He was anxious that the[Pg 36]
hounds, which, on the previous day, had
arrived at the village, should enjoy good
sport during their stay in the neighbourhood.
But he saw nothing of the animals
he had come to watch; as soon as they
detected his whereabouts they retreated
hastily to the pond at the upper end of the
garden, gained the river, and, like Lutra,
swam homewards around the bend. But,
less familiar than Lutra with the strength
of the current, they left the water as they
approached the fall, and crept through the
deep shadows of the alder-roots till they
reached a point at some distance beyond the
pool.

These events of the night were of the
utmost importance to the otters as
connected with the events of the morrow.
During the early morning the villager paid
a second visit to the garden, and
examined closely the soft mud at the
margin of the ponds. The remains of the
otters’ feast—the skins and the eyes of
frogs—lay in several places, and, near the
largest of the ponds, the otters’ “spur”
showed clearly that the animals had for
some time been busy there. Taking a[Pg 37]
straight course to the river above the pools,
the watcher again detected the marks of
the otters on the sloping bank. By the
riverside below the garden, however, he
failed to observe any further sign, and so
concluded that the animals had probably
left the water at the opposite bank.

When, later, the Hunt crossed the bridge
on its way up-stream, the villager told his
story to the Master, who immediately led
his hounds over the hill-top in the direction
of the ponds. This unexpected movement
drew the followers of the Hunt away from
the river; they imagined that the hounds
were to be taken across country to a well
known gorge where, during a previous
season, good sport had been obtained.

At the farm, the Master, leaving the
hounds to the care of the whippers-in,
waited till the villagers and the farmers
had congregated in the yard. He then
addressed the crowd, telling them that otters
had visited the garden during the night
and probably were still in hiding there, and
that, if good sport were desired, it would be
wise for his followers to form two groups
and watch the fords above and below[Pg 38]
the river-bend, while he, alone, accompanied
the hounds to the garden; his chief reason,
he said, for pointing out to them the
advisability of leaving him was that if an
otter still remained near the pond it should
be given every chance of reaching the river
without molestation. The crowd, recognising
the wisdom of the Master’s remarks, moved
off with the whippers-in to the fords; and,
when all was in readiness, the pack was led
into the garden. One, and another, and
yet another of the “young entry” soon
gave tongue; then, after a minute’s deliberation,
an old, experienced hound raised his
head from the rushes, uttered a single deep,
clear note, climbed the garden hedge, and
galloped across the meadow towards the
river.

The rest of the hounds speedily found the
line of the “drag,” but all came to a
check at the water’s edge. They were
taken back to the ponds, and thence to the
pool by the farm, but the scent was weak
above the waterfall. They again “cast”
to the upper end of the garden, and onward
to the river. Carefully searching every hole
and corner in the bank, they drew down-stream[Pg 39]
around the bend, and at last struck
the scent of the otters among the reeds
below the pool. Lutra heard them tearing
madly past, heard also the dull thud of
human footsteps above her “holt,” but she
discreetly remained close-hidden in her
sleeping chamber. For hours, in a pool
beyond the trout-reach, her visitors of the
previous night were hustled to and fro, and
frequent cries of “Gaze! gaze!” and “Bubble
avent!” mingled with the clamour of the
hounds. Then the commotion seemed
suddenly to subside. After an interval the
hounds splashed by once more among the
alder-roots, and the thud of human footsteps
resounded in the “holt.” In the silence
that followed, Lutra, reassured, dived
from her “holt,” and, paddling gently to
the surface, saw the last stragglers of the
Hunt climbing the slope towards the
farm.

That night no otter from the down-stream
trout-reach wandered to the salmon-pool
beneath the farm. The water-voles and
the moorhens were unusually alert as they
swam hither and thither in the little bays
along the edge of the current. The fear of[Pg 40]
man and his loud-tongued hounds rested,
like a spell, on the creatures of the river.
Even Lutra felt its power; but when the
scent of her foes became so faint as to be
lost in the fragrance of the meadow-sweet
along the river-bank, she ventured into the
old garden, and, on returning to the pool,
played again in the raging water by the
fall.

Top

III.

[Pg 41]

THE GORGE OF ALLTYCAFN.

When Lutra had attained her full size
and strength she was wooed and won by
a young dog-otter of her own age, and
lived with him in a “holt” among the
great rocks of Alltycafn. Now, again, the
Hunt arrived in the neighbourhood. It
was a lovely morning in May. The sun
shone brightly; the leaves were breaking
from their sheaths; the birds sang blithely
in the trees. Suddenly the otters, resting
in their “holt,” were awakened by a loud
commotion—the sounds of hurrying feet,
reverberating in the chamber among the
boulders, and then the music of the
shaggy hounds, varied occasionally by the
yap-yap of the terriers. The noise drew[Pg 42]
rapidly nearer. Presently a man, in red
stockings and vest, blue breeches and coat,
and a blue hunting cap bearing an otter’s
“pad” mounted in silver, poked among
the boulders with a steelshod pole. The
dog-otter was now thoroughly alarmed.
He rushed from his lair, dived straight
into the stream, headed through the seething
current, and rose in the adjoining pool.
Threatened by a hound, he dived again,
walked over the gravel, and swam under
the gnarled roots of an oak. The members
of the Hunt stood watching the bubbles,
filled by his breath, as they floated up and
broke. The hounds swam pell-mell in hot
pursuit, and the otter was forced to turn
up-stream. Moving cautiously under the
rocky ledges, he regained the “holt,” where
his terrified mate awaited his return. Sorely
pressed, the dog-otter hid close, hoping to
baffle his relentless pursuers. But a bristling,
snarling terrier soon came down the shaft
from the bank. Maddened, and courageous
with the fury of despair, Lutra seized the
intruder by the muzzle, and, in the combat
that ensued, sorely mangled her assailant’s
lips and nostrils. Then, as her mate dived[Pg 43]
out once more and swam down-stream, she
also left the chamber. She rose immediately
among the surrounding boulders, and hid
in the furthest recess. With nostrils, eyes,
and ears raised slightly above the surface
of the water, she stayed there, unseen and
hardly daring to breathe, and, with strained
senses watched closely every movement of
hounds and hunters.

Fortunately for Lutra, the arch of the
boulders below was shaped so peculiarly
that the scent of her breath and body was
sucked into a cavity and carried down-stream,
and, passing beneath the stone,
mingled, at the raging cataract near the
rock, with air in the bubbles formed by the
tumult of the waters. These bubbles,
instead of bursting, were drawn into the
vortex of a little whirlpool; and the keen-nosed
hounds, though suspicious, could form
no definite opinion as to the presence of
a second otter among the rocks. The
terrier knew the secret, but he had been
put out of action and sent off, post haste,
to the nearest veterinary surgeon. Lutra
saw her tormentors—some of them of the
pure otter-hound breed, some half otter-hound,[Pg 44]
half fox-hound, and others, again, fox-hounds
trained for otter-hunting—rushing
backwards and forwards in the water and
on the bank. Another terrier, led by a boy,
strained at his leash near the river’s brink.
Women, dressed, like the men, in smart
scarlet and blue, and as ready to wade into
the stream as the huntsman himself, stood
leaning on their otter-poles not far away.
At the fords above and below the “pool,”
the dog-otter’s egress was barred by outposts
of the enemy standing and splashing, in
complete lines, from bank to bank. Once,
in despair, the otter actually tried to break
through the human chain; but a hunter
“tailed” him for a moment, and then dropped
him into the deeper water beyond the ford.

The sound of horn, the shouts of men, the
deep-toned notes of great hounds, the shrill
yapping of eager terriers, and the splashing
and the plunging on every side, almost
bewildered Lutra. Fearing to move from
her shelter, she floated in the deep basin of
the hidden pool beside the cataract, till at last
the commotion gradually subsided, and hounds
and hunters passed out of sight down-stream.

Lutra awaited her mate’s return, but in[Pg 45]
vain. Not till night did she venture from
her hiding place. When, however, the stars
appeared, she swam wearily from pool to
pool, calling, calling, calling. She explored
each little bay, each crevice in the rock.
She walked up the dry bed of a tributary
brook, and searched among the gnarled
roots and the dry, brown grass fringing
the gravelly watercourse. She skirted the
meadows and the rocks where the hunters had
beaten down the gorse and the brambles near
her home; thence she returned to the pool.
Hitherto she had loved the placid night;
to her the stillness was significant of peace.
But now that stillness was full of sadness,
and weariness, and monotony. The shadows
were deep within the gorge; from the distant
woods the hoot of an owl mocked her loneliness.
She heard no glad answering cry.
Still calling, calling, calling, she floated
through the shadows, and out into the moonlight
shimmering on the placid water below
the gorge; but she sought and called in vain.

Lutra spent the rest of that year in widowhood.
In consequence of her fight with the
terrier, and also because of her grief, her two
little cubs were still-born.[Pg 46]

Midsummer came, and the shallows were
almost choked with weeds. The countryside
experienced a phenomenal period of
drought, and for weeks the river seemed
impure and almost fetid. Night after night,
and steadily travelling westward, Lutra took
short cuts across country from pool to pool.
Late in July she reached the estuary of the
river; and for the remaining months of
summer fished in the bay, finding there a
pleasant change in her surroundings. Once
she was chased by some men in a boat,
who shot at her as she appeared for an
instant to breathe. Quick and watchful, she
dived at the flash, and the pellets fell
harmlessly overhead. Again she rose, and
again she dived just in time to avoid the
leaden hail. Then she doubled back towards
the estuary, and the baffled sportsmen sailed
away across the bay. As autumn came once
more she returned to the river, and fed chiefly
on the migrating eels that swarmed in the
hollows near the bank. Presently, by many
a nightly journey, she gained the upper
reaches, where she lived, till the following
spring, close to her old home.

The winter was long and severe. In[Pg 47]
January, the fields were buried in snow, the
roads were as smooth and hard as glass,
and the well-remembered pool beneath the
pines was almost covered with a great sheet
of ice. At this time another young dog-otter
began to show Lutra considerable
attention. The village children often saw
the pairing otters, for the animals, hard
pressed, had perforce to fish by day instead
of by night. All night the trout lay dormant
under the stones in the bed of the river,
and only at noon did they rise to the
surface on the lookout for hardy ephemerals
that, in a 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[Pg 48]
ravenously for the inmates. Among the
roots of the spreading oaks, the otters
found, also, such tit-bits as the larvæ 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[Pg 49]
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 of a neighbouring valley.
So, when the snows had melted and the
rime no longer touched with fairy fingerprints
the tracery of the leafless boughs,
and when Olwen the White-footed had
come once more into the valley called after
her name, Lutra forsook the broad river in
which she had spent her early life, and,[Pg 50]
with her companion and a promising family,
lived contented under the frowning Rock
of Gwion, secure in peace and solitude,
at least for a season, from the shaggy otter-hounds.

---

[Pg 51]

Top

THE WATER-VOLE.

[Pg 53]

I.

OUR VILLAGE HOUNDS.

Not many years ago the pleasures of life
among my neighbours here in the country
were simpler and truer than they are to-day.
Perhaps in that bygone time money was more
easily made, or daily need was met with
smaller expenditure. It may be, too, that
family cares were then less pressing, or that
a prolonged period of general prosperity had
been the privilege of rich and poor alike in
this green river-valley around my home. In
those days, to which I often look back with
regretful yearning, everybody seemed to have
leisure; the ties of friendship were not
severed by malicious gossip; old and young
seemed to realise how good it was to have
pleasant acquaintanceships and to be in the
sunshine and the open air. Fathers played[Pg 54]
with their children in the street: one winter
morning, when, after a heavy fall of snow
and a subsequent frost, the ground was as
slippery as glass, I watched a white-haired
shopkeeper, lying prone on a home-made
toboggan, with his feet sprawling behind for
rudder, steer a load of merry youngsters full
tilt down a steep lane behind his house.
The sight was so exhilarating that I also
forgot I was not a child; and on the second
journey I joined the sportive party, and
came to grief because the shopkeeper kicked
too quickly at a turn in the course and sent
me with a double somersault into the ditch.

It happened in those days that in the
miscellaneous pack of mongrels our village
sportsmen gathered together when they went
rabbit-shooting among the dense coverts
of the hillsides were two exceptionally
clever dogs—a big, shaggy, bobtail kind of
animal, and a little, smooth-coated beast
resembling a black-and-tan terrier.

The big dog, Joker, lived at a farm in
the village, and, during the leisure of summer,
when rabbiting did not engage his attention,
took to wandering by the river, joining the
bathers in their sport and poking his nose[Pg 55]
inquisitively under the alder-roots along the
bank. While, one sultry noon, the fun in
the bathing pool was at its height, Joker
routed an otter from a hiding place near
which the bathers were swimming with the
current, and a terrific fight took place in
the shallows before the dwrgu made good
his escape. The dog was found to have
been severely worsted in the fray, and was
taken home to be nursed till his wounds
were healed. Meanwhile, Joker’s fame as
an otter-hound was firmly established in the
village, and he was regarded as a hero.

The little dog, Bob, lived at the inn, and
for years his droll ways endeared him to
every villager, as well as to every angler
who came to “the house” for salmon-fishing.
He loved nothing better than a friendship
with some unsuspecting fisherman whom he
might afterwards use to further his own
ends. The sight of a rod placed by the
door in the early morning was sufficient
promise of a day’s continuous enjoyment;
the terrier assumed possession of the rod at
once, and kept all other curs at a distance.
On the appearance of the sportsman, he
manifested such unmistakable delight, and[Pg 56]
pleaded so hard for permission to follow,
that, unless the sportsman happened to be
one whose experiences led him to dislike the
presence of a fussy dog by the riverside,
the flattery rarely failed of its object. Once
past the rustic swing-bridge at the lower
boundary of the waters belonging to the
inn, Bob left the sportsman to his own
devices, and stole off into the woods to hunt
rabbits. Unfailingly, however, he rejoined
his friend at lunch.

On Sundays, knowing that the report of
a gun was not likely then to resound
among the woods, and depressed by the
quietness and disappointed by the nervous
manner with which everybody well dressed
for church resented his familiarities, he
lingered about the street corners—as the
unemployed usually do, even in our village—till
the delicious smells of Sunday dinners
pervaded the street. The savoury odours
in no way sharpened his appetite, for at the
inn his fare was always of the best; but
they indicated that the time was approaching
when the watchmaker and the lawyer
set out together for their long weekly
ramble through the woods. Bob knew what[Pg 57]
such a ramble meant for him. The watchmaker’s
dog, Tip, was Bob’s respected sire,
and Tip’s brother, Charlie, dwelt at a house
in “The Square.” Bob, scenting the Sunday
dinners, went at once to call for Charlie,
and in his company adjourned to the lane
behind the village gardens, till the watchmaker
and the lawyer, with Tip, were
ready for their customary walk.

When the water was low and anglers
seldom visited the inn, Bob, during the
summer week-days, followed Joker’s course
of action, and attached himself to a bathing
party frequenting a pool below the ruined
garden on the outskirts of the village. There,
like Joker, he searched beneath the alder-roots,
but without success as far as an otter
was concerned. However, he vastly enjoyed
himself digging out the brown rats from
their holes along the bank not far from
a rick-yard belonging to the inn, and then
hunting them about the pool with as much
noise and bustle as if he were close at the
tail of a rabbit in the furze. He was so
fond of the water that he became a rapid,
untiring swimmer; and the boys trained him,
in intervals of rat-hunting, to dive to the[Pg 58]
bottom of the river and pick up a white
pebble thrown from the bank. Like Joker,
also, he gained a name for pluck and ability;
and one night the village sportsmen, at an
informal meeting in the “private room” of
the inn, decided to hunt in the river on
Wednesday evenings, with Bob and Joker
at the head of a pack including nearly
every game-dog in the near neighbourhood,
except certain aristocratic pointers and setters
likely to be spoiled by companionship with
yelping and excited curs.

A merrier hunting party was never in
the world. They would foregather in the
meadow below the ruined garden: the
landlord, whose home-brewed ale was the
best and strongest on the countryside; the
curate, whose stern admonitions were the
terror of evil-doers; the farmer, whose skill
in ferreting was greater than in ploughing;
the watchmaker, whose clocks filled the
village street with music when, simultaneously,
they struck the hour; the draper, whose
white pigeons cooed and fluttered on the
bridge near his shop; the solicitor, whose
law was for a time thrown to the winds;
and a small crowd of boys ready to assist,[Pg 59]
if required, in “chaining” the fords. There
they would “cry” the dogs across the
stream till the valley echoed and re-echoed
with shouts and laughter.

The first hunt was started in spirited fashion;
the men walked along the bank thrusting their
sticks into crevices and holes; but only Joker
and Bob entered the water, and rats and otters
for a while remained discreetly out of view.
Near a bend of the stream, however, Bob surprised
a rat secreted by a stone, and, forcing
it to rush to the river, followed with frantic
speed. Here, at last, was a chase; the other
dogs all hurried to the spot, and the landlord,
swinging his otter-pole, waded out to perform
the duties of huntsman with the now uproarious
pack. His action proved infectious—watchmaker,
draper, lawyer, and curate
splashed into the shallows to help in keeping
the rat on the move; and fun was fast
and furious till the prey, fleeing from a
smart attack by Bob, was captured by a
spaniel swimming under a big oak-root
between the curate and the bank.

I hardly think I have enjoyed any
sport so well as those Wednesday evening
hunts in the bygone years, when life was[Pg 60]
unshadowed and each sportsman of us felt
within him the heart of a child. So great
was our amusement that the village urchins
instituted a rival Hunt in the brooks on
Saturdays; they notched their sticks for
every “kill,” and boasted that they beat us
hollow with the number of their trophies.

We had several adventures with otters, but
the creatures always, in the end, eluded us,
and we soon were of opinion that smaller fry
were capable of affording better fun. Some
seasons afterwards, when our Hunt was disbanded,
the shopkeepers’ apprentices continued,
with the youngsters, to work our mongrel
hounds; but eventually Joker’s death from the
bite of an adder put an end to their pastime,
for the bobtail and the terrier were the only
possible leaders of the nondescript pack.

Bob, the terrier, was always the most interesting
of our hounds. He manifested
a disposition to use the other dogs to
serve his purposes, just as he used the
unsuspecting fishermen if he wished to
go hunting in the woods. When with me
after game on the upland farms, he often
seemed to forget entirely that I had taken
him to hunt, not for his own amusement only,[Pg 61]
but also for mine. Directly he discovered
a rabbit squatting in a clump of grass or
brambles, perhaps ten or a dozen yards from
a hedge, he signalled his find by barking so
incessantly that my spaniels hastened pell-mell
to the spot. This was just as it should
be—for Bob. Dancing with excitement, he
waited between the clump and the hedge till
the spaniels entered and bolted the rabbit;
then he tore madly in close pursuit of the
fleeing creature, and my chance of a shot
was spoiled through the possibility of my
hitting him instead of his quarry.

By the riverside, his tricks were precisely
similar. Seeing a moorhen dive, he would
call the dogs around him, so that they might
bring the bird again to the surface and thus
afford him sport. The moorhen, meanwhile,
invariably escaped; yet Bob failed to understand
that he was the only diver in the pack.

His antics were comical in the extreme if
a vole eluded him by diving to the lower
entrance of its burrow beneath the surface
of a backwater. Having missed his opportunity,
but unable to comprehend how he
had missed it, the terrier left the water, stood
on the roots of a tree over the entrance to[Pg 62]
the vole’s burrow, and furiously barked instructions
to his companions swimming in the
pool. Disgusted at last by their inattention
to his orders, he plunged headlong into the
stream and vanished for a few moments;
then he reappeared, proud of his superior
bravery, sneezing and coughing, and with a
mouthful of stones and soil torn from the
bank in his desperate efforts to force his
way to the spot whither the object of the
chase had gone from view.

Bob long survived the big dog Joker, and
in his old days loved as well as ever the
excitement of a hunt. His originality was
preserved to the end; stiffened by rheumatism
and almost choked by asthma, he always,
when in search of rabbits, ran up-hill and
walked down-hill, thus losing both energy
and breath that might with advantage have
been kept in reserve.

With the passing of the years, many changes
have occurred to sunder the friendships formed
during those boylike expeditions. I smile
when I think how impossible it would be,
now that the veneer of town life has been
thinly spread over the life of our village, for
the man of law to go wading, with tucked-up[Pg 63]
trousers, after rats; how impossible, also, for
him to frequent with me the bathing pool,
as was sometimes his wont, and swim idly
hither and thither, while the moon peered
between the trees and the vague witchery
of the summer night filled his spirit and my
own. My youthful feelings, long preserved,
have been irrevocably lost; and yet, if only
for memory’s sake, I would willingly hunt
with him again, and, when night had fallen,
swim with him once more in the dim,
mysterious pool below the garden. But
the old hunting party could never be complete.
Death makes gaps that Time fails to
fill.

Those evenings were delightful, not only
because of unrestrained mirth and innocent
sport, but also because we took a keen interest
in our surroundings, seeing the world of small
things by the river-bank with eyes such as
belonged to anglers and hunters of the old-fashioned,
leisurely school. They marked for
me the beginning of a pleasant study of the
water-voles that lived in their burrows on
the brink of the river, and were sometimes
hunted as persistently as were the brown rats,
but far more frequently eluded our hounds[Pg 64]
than did the noxious little brutes we particularly
desired to destroy.

Wherever they take up their quarters, about
the farmstead during winter or in the open
fields during summer, brown rats are an insufferable
nuisance. There is no courtesy or
kindness in the nature of the rat; no nesting
bird is safe from his attacks, unless her home
is beyond his reach in some cleft of a rock
that he cannot scale or in some fork of a tree
that he cannot climb. He is a cannibal—even
the young and the sick of his own kind become
the victims of his rapacious hunger—and he
will eat almost anything, living or dead, from
the refuse in a garbage heap to the dainty
egg of a willow-wren in the tiny, domed nest
amid the briars at the margin of the river.

The water-vole is often called, wrongly, the
water-rat, but it is of very different habits,
and is well nigh entirely a vegetable feeder,
and one of the most charming and most
inoffensive creatures in Britain. To the close
observer of Nature, differences in the character
of animals—even among the members
of one species—soon become apparent. I was
struck with manifestations of such unlikeness
when I kept small communities of ants[Pg 65]
in artificial nests between slips of glass, so as
to watch their doings in my hours of leisure.
One nest of yellow ants contained at first a
dozen workers and a queen; and when I
began to study them I used to mark with
minute spots of white the bodies of the
particular ants under observation. These
spots would remain till the ants had
time for their toilet and either licked
themselves clean or were licked clean by
sympathetic companions. At the outset I
found that under a magnifying glass two
of the dozen workers were readily distinguishable
from the others because of their
size and shape. Gradually, by detecting little
peculiarities, I could single out the ants,
and so had no need to mark my tiny pets
in order to follow their movements, except
on occasions when they clustered round
the queen, or rested, gossiping in little
groups, here and there in the rooms and
passages of their dwelling. One ant was
greedy, and, if she was the first to find a
fresh drop of honey I had placed outside the
nest, would feed to repletion without ever
thinking of informing her friends of her discovery.
At such times she even became[Pg 66]
intoxicated, and I fancied that, when she
did at last get home, eager enquiries made
as to the whereabouts of the nectar met
with incoherent replies, since the seekers for
information generally failed to profit by what
they were told, and had to cast about aimlessly
for some time before finding the food. I
also observed that another ant was perfectly
unselfish, and not only would inform her
companions directly she discovered honey,
but would assiduously feed the queen before
attending to her own requirements. And
so my pets were separately known because
of faults and failings or good qualities that
often seemed quite human.

A certain vole, living in the river-bank
near the place where the villagers met to
hunt, was not easily mistaken for one of his
fellows. Whereas the general colour of a
water-vole’s coat—except in the variety
known as the black vole—is greyish brown,
which takes a reddish tinge when the light
glances on it between the leaves, his was
uniformly of a dark russet. In keeping with
this shiny russet coat, his beady black eyes
seemed to glisten with unusual lustre; and
so it happened that the question, “I wonder[Pg 67]
if Brighteye is from home?” was often
asked as we sent our hounds to search
among the willows on the further bank;
and later it became a custom for the Hunt,
before the sport of the evening was begun,
to pass up-stream for a hundred yards or so
in order that he might be left in peace.

He was quite a baby water-vole when first
I made his acquaintance, but the colour of
his coat did not change with the succeeding
months, and, evening after evening, when
the noisy hounds were safe at home or
strolling about the village street, I would
quietly make my way back to his haunt,
and, hidden behind a convenient tree, carefully
watch him. In this way I learned many
secrets of his life, noticed many traits in
which he differed from his companions, and
could form a fairly accurate idea of the
dangers that beset him, and of the joys and
the sorrows that fell to his lot during the
three years when his presence was familiar
as I fished in the calm summer twilight,
or lay motionless in the long grass near the
place where he was wont to sit, silent and
alert, before dropping into the backwater and
beginning the work and the play of the night.

II.

Top

[Pg 68]

THE BURROW IN THE RIVER-BANK.

The first faint shadows of dusk were creeping
over the river when Brighteye, awakened
by a movement on the part of his mother,
stole from his burrow into the tall grass at
the edge of the gravel-bank by the pool.
His home was situated in a picturesque
spot between the river and a woodland path
skirting the base of a cliff-like ascent
clothed with giant beeches and an under-garment
of ferns and whinberry bushes.
Alders and willows grew along the gravel-bank,
and through the moss-tangles among
the roots many a twisting, close-hidden
run-way led upwards to what might be
called a main thoroughfare, in and out of the
grass-fringes and the ivy, above high-water
mark. This road, extending from the far-off[Pg 69]
tidal estuary to the river’s source in the
wild mountains to the north, communicated
with all the dwellings of the riverside people,
and had been kept clear for hundreds of
years by wandering voles and water-shrews,
moorhens, water-rails, and coots, and, in
recent days, by those unwelcome invaders,
the brown rats. Here and there it merged
into the wider trail of the otter. Sometimes,
near a hedge, it was joined by
the track of rabbits, bank-voles, field-voles,
weasels, and stoats, and sometimes, where
brooks and rills trickled over the stones
on their way to the river, by other main
roads that had followed the smaller water-courses
from the crests of the hills.

Brighteye’s home might be likened to a
cottage nestling among trees at the end of
an embowered lane well removed from busy
traffic; it contained four or five chambers
wherein the members of his family dwelt;
and to Brighteye the tall reeds and the
bramble thickets were as large as shrubs and
trees are to human beings. And, like a
sequestered cottager, he knew but little
about the great road stretching, up-stream
and down-stream, away from his haunts;[Pg 70]
he was content with his particular domain—the
pool, the shallows beyond, a hundred
yards of intersected lanes, and the wide main
road above the pool and the shallows.

For a time Brighteye sat at the edge
of the stream, alert for any sign of danger
that might threaten his harmless existence.
Then playfully he dropped into the pool,
dived, sought the water-entrance to his
house, climbed inside his sleeping chamber,
and thence to the bank, where again he sat
intently listening as he sniffed the cool
evening air. A quick-eyed heron was standing
motionless in a tranquil backwater thirty
yards up-stream; the scent of the bird was
borne down by the water, and the vole
caught it as it passed beneath the bank.
But he showed no trace of terror; the heron
was not near enough to give him any real
cause for alarm. The rabbits stole down
through the woods, the undergrowth crackled
slightly as they passed, and one old buck
“drummed” a danger signal. Instantly the
vole dived again, for he interpreted the sound
to mean that a weasel was on the prowl; and,
as he vanished, the first notes of a blackbird’s
rattling cry came to his ears.[Pg 71]

Brighteye stayed awhile in his burrow
before climbing once more to the upper
entrance. Then cautiously he advanced
through the passage, and gained his lookout
station. Not the slightest taint of a
weasel was noticeable on the bank; so,
regaining confidence, he sat on his haunches,
brushed his long, bristly whiskers with his
fore-feet, and licked his russet body clean
with his warm, red tongue. Then he dropped
once more into the pool, and swam across
to a reed-bed on the further margin. There
he found several of his neighbours feeding
on roots of riverside plants. He, too, was
hungry, so he bit off a juicy flag at the spot
marking the junction of the tender stalk with
the tough, fibrous stem; then, sitting upright,
he took it in his fore-paws, and with his incisor
teeth—shaped perfectly like an adze for such
a purpose—stripped it of its outer covering,
beginning at the severed edge, and laying
bare the white pith, on which he greedily
fed.

While thus engaged, he, as usual, watched
and listened. The spot was dangerous for
him because of its distance from the stream,
and because the water immediately beyond[Pg 72]
was so shallow that he could not, by diving,
readily escape from determined pursuit.

His meal was often interrupted for a
few moments by some trifling incident that
caused alarm. A moorhen splattered out
from the willow-roots, and Brighteye crouched
motionless, till he recognised that the noise
made by the clumsy bird was almost as
familiar to him as the rustle of the reeds in
a breeze. The blue heron rose heavily from
the backwater, and winged his slow flight
high above the trees. Here, indeed, seemed
reason for fear; but the great bird was not
in the humour for killing voles, and soon
passed out of view. Now a kingfisher, then
a dipper, sped like an arrow past the near
corner of the pool; and the whiz of swift
wings—unheard by all except little creatures
living in frequent danger, and listening with
beating hearts to sounds unperceived by our
drowsy senses dulled by long immunity from
fear—caused momentary terror to the water-vole.
Each trifling sight and sound contributed
to that invaluable stock of experience
from which he would gradually learn
to distinguish without hesitation between
friends and foes, and be freed from the[Pg 73]
pain of needless anxiety which, to Nature’s
weaklings, is at times almost as bitter as death.

Brighteye was fated to meet with an
unusual number of adventures, and consequently
to know much of the agony of fear.
His russet coat was more conspicuous than
that of his soberly gowned companions,
and he was on several occasions marked for
attack when they escaped detection. But he
became the wisest, shyest, most watchful vole
along the wooded river-reach, and in time his
neighbours and offspring were so influenced
by his example and training that a strangely
furtive kindred, the wildest of the wild, living
in secrecy—their presence revealed to loitering
anglers only by tell-tale footprints on the wet
sand when the torrent dwindled after a flood—seemed
to have come to haunt the river
bank between the cottage gardens and the
swinging bridge above the pool where Brighteye
dwelt.

Though Brighteye’s distinctive appearance
attracted the notice of numerous enemies,
his marked individuality was not wholly a
misfortune, since it aroused my kindly
interest, and thus caused him to be spared
by the village hunting party.[Pg 74]

As he sat in the first shadows of evening
among the reeds and the rushes, the kingfisher
and the dipper, by which a few minutes
before he had been startled, flew back from
the direction of the village gardens; and he
quickly decided, while watching their flight,
that somehow it must be connected with
the dull, but now plainly audible, thud of
approaching footsteps on the meadow-path.
The buck “drummed” again, then the
rustling “pat, pat” of the rabbits ceased in
the wood, and one by one the adult voles
feeding in the reed-bed slipped silently into
the shallows and disappeared.

Brighteye was loath to relinquish the juicy
rush that he held in his fore-paws, but the
signs of danger were insistent. After creeping
through the reeds to the water’s edge,
he proceeded a little way down the bank
till he came to a spot where the view of
the meadow-path was uninterrupted. His
sight was not nearly so keen as his scent
and hearing were, but he discerned, in a
blur of dim fields, and rippling water, and
evening light peering through the willow-stoles,
a number of unfamiliar moving
objects. He heard quick, uneven footsteps,[Pg 75]
and, now and then, a voice; and was aware
of an unmistakable scent, such as he had
already often noticed in the shallows and
amid the grass.

On several occasions, at dusk, Brighteye,
like Lutra the otter, had seen a trout splashing
and twisting convulsively in terror and pain.
Each time the trout had been irresistibly
drawn through the shallows towards a
peculiar, upright object on the opposite
bank, and after this object had passed into
the distance the vole had found that the
familiar scent of which he was now conscious
was mingled, at the edge of the river-bank,
with fresh blood-stains and with the strong
smell of fish.

To all animals, whether wild or domesticated,
fresh-spilt blood has a significance
that can never be disregarded. It indicates
suffering and death. Ever since, in far
distant years, blood first welled from a
stricken creature’s wounds, Nature has been
haunted by the grim presence of Fear. The
hunting weasel, coming unexpectedly to a
pool of blood, whence a wounded rabbit has
crawled away to die in the nearest burrow,
opens mouth and nostrils wide to inhale[Pg 76]
with fierce delight the pungent odour. Once
I caught sight of a weasel under such
circumstances, and was startled by the
almost demon-like look of ferocity on the
creature’s face.

But the hunted weaklings of the fields and
woods read the signs of death with consternation.
When the scent of the slayer is
mingled with that of the victim it is noted
with care, and, if often detected in similar
conditions, is committed to memory as
inseparable from danger.

Brighteye had been repeatedly warned by
his mother to avoid the presence of man, and
had also learned to fear it because of his
experiences with the angler and the trout.
Alarmed at the approach of men and hounds,
he waded out, swam straight up-stream to
a tiny bay, and hid beneath a willow-root to
wait till the danger had passed. He strained
his ears to catch each different sound as the
“thud, thud” and the patter of feet came
nearer. Then the gravel rattled, a stone fell
into the stream, and a shaggy spaniel poked
his nose into a hole between the willow-roots.
The dog drew a long, noisy breath, and
barked so suddenly and loudly, and so close[Pg 77]
to Brighteye’s ear, that the vole involuntarily
leaped from his resting place.

In full view of the spaniel, Brighteye passed
deep down into the clear, unruffled pool,
hurriedly using every limb, instead of only
his hind-legs, and with quick strokes gained
the edge of the current, where for an instant
he rose to breathe before plunging deep once
more and continuing his journey towards the
willows on the opposite bank. As he dived
for the second time, Bob saw him among
the ripples, and with shrill voice headed
the clamouring hounds, that, “harking
forward” to his cry, rushed headlong in
pursuit through shallow and pool. A
stout, lichen-covered branch, weighed down
at the river’s edge by a mass of herbage
borne thither by a recent heavy flood,
occupied a corner in the dense shadow of
an alder; and the vole, climbing out of the
water, sat on it, and was hidden completely
by the darkness from the eager hounds.
But his sanctuary was soon invaded; the
indefatigable terrier, guided by the tiny
bubbles of scent borne down by the stream,
left the river, and ran, whimpering with
excitement, straight to the alder. Brighteye[Pg 78]
saw him approach, dived silently, and, with
a wisdom he had never gained from experience,
turned in a direction quite contrary
to that in which the terrier expected him to
flee. The vole moved slowly, right beneath
the dark form of the terrier now swimming
in the backwater. On, on, he went, past
the stakes at the outlet of the pool into the
trout-reach, and still on, by a series of dives,
each following a brief interval for breath
and observation among the sheltering weeds,
till he arrived at the pool above the cottage
gardens, where a wide fringe of brushwood
formed an impenetrable thicket and he was
safe from his pursuers.

Hardly, however, was this long journey
needed. The dog was baffled at the outset;
and, casting about for the lost scent, he
discovered, on the pebbles, the strong smell
of the weasel that had wandered thither to
quench his thirst while Brighteye was
feeding in the reed-bed opposite. Bob
never by any chance neglected the
opportunity of killing a stoat or a weasel;
so, abandoning all thoughts of rats and
voles, he dashed upward through the wood,
and, almost immediately closing on his[Pg 79]
prey, destroyed a bloodthirsty little tyrant
that, unknown to Brighteye, had just been
planning a raid on the burrow by the
willow-stoles.

Water-voles, as a rule, are silent little
creatures; unless attacked or frightened
they seldom squeak as they move in and
out of the lush herbage by the riverside.
But Brighteye was undoubtedly different
from his fellows: he was almost as noisy as
a shrew in the dead leaves of a tangled
hedgerow, and his voice was like a shrew’s,
high-pitched and continuous, but louder, so
that I could hear him at some distance
from his favourite resort in the reeds and the
rushes by the willows. He seemed to be
always talking to himself or to the flowers
and the river as he wandered to and fro in
search of tit-bits; always debating with
himself as to the chances of finding a
tempting delicacy; always querulous of
danger from some ravenous tyrant that
might surprise him in his burrow, or pounce
on him unawares from the evening sky, or
rise, swift, relentless, eager, from the depths
beneath him as he swam across the pool.

When I got to know him well, my[Pg 80]
favourite method, in learning of his ways,
was to lie in wait at a spot commanding a
view of one or other of the narrow lanes
joining the main road of the riverside folk,
and there, my face hidden by a convenient
screen of interlacing grass-stems, to listen
intently for his approach. Generally, for
five minutes or so before he chose to reach
my hiding place, I could hear his shrill
piping, now faint and intercepted by a
mound, or indistinct and mingled with the
swirl of the water around the stakes, then
full and clear as he gained the summit of
a stone or ridge and came down the
winding path towards me. Though in
his talkative moments Brighteye usually
reminded me of the tiny shrew, there were
times when he reminded me more forcibly
of an eccentric mouse that, a few years
before, had taken up her quarters in the
wall of my study, and each night, for more
than a week, when the children’s hour was
over and I sat in silence by my shaded lamp,
had made her presence known by a bird-like
solo interrupted only when the singer
stayed to pick up a crumb on her way
across the room.[Pg 81]

The times when Brighteye wandered,
singing, singing, down the lanes and main
road of the river-bank, were, however,
infrequent; and the surest sign of his
approach, before he came in sight, was the
continuous, gossiping twitter I have already
described. This habit of singing and
twittering was not connected with amorous
sentiments towards any sleek young female;
Brighteye adopted it long before he was of
an age to seek a mate, and he ceased
practising his solos before the first winter
set in and the morning sun glanced between
leafless trees on a dark flood swirling over
the reed-bed where in summer was his
favourite feeding place.

Whether or not the other voles frequenting
the burrow by the willows had shown
their disapproval of such a habit I was
never able to discover. One fact, however,
seemed significant: Brighteye parted from
his parents as soon as he was sufficiently alert
and industrious to manage his own affairs,
and, having hollowed out a plain, one-roomed
dwelling, with an exit under the surface of
the water and another near some primrose-roots
above the level of flood, lived there for[Pg 82]
months, timid and lonely, yet withal, if his
singing might be regarded as the sign of a
gladsome life, the happiest vole in the shadowed
pool above the village gardens.

It has been supposed by certain naturalists
that the song of the house-mouse is the result
of a disease in its throat, and is therefore a
precursor of death. The mouse that came to
my study ceased her visits soon after the
week had passed and was never seen again;
and I was unable to determine how her end
was hastened. Brighteye could not, at any
rate, have suffered seriously, else he would
have succumbed, either to some enemy ever
ready to prey on the young, the aged, the
sick, and the wounded of his tribe, or to
starvation, the well-nigh inevitable follower of
disease in animals. He always seemed to me
to be full of vitality and happiness, as if the
dangers besetting his life only provided him
with wholesome excitement, and sharpened
his intellect far more finely than that of the
rest of his tribe.

III.

Top

[Pg 83]

WILD HUNTING.

Once, during the first summer of the water-vole’s
life, I saw as pretty a bit of wild hunting
as I have ever witnessed, and my pleasure
was enhanced by the fact that the quarry
escaped unharmed. Early in the afternoon,
instead of during twilight, I, in company with
the members of the village Hunt and their
mongrel pack, had searched the stream and
its banks for rats, and had enjoyed good sport.
Suddenly, however, our ragamuffin hounds
struck the line of nobler game: Lutra, the
otter, was astir in the pool.

I was not surprised, for on the previous
night, long after the moon had risen and sleep
had descended on the village, I, with Ianto
the fisherman, had passed the spot on returning
from an angling expedition eight or ten[Pg 84]
miles up-stream, and had stayed awhile to
watch the most expert of all river-fishers, as
she dived and swam from bank to bank, and
sometimes, turning swiftly into the backwater,
landed on the shingle close by Brighteye’s
reed-bed, to devour at leisure a captured
trout.

Lutra soon baffled our inexpert hounds,
and gained refuge in a “strong place” well
behind a fringe of alder-roots, whence Bob,
notwithstanding his most strenuous efforts,
failed to “bolt” her. I then drew off
the hounds, led them towards the throat of
the pool, and for a half hour assisted them
to work the “stale drag,” till I reached a
bend of the river where Lutra’s footprints
were still visible on the fine, wet sand at the
brink of a rapid.

Later, when the dogs were quietly resting
at their homes, I returned, alone, to my
hiding place not far from Lutra’s “holt.”
As long as daylight lasted I saw nothing of
vole or otter, though several brown rats,
undeterred by the disturbance of the early
afternoon, came from their burrows and
ran boldly hither and thither through the
arched pathways of the rank grass by the[Pg 85]
edge of the bank. The afterglow faded in
the western sky around the old church
beyond the village gardens; and the night,
though one by one the stars were lighted
overhead, became so dark that I could see
nothing plainly except the white froth, in
large round masses, floating idly down the
pool. I waited impatiently for the moon to
rise, for I feared lest the faint, occasional
plashes in the pool indicated that the otter
had left her “holt,” and would probably be
fishing in a distant pool when an opportunity
for observation arrived.

The night was strangely impressive, as it
always is to me while I roam through the
woodlands or lie in hiding to watch the
creatures that haunt the gloom-wrapt clearings
among the oaks and the beeches. In
the darkness, long intervals, during which
nothing will be seen or heard, must of
necessity be spent by the naturalist; and in
such intervals the mind is often filled with
what may, perhaps, be best described as the
spiritual influence of night, when the eyes
turn upward to the stars or to the lights of
a lone farmstead twinkling through the trees,
and imagination, wondering greatly at its[Pg 86]
own daring, links time with eternity, and
the destinies of this little world with the
affairs of a limitless universe.

At length the rim of the full moon
appeared above the crest of the hill behind
the village, and gradually, as the orb
ascended, the night became brighter, till
the whole surface of the pool, except for a
fleeting shadow, was clear and white, and a
broad silver bar lay across the ripples
between me and the reed-bed on the further
side. For a time no sign of a living
creature was visible; then a brown rat
crept along the bank beneath my hiding
place; a dim form, which from its size I
concluded was that of Lutra, the otter,
crossed a spit of sand about a dozen yards
above the reed-bed, where a moonbeam
glanced through the alders; and a big brown
owl, silhouetted against the sky, flew silently
up-stream, and perched on a low, bare branch
of a Scotch fir beside the grass-grown
path.

After another uneventful interval a slight
movement was observable in the reeds
directly opposite. Straight in the line of
the silver bar a water-vole came towards[Pg 87]
me, only the head of the little swimmer
being visible at the apex of a V-shaped
wake lengthening rapidly behind him. More
than half-way across the pool a large boulder
stood out of the water, but the vole was
heading towards the bank above. Then,
apparently without cause, he turned quickly
and made straight for the stone. He had
barely landed and run round to hide in
a shallow depression of the stone when the
water seemed to swell and heave immediately
beside the boulder, and Lutra’s head, with
wide-open jaws, shot above the current.
Disappointed, the otter vanished under the
shining surface of the stream, came to sight
once more in an eddy between the boulder
and the bank, and once more disappeared. I
was keenly interested, for every movement
of the vole and the otter had been plainly
discernible, so bright was the night, and so
close were the creatures to my hiding
place; and, raising myself slightly, I crawled
a few inches nearer the edge of the overhanging
bank.

“AN OPPORTUNITY CAME, WHICH, HAD SHE BEEN POISED IN THE AIR, COULD
SCARCELY HAVE BEEN MISSED.”
To List

For a long time the vole, not daring to
move, remained in the shadow. I had
almost concluded that he had dived through[Pg 88]
some crevice into the dark water on the
other side of the boulder, when he cautiously
lifted his head to the light, and crept into
a grass-clump on the top of the stone.
Thence, after a little hesitation, he moved
to the edge, as if contemplating a second
swim. Fastidious as to his toilet, even
in the presence of danger, he rose on his
haunches and washed his round, furry face.
The action was almost fatal. The brown
owl, that had doubtless seen him by the
grass-clump and had therefore left her
perch in the fir-tree, dropped like a bolt and
hovered, with wings nearly touching the silver
stream, above the spot where she had marked
her prey. But she was too late—the vole
had dived. Yet, even while, having alighted
on the boulder, the owl stood baffled by the
disappearance of the vole, an opportunity
came, which, had she been poised in the
air, could scarcely have been missed. Close
to the near bank a wave rose above
the surface of the eddy as Lutra, having
seen the vole dive from the stone, again
hurried in pursuit. So fast was the otter
that the momentum carried her well into the
shallows. But for the third time the vole[Pg 89]
escaped. I indistinctly saw him scramble
out, and run, with a shrill squeak, across a
ridge of sand, offering a second chance to the
listening owl; and, from his flight in the
direction of the well known burrow, I
concluded that the hunted creature was
russet-coated little Brighteye. But the bird
knew that she could not rise and swoop in
time; so, probably disturbed by the presence
of the otter, she flew away down-stream
just as Lutra, since the vole was out of
reach, glided from the sand and philosophically
turned her attention to less evasive
trout and eels.

Then all was motionless and silent, but
for an occasional faint whistle as Lutra
fished in the backwater at the throat of the
pool, the wailing cry of the owl from
the garden on the crest of the slope behind
me, and the ceaseless, gentle ripple of the
river. At last, when the voices of the otter
and the owl were still, and when the shadows
were foreshortened as the moon gazed coldly
down between the branches of the fir, Brighteye,
having recovered from his recent fright,
left his sanctuary by the roots of the willow,
and wandered, singing, singing, down the[Pg 90]
white, winding run-way and out into the
main road of the riverside people, till he
came to a jutting branch above the river’s
brim, whence he dived into the placid pool,
and swam away towards the reed-bed. Then
the crossed shadows of the flags and hemlocks
screened him from my sight.

The first autumn in the water-vole’s life
was a season of wonderful beauty. A few
successive frosts chilled the sap in the trees
and the bushes near the river, but were
succeeded by a long period when the air
was crisp yet balmy, and not a breath of
wind was noticeable except by the birds and
the squirrels high among the giant beeches
around the old garden, and when the murmur
of summer insects was never heard by night,
and only by day if a chance drone-fly
or humble-bee visited a surviving clump
of yellow ragweed by the run-way close
to Brighteye’s burrow. The elms and the
sycamores glowed with purple and bronze,
the ash-trees and the willows paled to lemon
yellow, the oaks arrayed themselves in rich
and glossy olive green; while the beeches
in the glade, and the brambles along the
outskirts of the thickets, ruddy and golden[Pg 91]
and glittering in the brief, delicious autumn
days, seemed to filter and yet stain the
mellow sunshine, and to fill each nook with
liquid shadow as pure and glorious as the
blue and amber lights on the undulating
hills. Spread on the bosom of the brimming
river, and broken, here and there, by creamy
lines of passing foam, the reflections of this
beauty seemed to well and bubble, from unfathomable
deeps, around the “sly, fat fishes
sailing, watching all.”

The water became much colder than in
summer; but Brighteye, protected by a warm
covering of thick, soft fur through which the
moisture could not penetrate, as well as by
an over-garment of longer, coarser hair from
which the drops were easily shaken when he
left the stream, hardly noticed the change of
temperature. But he well knew there were
changes in the surroundings of his home.
The flags in the reed-bed were not so
succulent as they had been in early summer;
the branches that sometimes guided him as he
swam from place to place seemed strangely
bare and grey; the clump of may-weed that,
growing near his burrow, had served as a
beacon in the gloom, was faded to a few[Pg 92]
short brown tufts; and nightly in his
wanderings he was startled by the withered
leaves that, like fluttering birds, descended
near him on the littered run-ways or on the
glassy surface of the river-reach. It was
long before he became accustomed to the
falling of the leaves, and up to the time
when every bough was bare the rustling
flight of a great chestnut plume towards
him never failed to rouse the fear first
wakened by the owl, and to send him on a
long, breathless dive to the bottom of the
pool.

Brighteye was a familiar figure to all the
river-folk, while he, in turn, knew most of
them, and had learned to distinguish between
friends and foes. But occasionally he made
a slight mistake. Though shy, he was as
curious as the squirrel that, one afternoon
when Brighteye was early abroad, hopped
down the run-way to make his acquaintance,
and frightened him into a precipitate retreat,
then ran out to a branch above the stream
and loudly derided the creature apparently
drowning in the stream.

An object of ceaseless curiosity to Brighteye
was a water-shrew, not more than half[Pg 93]
the size of the vole, that had come to dwell in
the pool, and had tunnelled out a burrow in
the bank above the reed-bed. Nightly, after
supper, Brighteye made a circuit of the
pool to find the shrew, and with his companion
swam hither and thither, till, startled
by some real or imagined danger, each of
the playmates hurried to refuge, and was
lost awhile to the other amid the darkness
and the solitude of the silent hours.

Brighteye soon became aware of the fact
that some of the habits of the shrew were
entirely different from his own. While the
vole was almost entirely a vegetable feeder, the
shrew, diving to the bed of the river, would
thrust his long snout between the stones,
and pick up grubs and worms and leeches
sheltering there. With Brighteye’s curiosity
was mingled not a little wonderment, for
the shrew’s furry coat presented a strange
contrast of black above and white beneath,
and, immediately after the shrew had dived,
a hundred little bubbles, adhering to the
ends of his hair, caused him to appear like
a silvery grey phantom, gliding gracefully,
though erratically, from stone to stone, from
patch to patch of water-weed, from ripple to[Pg 94]
ripple near the surface of the stream. The
young brown trout, hovering harmlessly
above the rocky shelves and in the sandy
shallows, far from being a source of terror
to Brighteye, fled at his approach, and
seldom returned to their haunts till he
had reached the far side of the current.
Emboldened by the example of the shrew,
that sometimes made a raid among the
minnows, and desirous of keeping all
intruders away from the lower entrance
to his burrow, Brighteye habitually chased
the trout if they ventured within the little
bay before his home. But there was one
trout, old and lean, whose haunt was behind
a weed-covered stone at the throat of the
pool, and of this hook-beaked, carnivorous
creature, by which he had once been chased
and bitten, Brighteye went in such constant
fear that he avoided the rapid, and, directly
he caught a glimpse of the long, dark form
roving through the gloomy depths, paddled
with utmost haste to his nearest landing
place.

Since, under the care of his mother, he
made his earliest visit to the reed-bed,
Brighteye had seen hundreds of giant[Pg 95]
salmon; the restless fish, however, did not
stay long in the pool, but after a brief
sojourn passed upward. Often at dusk the
salmon would leap clear into the air just
as Brighteye came to the surface after his
first dive, and once so near was a sportive
fish that the vole became confused for the
moment by the sudden turmoil of the
“rise,” and rocked on the swell of the back-wash
like a boat on the waves of a tossing
sea. During the summer Brighteye had
suffered nothing, beyond this one sudden
fright, from the visits of the great silvery
fish to the neighbourhood of his home;
and, notwithstanding his experience, he was
accustomed to dive boldly into the depths
of the “hovers,” and even to regard without
fear the approach of an unusually inquisitive
salmon. Late in the autumn, however,
Brighteye noticed, with unaccountable misgiving,
a distinct change in the appearance
of these passing visitors. The silvery sheen
had died away from their scales, and had
been succeeded by a dark, dull red; and the
fish were sluggish and ill-tempered. Besides,
they were so numerous, especially after a
heavy rainfall, that the stream seemed[Pg 96]
barely able to afford them room in their
favourite “hovers,” and the old trout,
previously an easy master of the situation,
found it almost beyond his powers to keep
trespassers from his particular haunt in mid-current
at the throat of the pool. So
occupied was he with this duty that he
seldom roamed into the little bays beneath
the alder-fringes; and Brighteye, so long as
he avoided the rapid, was fairly safe from
his attack. The reed-bed, though partly
submerged, still yielded the vole sufficient
food; and to reach it straight from his
home he had to pass through the shallows,
which extended for a considerable distance
up-stream and down-stream from the
gravelly stretch immediately outside the
reeds.

About the beginning of winter, when the
migration of the salmon had become intermittent,
and the sea-trout had all passed
upward beyond the pool, two of the big,
ugly “red fish,” late arrivals at the “hover”
nearest the burrow, made a close inspection
of the pool; then, instead of following their
kindred to the further reaches, they fell
back toward the tail of the stream and[Pg 97]
there remained. After the first week of
their stay, Brighteye found them so ill-tempered
that he dared not venture anywhere
near the tail of the stream; and, as
the big trout at the top of the pool showed
irritation at the least disturbance, the vole
was forced to wander down the bank, to a
spot below the salmon, before crossing the
river on his periodical journeys to the reed-bed.
His kindred, still living in the burrow
where he had been born, were similarly
daunted; while the shrew became the object
of such frequent attack—especially from
the bigger of the two salmon, an old male
with a sinister, pig-like countenance and a
formidable array of teeth—that escape from
disaster was little short of miraculous.

Having calculated to a nicety his chances
of escape, and having decided to avoid
at all times the haunts of the pugnacious
fish, Brighteye was seldom inconvenienced,
except that he had to pass further than
hitherto along the bank before taking to
the water, and thus had to risk attack from
weasels and owls. But soon, to his dismay,
he discovered that the salmon had shifted their
quarters to the shallow close by the reeds.[Pg 98]
He was swimming one night as usual
into the quiet water by the reed-bed, and,
indeed, had entered a narrow, lane-like
opening among the stems, when he felt
a quick, powerful movement in the water,
and saw a mysterious form turn in pursuit
of him, and glide swiftly away with a
mighty effort that caused a wave to ripple
through the reeds, while the outer stalks
bent and recoiled as if from the force
of a powerful blow. On the following
night he was chased almost to the end of
the opening among the reeds, and barely
escaped; but this time he recognised his
pursuer. Afterwards, having unexpectedly
met the shrew, he crept with his companion
along by the water’s edge as far as the
ford, and spent the dark hours in a
strange place, till at dawn he crossed the
rough water, and sought his home by a
path the further part of which he had not
previously explored.

IV.

Top

[Pg 99]

SAVED BY AN ENEMY.

The days were dim and the nights long,
and thick, drenching mists hung over
the gloomy river. The salmon’s family
affairs had reached an important stage; and
the “redd,” furrowed in the gravel by the
mated fish, contained thousands of newly
deposited eggs. And, as many of the river-folk,
from the big trout to the little water-shrew,
continually threatened a raid on the
spawn, the salmon guarded each approach to
the shallows with unremitting vigilance.

It happened, unfortunately for Brighteye,
that, while the construction of the “redd”
was in progress, some of the eggs—unfertilised
and therefore not heavy enough
to sink to the bottom of the water—were
borne slowly by the current to the ford[Pg 100]
below the pool, just as the shrew was
occupied there in vain attempts to teach
the vole how to hunt for insects among
the pebbles.

If Brighteye had been at all inclined to
vary his diet, he would at that moment
have yielded to temptation. Everywhere
around him the trout were exhibiting great
eagerness, snapping up the delicacies as they
drew near, and then moving forward on the
scent in the direction of the “redd.” The
shrew joined in the quest; and Brighteye,
full of curiosity, swam beside his playmate
in the wake of the hungry trout. The
vole found quite a shoal of fish collected
near the reeds; and for a few moments he
frolicked about the edge of the shallow. He
could see nothing of the old male salmon,
though he caught a glimpse of the female
busy with her maternal duties at the top
of the “redd.”

After diving up-stream and along by the
line of the eager trout, he rose to breathe
at the surface, when, suddenly, the river
seemed alive with trout scattering in every
direction, a great upheaval seemed to part
the water, and he himself was gripped by[Pg 101]
one of his hind-feet and dragged violently
down and across to the deep “hover” near
his home. The salmon had at last outwitted
the vole. The current was strong, and beneath
its weight Brighteye’s body was bent
backwards till his fore-paws rested on the
salmon’s head. Mad with rage and fright,
he clawed and bit at the neck of his captor.
Gradually his strength was giving way, and
for want of air he was losing consciousness,
when, like a living bolt, Lutra, the otter, to
save unwittingly a life that she had erstwhile
threatened, shot from the darkness of the river-bed,
and fixed her teeth in the neck of the
salmon scarcely more than an inch from the
spot to which the vole held fast in desperation.
In the struggle that ensued, and ended only
when Lutra had carried her prey to shore,
Brighteye, half suffocated and but faintly
apprehending what had taken place, was
released. Like a cork he rose to the surface,
where he lay outstretched and gasping,
while the current carried him swiftly to the
ford, and thence to the pool beneath the
village gardens. Having recovered sufficiently
to paddle feebly ashore, he sat for a
time in the safe shelter of a rocky ledge,[Pg 102]
unnoticed by the brown rats as they wandered
through the tall, withered grass-clumps high
above his hiding place. At last he got
the better of his sickness and fright; and,
notwithstanding the continued pain of his
scarred limbs, he brushed his furry coat and
limped homeward just as the dawn was
silvering the grey, silent pool where the lonely
salmon guarded the “redd” and waited
in vain for the return of her absent mate.

Brighteye took to heart his own escape
from death, and for several nights moped and
pined, ate little, and frequented only a part
of the river-bank in proximity to his burrow.
As soon, however, as the tiny scars on his
leg were healed, he ventured again to the
river; and for a period danger seldom
threatened him. While he was unceasingly
vigilant, and always ready to seek with
utmost haste the safety of his home, a new
desire to take precautions against the probability
of attack possessed him. When, at
dusk, he stole out from the upper entrance
of his dwelling, he crouched on the grassy
ledge at the river’s brim and peered into the
little bay below. If nothing stirred between
the salmon “hover” and the bank, he dropped[Pg 103]
quietly into the pool, inhaled a long, deep
breath, dived beneath the willow-roots, and
watched, through the clear depths, each
moving fish or swaying stem of river-weed
within the range of his vision. But not till,
after several visits to his water-entrance, he
was perfectly convinced of the absence of
danger, did he dare to brave the passage of
the pool.

The water-entrance to the vole’s burrow
was situated about a foot below the summer
level of the river, and in a kind of buttress
of gravel and soil, which, at its base, sloped
abruptly inwards like an arch. This buttress
jutted out at the lower corner of a little
horse-shoe bay; and hereabouts, during
summer, a shoal of minnows had often
played, following each other in and out of
every nook and cranny beneath the bank, or
floating up and flashing in sun-flecked ripples
faintly stirred by a breeze that wandered
lightly from across the stream.

Ordinarily, Brighteye found that the hole
in the perpendicular bank served its purpose
well; at the slightest disturbance he could
escape thither, and, safe from pursuit, climb
the irregular stairway to the hollow chamber[Pg 104]
above high-water mark. But it was different
in times of flood. If he had to flee from
the big trout, or from the otter, when the
stream rushed madly past his open doorway,
he found that an interval, which, however
brief, was sufficient to imperil his life,
must necessarily elapse before he could
secure a foothold in his doorway and lift
himself into the dark recess beyond.

“THE BIG TROUT, IN HIS TORPEDO-LIKE RUSH TO CUT OFF BRIGHTEYE
FROM SURE REFUGE.” (See p. 105).
To List

Lutra had almost caught him after his
adventure with the owl. He had, however,
eluded the otter by diving, in the nick of
time, from the stone to which he clung
before the entrance, and then seeking the
land. If he had been an instant later, she
would have picked him off, as a bat picks a
moth from a lighted window-pane, and he
would never have reached the down-stream
shallow. At that time the water, clearing
after a summer freshet, was fairly low.
Brighteye’s danger in some wild winter flood
would, therefore, be far greater; so, timorous
from his recent experiences, and sufficiently
intelligent to devise and carry out plans by
which he would secure greater safety, he
occupied his spare time in the lengthening
nights with driving a second shaft straight[Pg 105]
inward from the chamber to a roomy natural
hollow among the willow-roots, and thence
in devious course, to avoid embedded stones,
downward to a tiny haven in the angle of
the buttress far inside the archway of the
bank, where the space was so confined that
the otter could not possibly follow him.
Even the big trout, in his torpedo-like rush
to cut off Brighteye from sure refuge, utterly
failed to turn, and then enter the narrow archway,
in time to catch the artful vole.

The task of digging out the second tunnel
was exceedingly arduous; yet, on its completion,
Brighteye, taught by the changes going
on around him that months of scarcity were
impending, set to work again about half-way
between his sleeping chamber and the upper
entrance of the burrow. Here he scratched
out a small, semicircular “pocket,” which he
filled with miscellaneous supplies—seeds of
many kinds, a few beech-nuts, hazel-nuts, and
acorns, as well as roots of horse-tail grass
and fibrous river-weed.

He was careful, like his small relative
the field-vole, and like the squirrel in the
woods above the river-bank, to harvest only
ripe, undamaged seeds and nuts; and in[Pg 106]
making his choice he was helped by his
exquisite sense of smell. He found some
potatoes and carrots—so small that they
had been dropped as worthless by a passing
labourer on the river-path—and selected
the best, leaving the others to rot among
the autumn leaves. As the “pocket” was
inadequate to contain his various stores,
the vole used the chamber also as a
granary, and slept in the warm, dry
hollow by the willow-roots.

In the depth of winter, when the mist-wreaths
on the stream were icy cold and
brought death to the sleeping birds among
the branches of the leafless alders, and
when Lutra, ravenous with hunger, chased
the great grey trout from his “hover,” but
lost him in a crevice near the stakes,
Brighteye, saved from privation by his
hoarded provender, seldom ventured from
his home. But if the night was mild and
the stars were not hidden by a cloud of
mist, he would steal along his run-way
to the main road of the riverside people,
strip the bark from the willow-stoles, and
feed contentedly on the juicy pith; while
his friend, the shrew, busy in the shallows[Pg 107]
near the reed-bed, searched for salmon-spawn
washed from the “redd” by the
turbulent flood, or for newly hatched fry no
longer guarded by the lonely parent fish
long since departed on her way to the
distant sea.

The spirit of winter brooded over the
river valley. The faint summer music of
the gold-crest in the fir-tops, the sweet,
flute-like solo of the meditative thrush in
the darkness of the hawthorn, and the
weird, continuous rattle of the goatsucker
perched moveless on an oak-bough near the
river-bend, were no longer heard when at
dusk Brighteye left his burrow and sat,
watching and listening, on the little
eminence above the river’s brink. Even
the drone of the drowsy beetle, swinging
over the ripples of the shadowed stream or
from tuft to tuft of grass beside the woodland
path, had ceased. But at times the
cheery dipper still sang from the boulder
whence the vole had dived to escape the
big brown owl; and, when other birds had
gone to sleep, the robin on the alder-spray
and the wren among the willow-stoles
piped their glad vespers to assure a[Pg 108]
saddened world that presently the winter’s
gloom would vanish before the coming of
another spring.

Like a vision of glory, which, in the first hour
of some poor wanderer’s sleep, serves but to
mock awhile his awakened mind with recollections
of a happy past, so had the Indian
summer shone on Nature’s tired heart, and
mocked, and passed away. The last red roseleaf
had fluttered silently down; the last
purple sloe had fallen from its sapless stem.

A sharp November frost was succeeded
by a depressing month of mist and drizzling
rain. Then the heavens opened, and for
day after day, and night after night, their
torrents poured down the stony water-courses
of the hills. The river rose beyond
the highest mark of summer freshets, till
the low-lying meadow above the village was
converted into a lake, and Brighteye’s
burrow disappeared beneath the surface of
a raging flood.

Gifted with a mysterious knowledge of
Nature’s moods—which all wild animals in
some degree possess—the vole had made
ready for the sudden change. On the night
preceding the storm, when in the mist even[Pg 109]
the faintest sounds seemed to gain in clearness
and intensity, he had hollowed out for
himself a temporary dwelling among the
roots of a moss-grown tree on the steep
slope of the wood behind the river-path, and
had carried thither all his winter supplies
from the granary where first they had been
stored.

Brighteye was exposed to exceptional
danger by his compulsory retirement from
the old burrow in the river-bank. Stoats
and weasels were ever on the prowl; no
water-entrance afforded him immediate
escape from their relentless hostilities, and
he was almost as liable to panic, if pursued
for any considerable distance on land, as
were the rabbits living on the fringe of the
gravel-pit within the heart of the silent
wood. If a weasel or a stoat had entered
the vole’s new burrow during the period
when the flood was at its highest, only the
most fortunate circumstances could have
saved its occupant. Even had he managed
to flee to the river, his plight would still
have been pitiful. Unable to find security
in his former retreat, and effectually
deterred by the lingering scent of his[Pg 110]
pursuers from returning to his woodland
haunts, Brighteye, a homeless, hungry little
vagabond, at first perplexed, then risking
all in search of food and rest, would inevitably
have met his fate.

But neither stoat nor weasel learned of his
new abode. His burrow was high and dry
in the gravelly soil under the tree-trunk; and
before his doorway, as far as a hollow at the
river’s verge, stretched a natural path of rain-washed
stones on which the line of his scent
could never with certainty be followed.
While many of his kindred perished, Brighteye
survived this period of flood; and when
the waters, having cleansed each riverside
dwelling, abated to their ordinary winter
level, he returned to his burrow in the
buttress by the stakes, and once more felt
the joy of living in safety among familiar
scenes.

Since the leaves had fallen, the brown rats
had become fewer and still fewer along the
river, and, when the flood subsided, it might
have been found that none of these creatures
remained in their summer haunts. They had
emigrated to the rick-yard near the village
inn; many of the stoats and weasels, finding[Pg 111]
provender scarce, had followed in their footsteps;
and Brighteye and his kindred, with
the water-shrews, the moorhens, and the
coots, were unmolested in their wanderings
both by night and day.

The vole’s favourite reed-bed was now
seldom visited. Besides being inundated, it
was silted so completely with gravel that
to cut through the submerged stems would
have been an arduous and almost impossible
task. Luckily, in his journeys along the
edge of the shallows during the flood, Brighteye
had found a sequestered pond, near
an old hedgerow dividing the wood, where
tender duckweed was plentiful, and, with
delicious roots of watercress, promised him
abundant food. Every evening he stole
through the shadows, climbed the leaf-strewn
rabbit-track by the hedge, and swam across
the pond from a dark spot beneath some
brambles to the shelter of a gorse-bush overhanging
the weeds. There he was well protected
from the owl by an impenetrable
prickly roof, while he could readily elude, by
diving, any stray creature attacking him from
land.

Winter dragged slowly on its course, and,[Pg 112]
just as the first prophecy of spring was
breathed by the awakening woodlands, the
warm west breezes ceased to blow, and the
bleak north wind moaned drearily among
the trees. Night after night a sheet of ice
spread and thickened from the shallows to
the edge of the current, the wild ducks came
down to the river from the frost-bound moors,
and great flocks of geese, whistling loudly in
the starlit sky, passed on their southward
journey to the coast.

For the first few nights Brighteye left his
chamber only when acute hunger drove him
to his storehouse in the wood. Directly he
had fed, he returned home, and settled once
more to sleep. At last his supplies were
exhausted, and he was forced to subsist
almost entirely on the pith beneath the bark
of the willows. The pond by the hedgerow
was sealed with ice, and he suffered much
from the lack of his customary food. Half-way
between his sleeping chamber and its
water-entrance, a floor of ice prevented ready
access to the river; and, under this floor, a
hollow, filled with air, was gradually formed
as the river receded from the level it had
reached on the first night of frost. Brighteye’s[Pg 113]
only approach to the outer world was, therefore,
through the upper doorway. All along
the margin of the pool, as far as the swift
water beyond the stakes, the ice-shelf was
now so high above the river that even to a
large animal like the otter it offered no landing
place. Only at the stakes, where the dark,
cold stream flowed rapidly between two blocks
of ice, could Brighteye enter or leave the river.
Partly because, if he should be pursued, the
swiftness of the stream was likely to lessen
his chances of escape, and partly because of a
vague but ever-present apprehension of danger,
he avoided this spot. It was fortunate that
he did so; Lutra, knowing well the ways of
the riverside people, often lurked in hiding
under the shelf of ice beyond the stakes, and,
when she had gone from sight, the big, gaunt
trout came slyly from his refuge by the
boulder and resumed his tireless scrutiny of
everything that passed his “hover.” At last
a thaw set in, and Brighteye, awakening on
the second day from his noontide sleep, heard
the great ice-sheet crack, and groan, and fall
into the river.

When darkness came he hurried to the
water’s brink, and, almost reckless with[Pg 114]
delight, plunged headlong into the pool. He
tucked his fore-paws beneath his chin, and,
with quick, free strokes of his hind-legs, dived
deep to the very bottom of the backwater.
Thence he made a circle of the little bay,
and, floating up to the arch before his
dwelling, sought the inner entrance, where,
however, the ice had not yet melted. He
dived once more, and gained the outer
entrance in the front of the buttress, but
there, also, the ice was thick and firm.
He breathed the cold, damp air in the
hollow beneath the ice, then glided out and
swam to land. The tiny specks of dirt,
which, since the frost kept him from the
river, had matted his glossy fur, seemed now
completely washed away, and he felt delightfully
fresh and vigorous as he sat on the
grass, and licked and brushed each hair into
place. His toilet completed, he ran gaily
up the bank to his storehouse under
the tree, but only to find it empty. Not
in the least disheartened, he climbed the
rabbit-track, rustled over the hedge-bank to
the margin of the pond, and there, as in
the nights before the frost, feasted eagerly
on duckweed and watercress. On the[Pg 115]
following day the ice melted in the shaft
below his chamber, and he was thus saved
the trouble of tunnelling a third water-passage—as
a ready means of escape from the otter
and the big trout, as well as from a chance
weasel or stoat—which, if the ice had not
disappeared, he surely would have made
as soon as his vigour was fully restored.

V.

[Pg 116]

THE COURAGE OF FEAR.

The dawn, with easy movement, comes
across the eastern hills; the mists roll up
from steaming hollows to a cloudless sky;
the windows of a farm-house in the dingle
gleam and sparkle with the light. So came
the fair, unhesitating spring; so rolled
the veil of winter’s gloom away; so gleamed
and sparkled with responsive greeting every
tree and bush and flower in the awakened
river valley. The springs and summers of
our life are few, yet in each radiant dawn
and sunrise they may, in brief, be found.

Filled with the restlessness of springtide
life—a restlessness felt by all wild creatures,
and inherited by man from far distant ages
when, depending on the hunt for his sustenance,
he followed the migrations of the beasts—Brighteye[Pg 117]
often left his retreat much earlier
in the afternoon than had been his wont, and
stole along the river-paths even while the
sunshine lingered on the crest of the hill and
on the ripples by the stakes below the pool.

Prompted by an increasing feeling of
loneliness and a strong desire that one of
his kindred should share with him his
comfortable home, he occupied much of
his time in enlarging the upper chamber of
the burrow till it formed a snug, commodious
sleeping place ceiled by the twisted willow-roots;
and, throwing the soil behind him
down the shaft, he cleared the floor till it was
smooth and level. Then he boldly sallied
forth, determined to wander far in search
of a mate rather than remain a bachelor.
He proceeded down-stream beside the trout-reach,
and for a long time his journey was
in vain. He heard a faint plash on the
surface of the water, and at once his little
heart beat fast with mingled hope and fear;
but the sound merely indicated that the
last of winter’s withered oak-leaves, pushed
gently aside by a swelling bud, had fallen
from the bough. Suddenly, from the ruined
garden above him on the brow of the slope,[Pg 118]
came the dread hunting cry of his old
enemy, the tawny owl. Even as the first
weird note struck with far-spreading resonance
on the silence of the night, all longing
and hope forsook the vole. Realising only
that he was in a strange place far from
home, and exposed to many unknown
dangers, he sat as moveless as the pebbles
around him, till, from a repetition of the
cry, he learned that the owl was departing
into the heart of the wood. Then, silently, he
journeyed onward. Further and still further—past
the rocky shelf where he had landed
after his escape from the salmon, and into
a region honeycombed with old, deserted
rat-burrows, and arched with prostrate trees
and refuse borne by flood—he ventured, his
fear forgotten in the strength of his desire.

Close beside the river’s brink, as the
shadows darkened, he found the fresh scent
of a female vole. He followed it eagerly,
through shallow and whirlpool and stream,
to a spit of sand among some boulders,
where he met, not the reward of his labour
and longing, but a jealous admirer of the
dainty lady he had sought to woo. After
the manner of their kind in such affairs, the[Pg 119]
rivals ruffled with rage, kicked and squealed
as if to declare their reckless bravery, and
closed in desperate battle. Their polished
teeth cut deeply, and the sand was furrowed
and pitted by their straining feet. Several
times they paused for breath, but only to
resume the fight with renewed energy. The
issue was, however, at last decided. Brighteye,
lying on his back, used his powerful hind-claws
with such effect that, when he regained
his footing, he was able, almost unresisted, to
get firm hold of his tired opponent, and
to thrust him, screaming with pain and
baffled rage, into the pool.

The female vole had watched the combat
from a recess in the bank; and, when the
victor returned from the river, she crept out
trustfully to meet him, and licked his soiled
and ruffled fur. But for the moment Brighteye
was not in a responsive mood. Though
his body thrilled at the touch of her warm,
soft tongue, he recognised that his first duty
was to make his conquest sure. His strength
had been taxed to the utmost, and, since his
rage was expended and his tiny wounds
were beginning to smart, he feared a second
encounter and the possible loss of his lady-love.[Pg 120]
So, with simulated anger, he drove her
before him along the up-stream path and
into the network of deserted run-ways by the
trout-reach. There his mood entirely changed;
and soon, in simple, happy comradeship, he led
her to his home.

Brighteye was a handsome little fellow.
At all times he had been careful in his toilet,
but now, pardonably vain, he fastidiously
occupied every moment of leisure in brushing
and combing his long, fine, soft fur.
Both in appearance and habits he was altogether
different from the garbage-loving rat.
His head was rounder and blunter than the
rat’s, his feet were larger and softer, and his
limbs and his tail were shorter. On the under
side his feet were of a pale pink colour, but
on the upper side they were covered, like the
field-vole’s, with close, stiff hair set in regular
lines from the toes to the elbows of the front
limbs and to the ankles of the hind-legs, where
the long, fine fur of the body took its place.
A slight webbing crossed the toes of his hind-feet—so
slight, indeed, that it assisted him
but little in swimming—and his tiny, polished
claws were plum-coloured. Except when he
was listening intently for some sign of danger,[Pg 121]
his small, round ears were almost concealed
in his thick fur. His mate was of smaller
and more delicate build—this was especially
noticeable when once I saw her swim with
Brighteye through the clear water beneath
the bank—and she was clad in sombre brown
and grey.

Household and similar duties soon began
to claim attention in and around the riverside
dwelling. The green grass was growing
rapidly under the withered blades that arched
the run-ways between the river’s brink
and the woodland path; and, as the voles
desired to keep these run-ways clear, they
assiduously cut off all encroaching stems and
brushed them aside. The stems dried, and
in several places formed a screen beneath
which the movements of the voles were not
easily discernible. Selecting the best of the
dry grass-stalks, the voles carried them home,
and, after much labour, varied with much
consultation in which small differences of
opinion evidently occurred, completed, in
the sleeping chamber beneath the willow-roots,
a large, round nest. The magnitude
of their labour could be easily inferred from
the appearance of the nest: each grass-blade[Pg 122]
carried thither had been bitten into dozens
of fragments, and the structure filled the
entire space beyond the first of the exposed
roots, though its interior, till from frequent
use it changed its form, seemed hardly able
to accommodate the female vole.

In this tight snuggery, at a time when
the corncrake’s nocturnal music was first
heard in the meadow by the pool, five
midget water-voles, naked and blind, were
born. Brighteye listened intently to the
faint, unmistakable family noises issuing
therefrom, and then, like a thoughtful dry-nurse,
went off to find for his mate a tender
white root of horse-tail grass. For several
nights he was assiduous in his attentions to
the mother vole; and afterwards, his house-keeping
duties being suspended, he became
a vigilant sentinel, maintaining constant
watch over the precious family within his
home.

When the baby voles were about a week
old, a large brown rat, that on several
occasions in the previous year had annoyed
the youthful Brighteye, returned to the
pool. Wandering through the run-ways, the
monster chanced to discover the opening[Pg 123]
from the bank to Brighteye’s chamber, and,
thinking that here was a place admirably
suited for a summer resort, proceeded to
investigate. The vole scented him immediately,
and, though the weaker animal, climbed
quickly out and with tooth and nail fell upon
the intruder. An instant later, the mother
vole appeared, and with even greater ferocity
than that of her mate joined in the keen
affray in order to defend her home and
family to the utmost of her powers. But
the rat possessed great strength and cruel
teeth, and his size and weight were such
that for several minutes he successfully
maintained his position. With desperate
efforts, the voles endeavoured to pull the rat
into the water, where, as they knew, their
advantage would be greater than on land.
They succeeded at last in forcing him over
the bank, and in the pool proceeded to
punish him to such an extent—clinging to
his neck by their teeth and fore-feet, while
they used their hind-claws with painful effect
on his body—that, dazed by their drastic
methods and almost suffocated, he reluctantly
gave up the struggle, and floated, gasping,
down the stream.[Pg 124]

The mother vole, though she and her
spouse had proved victorious, was so
unsettled by the rat’s incursion, that, as a
cat carries her kittens, she carried each of
her young in turn from their nest to a
temporary refuge in a clump of brambles.
Still dissatisfied, she removed them thence
to a shallow depression beside one of
the run-ways, where, throughout the night,
she nursed them tenderly. At daybreak
she took them back to the warmth and the
comfort of the nest. Shortly afterwards,
when their eyes were opened and they were
following the parent voles on one of their
customary night excursions, the mother
found herself face to face with a far more
formidable antagonist than the rat.

The baby voles, like the offspring of
nearly all land animals that have gradually
become aquatic in their habits, were at first
strangely averse from entering the water,
and had to be taken by their parents into
the pool. There the anxious mother, firm
yet gentle in her system of education,
watched their every movement, and
encouraged them to follow her about the
backwaters and shallows near their home.[Pg 125]
But if either of them showed the faintest
sign of fatigue, the mother dived quietly
and lifted the tired nursling to the surface.

Late one evening, while the parent voles
were busy with their work of family training,
the old cannibal trout suddenly appeared, rose
quickly at one of the youngsters swimming
near the edge of the current, but, through
a slight miscalculation, failed to clutch his
prize. The mother vole, ever on the alert,
plunged down, and, heedless of danger,
darted towards her enemy. For a second
or two she manœuvred to obtain a grip,
then, as she turned to avoid attack, the
jaws of the trout opened wide, and, like
a steel trap, closed firmly on her tail.
Maddened with rage and pain, she raised
herself quickly, clutched at the back of her
assailant, and buried her sharp, adze-shaped
teeth—that could strip a piece of willow-bark
as neatly as could a highly tempered
tool of steel—in the flesh behind his gills.
So sure and speedy was her action, that she
showed no sign of fatigue when she reached
the surface of the water, and the trout,
his spinal column severed just behind his
gills, drifted lifelessly away.[Pg 126]

Though the young voles, in the tunnelled
buttress of the river-bank, lived under the
care of experienced parents ever ready and
resolute in their defence, and became as shy
and furtive as the wood-mice dwelling in
the hollows of the hedge beside the pond,
they were not always favoured by fortune.
The weakling of the family died of disease;
another of the youngsters, foraging alone in
the wood, was killed by a bloodthirsty weasel;
while a third, diving to pick up a root of
water-weed, was caught by the neck in the
fork of a submerged branch, and drowned.

During the autumn and the winter the
survivors remained with their parents; the
burrow was enlarged and improved by the
addition of new granaries for winter
supplies, new water-entrances to facilitate
escape in times of panic, and a new, commodious
sleeping chamber, strewn with hay
and withered reeds, at the end of a long
tunnel extending almost directly beneath
the river-path. The supplies in the
granaries were, however, hardly needed:
the winter was exceptionally mild, and the
voles were generally able to obtain duckweed
and watercress for food. Often, on[Pg 127]
my way to the ruined garden, I noticed
their footprints—indistinctly outlined on
the gravel, but deep and triangular where
the creatures climbed through soft and
yielding soil—along the path leading to the
pond in the pasture near the wood.

When spring came once more, and
the scented primroses gleamed faintly in
the gloom beside the upper entrance to
the burrow, and the corncrake, babbling
loudly, wandered through the growing grass
at the foot of the meadow-hedge, the household
of the voles was broken up. The
young ones found partners, and, in homes
not far from the burrow by the willow-stoles,
settled down to the usual life of the
vole, a life of happiness and yet of peril.

For still another year Brighteye’s presence
was familiar to me. I often watched him
as he sat at the water’s edge above the
buttress, or on the stone in mid-stream, or
on the half-submerged root of a tree washed
into an angle of the pool above the stakes,
and as, after his usual toilet observances, he
swam thence across the reed-bed opposite
the “hover” where, in autumn, the breeding
salmon lurked.[Pg 128]

Then, for many months, I lived far from
the well loved village. But one winter
evening, after a long journey, I returned.
The snow, falling rapidly, blotted out the
prospect of the silent hills. The village
seemed asleep; the shops were closed for the
weekly holiday; not a footfall could be
heard, not even a dog could be seen, down
the long vista of the straggling street. The
white walls of the cottages, and the white
snow-drifts banked beside the irregular
pavements, were in complete contrast to the
radiant summer scene on which my eyes
had lingered when I left the village. My
feeling of cheerlessness was not dispelled
even by the warmth and comfort of the
little inn. Oppressed by the evidences of
change, which in my disappointment were,
no doubt, much exaggerated, I left the inn,
and, heedless of the piercing cold and the
driving snow, made my way towards the
river. As I approached the stakes below
the pool, a golden-eye duck rose from beside
the bank, and on whistling wings flew
swiftly into the gloom. I crouched in the
shelter of a holly tree, and waited and
watched till the cold became unendurable;[Pg 129]
but no other sign of life was visible; the
pool was deserted.

In summer I returned home to stay, and
then, as of old, I often wandered by the
river. Evening after evening, till long
after the last red glow had faded from the
western hill-tops, I lingered by the pool.
The owl sailed slowly past; the goatsucker
hawked for moths about the oaks; the trout
rose to the incautious flies; the corncrake
babbled loudly in the long, lush meadow
grass. A family of voles swam in and out
of the shallows opposite my hiding place;
but none of the little animals approached
the buttress near the stakes. Frequently
I saw their footprints on the sandy margin,
but never the footprints of Brighteye.
Somehow, somewhere, he had met relentless
fate.

THE FIELD-VOLE.

[Pg 131]

I.

[Pg 133]

HIDDEN PATHWAYS IN THE GRASS.

The sun had set, the evening was calm, and
a mist hung over the countryside when a field-vole
appeared at the mouth of his burrow
in a mossy pasture. The little grey creature
was one of the most timorous of the feeble
folk dwelling in the pleasant wilderness of
the Valley of Olwen. His life, like that of
Brighteye, the water-vole, was beset with
enemies; but Nature had given to him, as
to the water-vole, acute senses of sight, and
smell, and hearing, and a great power of
quick and intelligent action. He had lived
four years, survived a hundred dangers, and
reared twenty healthy families; and his wits
were so finely sharpened that he was
recognised by a flourishing colony, which[Pg 134]
had gradually increased around his moss-roofed
home, as the wisest and most wide-awake
field-vole that ever nibbled a turnip
or harvested a seed.

For a moment the vole sat in the mouth
of the burrow, with nothing of himself visible
but a blunt little snout twitching as he sniffed
the air, and two beady eyes moving restlessly
as he peered into the sky. Suddenly he
leaped out and squatted beside the nearest
stone. A robin, disturbed in his roosting
place by another of his kind, flew from the
hedge in furious pursuit of the intruder, and
passed within a few inches of the burrow.
The vole, alarmed by the rush of wings,
instantly vanished; but soon, convinced that
no cause for fear existed, he again left his
burrow and for several minutes sat motionless
by the stone.

He was not, however, idle—a field-vole
is never idle save when he sleeps—but he was
puzzled by the different sounds and scents
and sights around him; they had become
entangled, and while he watched and listened
his mind was trying to pick out a thread of
meaning here and there. What was the cause
of that angry chatter, loud, prolonged, insistent,[Pg 135]
in the fir plantation at the bottom
of the field? Some unwelcome creature, bent
on mischief—perhaps a weasel or a cat—was
wandering through the undergrowth, and the
blackbirds, joined by the finches, the wrens,
and the tits, were endeavouring to drive it
from the neighbourhood. Gradually the
noisy birds followed the intruder to the far
end of the slope; then, returning to their
roosting places, they squabbled for the choice
of sheltered perches among the ivied boughs.
Silence fell on upland and valley; and the
creatures of the night crept forth from bank
and hedgerow, and the thickets of the wood,
to play and feed under the friendly protection
of the fast-gathering gloom. But the
field-vole would not venture from his lair
beside the stone.

A convenient tunnel, arched with grass-bents,
led thither from the burrow, the post
of observation being shaped through frequent
use into an oval “form.” The vole, though
anxious to begin his search for food, was
not satisfied that the way was clear to
the margin of the fir plantation, for the air
was infused with many odours, some so
strong and new that he could easily have[Pg 136]
followed their lines, but others so faint and
old that their direction and identity were
alike uncertain. From the signs that were
fresh the vole learned the story of field-life
for the day. Horses, men, and hounds had
hurried by in the early morning, and with
their scent was mingled that of a fleeing
fox. Later, the farmer and his dog had
passed along the hedge, a carrion crow had
fed on a scrap of refuse not a yard from the
stone, and a covey of partridges had “dusted”
in the soft soil before leaving the pasture by
a gap beside a clump of furze. Blackbirds,
thrushes, yellow-hammers, and larks had
wandered by in the grass, a wood-pigeon and
a squirrel had loitered among the acorns
under the oak, and a hedgehog had led her
young through the briars. Rabbits, too, had
left their trails in the clover, and a red bank-vole
had strayed near the boundaries of the
field-vole’s colony. Their signs were familiar
to the vole from experience; he detected
them and singled them out from the old
trails with a sense even truer than that of
the hounds as they galloped past in the
morning’s chase.

There was one distinct scent, however, that[Pg 137]
baffled him. At first he believed it to be
that of a weasel, but it lacked the pungent
strength inseparable from the scent of a
full-grown “vear.”

Gathering courage as the darkness deepened,
the field-vole rustled from his lair, ran
quickly down the slope, and crept through
a wattled opening into the wood. He found
some fallen hawthorn berries among the
hyacinth leaves that carpeted the ground, and
of these he made a hasty meal, sitting on
his haunches, and holding his food in his
fore-paws as he gnawed the firm, succulent
flesh about the kernel of the seed. Then,
with a swift patter of tiny feet on the leaf-mould,
he ran down to a rill trickling over
a gravelly bed towards the brook, stooped
at the edge of a dark pool in the shadow
of a stone, and lapped the cool, clear water.
Thence he made for the edge of the wood,
to visit a colony of his tribe which in spring
had migrated from the burrows in the
uplands. Half-way on his journey, he again
suddenly crossed the line of the unknown
scent, now mingled with the almost overpowering
smell of a full-grown weasel. The
mystery was explained: the strange trail in[Pg 138]
the upland meadow had evidently been that
of a young “vear” passing by the hedge
to join its parent in the wood.

For a moment the vole stood petrified
with terror; then he sank to the earth,
and lay as still as the dead leaves beneath
him. But there was no time to be lost;
the “vears” were returning on their trail.
In an agony of fear the mouse turned back
towards his home. He ran slowly, for his
limbs almost refused their office of bearing
him from danger. Reaching the mouth
of his burrow with great difficulty, he
dropped headlong down a shallow shaft
leading to one of the numerous galleries.
Then, lo! his mood immediately changed;
his reasoning powers became strong and
clear; his parental instincts whispered that
his family, like himself, was in peril.
Squeaking all the while, he raced down one
tunnel, then down another, turned a sharp
corner beneath an archway formed by the
roots of a tree that had long ago been felled;
and there, in a dry nest of hay and straw,
he found his mate with her helpless little
family of six blind, semi-transparent sucklings
only three days old. He heard on every
[Pg 139]side the quick scamper of feet as, alarmed
by his cries, the voles inhabiting the side
passages of the burrow scurried hither and
thither in wild efforts to remove their young
to some imagined place of safety.

“SHE WAS HOLDING ONE OF HER OFFSPRING BY THE NECK, IN
PREPARATION FOR FLIGHT.” (See p. 139).
To List

His mate, like her neighbours, had
already taken alarm. At the moment of
his arrival she was holding one of her offspring
by the neck, in preparation for flight.
The next instant an ominous hiss reverberated
along the hollow passages; the mother vole,
with her suckling, vanished in the darkness
of the winding gallery; and the weasels
descended into the labyrinth of tunnels
hollowed out beneath the moss.

Again an almost overwhelming fear
possessed the hunted vole, his limbs
stiffened, his condition seemed helpless. He
crawled slowly hither and thither, now passing
some fellow-creature huddled in the corner
of a blind alley; now lifting himself above
ground to seek refuge in another part of the
burrow; now pausing to listen to cries of
pain which indicated how thoroughly the
“vears” were fulfilling their gruesome work.
It seemed that the whole colony of voles
was being exterminated.[Pg 140]

Bewildered, after an hour of unmitigated
dread, he quitted the place of slaughter,
where every nook and corner reeked of
blood or of the weasels’ scent, and limped
through the grass towards the hedge. In
a hollow among the scattered stones he
stayed till terror no longer benumbed him,
and he could summon courage to seek an
early meal in the root-field beyond the
pasture. Directly the day began to dawn,
he cautiously returned to his burrow.
Though numerous traces of the havoc of
the night remained, he knew, from the
staleness of the weasels’ scent, that his foes
had departed.

At noon his mate came again to her nest,
and searched for her missing offspring. But
the taint of blood on the floor of the
chamber told her only too well that henceforth
her mothering care would be needed
solely by the young mouse that she had
rescued in her flight. The day passed
uneventfully; the weasels did not repeat
their visit. At nightfall the mother mouse,
stealing into the wood, found both her
enemies caught in rabbit-traps set beside
the “runs” among the hawthorns.[Pg 141]

For a while peace reigned in the underground
dwellings of the mossy pasture,
and the young field-vole thrived amazingly;
from the very outset fortune favoured him
above the rest of his species. After the
wholesale destruction that had taken place,
little risk of overcrowding and its attendant
evils remained, and, for the lucky mice surviving
the raid, food was plentiful, even
when later, in winter, they were awakened
by some warm, bright day, and hunger,
long sustained, had made them ravenous.
Kweek, having no brother or sister to
share his birthright, was fed and trained
in a manner that otherwise would have
been impossible, while his parents were
particularly strong and healthy. These
circumstances undoubtedly combined to
make him what he eventually became—quick
to form an opinion and to act, and
able, once he was fully grown, to meet in
fight all rivals for the possession of any
sleek young she-vole he happened to have
chosen for his mate.

Soon after his eyes were open, the adult
voles of the colony began to harvest their
winter supplies. Seeds of all kinds were[Pg 142]
stored in shallow hiding places—under
stones, or under fallen branches—or in
certain chambers of the burrow set apart
for that especial purpose; and as each
granary was filled its entrance was securely
stopped by a mound of earth thrown up by
the busy harvesters.

The first solid food Kweek tasted was the
black, glossy seed of a columbine, which
his mother, busily collecting provender,
chanced to drop near him as she hurried to
her storehouse. Earlier in the night, just
outside the burrow, he had watched her
with great curiosity as she daintily nibbled
a grain of wheat brought from a gateway
where the laden waggons had passed. He
had loitered near, searching among the grass-roots
for some fragment he supposed his
mother to have left behind, but he found
only a rough, prickly husk, that stuck
beneath his tongue, nearly choked him,
and drove him frantic with irritation, till,
after much violent shaking and twitching,
and rubbing his throat and muzzle with his
fore-paws, he managed to get rid of the
objectionable morsel. Something, however,
in the taste of the husk so aroused his[Pg 143]
appetite for solid food, that when his
mother dropped the columbine seed he
at once picked it up in his fore-paws, and,
stripping off the hard, glossy covering,
devoured it with the keen relish of a new
hunger that as yet he could not entirely
understand. His growth, directly he learned
to feed on the seeds his mother showed
him, and to forage a little for himself, was
more rapid than before. Nature seemed in
a hurry to make him strong and fat, that
he might be able to endure the cold and
privation of winter.

By the end of November, when at night
the first rime-frosts lay on the fallow, and
the voles, disliking the chill mists, seldom
left their burrow, Kweek was already bigger
than his dam. He was, in fact, the equal
of his sire in bone and length, but he was
loose-limbed and had not filled out to
those exact proportions which, among voles
as among all other wildlings of the field,
make for perfect symmetry, grace, and
stamina, and come only with maturity and
the first love season.

When about two months old, Kweek, for
the first time since the weasels had visited[Pg 144]
the burrow, experienced a narrow escape
from death. The night was mild and
bright, and the vole was busy in the littered
loam of the hedgerow, where, during the
afternoon, a blackbird had scratched the
leaves away and left some ripe haws
exposed to view. Suddenly he heard a
loud, mocking call, apparently coming from
the direction of the moon: “Whoo-hoo!
Whoo-hoo-o-o-o!” It was a strangely
bewildering sound; so the vole squatted
among the leaves and listened anxiously,
every sense alert to catch the meaning of
the weird, foreboding voice. “Whoo-hoo!
Whoo-hoo-o-o-o!”—again, from directly
overhead, the cry rang out into the night.
A low squeak of warning, uttered by the
father vole as he dived into his burrow,
caused the young mice foraging in the
undergrowth to bolt helter-skelter towards
home. Kweek, joining in the general panic,
rushed across the field, and had almost disappeared
underground when he felt the
earth and the loose pebbles falling over him,
and at the same time experienced a sharp
thrill of pain. Fortunately, his speed saved
him—but only by an inch. The claws of[Pg 145]
the great brown owl, shutting like a vice
as the bird “stooped” on her prey, laid
hold of nothing but earth and grass, though
one keen talon cut the vole’s tail as with
a knife, so that the little creature squealed
lustily as he ran along the gallery to seek
solace from his mother’s companionship in
the central chamber beyond. Yet even there
he was not allowed to remain in peace.
Maddened by the scent of a few drops of
blood coming from his wound, the adult
voles chased him from the burrow, and
drove him out into the field. Luckily for
him the brown owl had meanwhile flown
away with another young vole in her claws.
Kweek remained in safety under the hawthorns
till the grey dawn flushed the
south-east sky; then, his injured tail having
ceased to bleed, he ventured without fear
among his kindred as they lay huddled
asleep in the recesses of their underground
abode.

The year drew to its close, the weather
became colder, and an irresistible desire for
long-continued rest took possession of Kweek.
His appetite was more easily satisfied than
hitherto; hour after hour, by night as well[Pg 146]
as by day, he drowsed in the snug corner
where lay the remains of the nest in which
he had been born. Winter, weary and
monotonous to most of the wildlings of the
field, passed quickly over his head. Scarce-broken
sleep and forgetfulness, when skies
are grey and tempests rage—such are
Nature’s gifts to the snake, the bee, and
the flower, as well as to the squirrel in the
wood and the vole in the burrow beneath
the moss. Occasionally, it is true, when at
noon the sun was bright and spring seemed
to have come to the Valley of Olwen, the
snake would stir in his retreat beneath the
leaves, the bee would crawl to and fro in
her hidden nest, the flower would feel the
stir of rising sap, the squirrel would venture
forth to stretch cramped limbs by a visit
to some particular storehouse—the existence
of which, as one among many filled with
nuts and acorns, he happened to remember—and
the vole would creep to the entrance
of his burrow, and sit in the welcome
warmth till the sun declined and hunger
sent him to his granary for a hearty meal.
These brief, spring-like hours, when the
golden furze blossomed in the hedge-bank[Pg 147]
near the field-vole’s home, and the lark,
exultant, rose from the barren stubble,
were, however, full of danger to Kweek if
he but dared to lift his head above the
opening of his burrow.

On the outskirts of the wood, in a rough,
ivy-grown ridge where, years ago, some trees
had been felled, a flourishing colony of bank-voles—little
creatures nearly akin, and almost
similar in shape and size, to the field-voles—dwelt
among the roots and the undergrowth.
These bank-voles, probably because
they lived in a sheltered place screened
from the bitter wind by a wall of gorse and
pines, moved abroad in the winter days far
more frequently than did the field-voles. For
several years a pair of kestrels had lived in
the valley, and had reared their young in a
nest built on a ledge of rock above the
Cerdyn brook and safe beyond the reach of
marauding schoolboys. The hen-kestrel,
when provender became scarce, would
regularly at noon beat her way across the
hill-top to the ridge where the red voles
lived, and, watching and waiting, with keen
eyes and ready talons, would remain in the
air above the burrow as if poised at the[Pg 148]
end of an invisible thread. Chiefly she was
the terror of the bank-voles; but often,
impatient of failure, she would slant her
fans and drift towards the burrows in the
mossy pasture, hoping to find that the grey
voles had awakened for an hour from their
winter sleep.

Once, when the breeze blew gently from
the south and the sun was bright, Kweek,
sitting on a grassy mound, saw a shadow
rapidly approaching, and heard a sharp
swish of powerful wings. Though drowsy
and stiff from his winter sleep, he was
roused for the moment by the imminence
of danger, and, barely in time, scurried to
his hole. A fortnight afterwards, when,
again tempted out of doors by the mildness
of the weather, the vole was peeping
through an archway of matted grass, the
hawk, with even greater rapidity than
before, shot down from the sky. Had it
not been that the long grass screened an
entrance on the outskirts of the burrow,
Kweek would then have met his fate. He
fell, almost without knowing what was
happening, straight down the shaft; and
the sharp talons of the hawk touched[Pg 149]
nothing but grass and earth, and the end
of a tail already scarred by the claws of
the owl. Next day, as, moving along the
galleries to his favourite exit, the vole
passed beneath the shaft, he saw, straight
overhead, the shadowy wings outstretched,
quivering, lifting, gliding, pausing, while
beneath those spreading fans the baleful
eyes gleamed yellow in the slant of the
south-west sun, and the cruel claws, indrawn
against the keel-shaped breast, were clenched
in readiness for the deadly “stoop.” Fascinated,
the vole stayed awhile to look at
the hovering hawk. Then, as the bird
passed from the line of sight, he continued
his way along the underground passage to
the spot where he usually left his home by
one of the narrow, clean-cut holes which,
in a field-vole’s burrow, seem to serve a
somewhat similar purpose to that of the
“bolts” in a rabbit’s warren; and there he
again looked out. The hawk still hovered
in the calm winter air, so Kweek did not
venture that day to bask in the sun outside
his door. As soon as he had fed, and
shaken every speck of loose loam from his
fur, and washed himself clean with his tiny[Pg 150]
red tongue, he once more sought his cosy
corner and fell asleep.

Presently a pink and purple sunset faded
in the gloom of night, and a heavy frost,
beginning a month of bitter cold, lay over
the fields. In continuous slumber Kweek
passed that dreary month, till the daisies
peeped in the grass, the snowdrops and the
daffodils thrust forth their sword-shaped
leaves above the water-meadows, and the
earliest violet unfolded its petals by the
pathway in the woods.

II.

[Pg 151]

THE VALLEY OF OLWEN.

Eastward, the sky was covered with pale
cobalt; and in the midst of the far-spreading
blue hung a white and crimson cloud, like a
puff of bright-stained vapour blown up above
the rim of the world. Westward, the sky was
coloured with brilliant primrose; and on the
edge of the distant moorlands lay a great
bank of mist, rainbow-tinted with deep
violet, and rose, and orange. For a space
immediately on each side of the mist the
primrose deepened into daffodil—a chaste yet
intense splendour that seemed to stretch into
infinite distances and overlap the sharply
defined ridges of the dark horizon. The
green of the upland pasture and the brown
of the ploughland beyond were veiled by
a shimmering twilight haze, in which the[Pg 152]
varied tints of the sky harmoniously blended,
till the umber and indigo shadows of night
loomed over the hills, and the daffodil flame
flickered and vanished over the last red ember
of the afterglow. Thus the first calm day of
early spring drew to its close.

Kweek, the little field-vole, asleep in his
hidden nest beneath the moss, was roused by
the promise that Olwen, the White-footed,
who had come to her own beautiful valley
among our western hills, whispered as she
passed along the slope above the mill-dam
in the glen. He uncurled himself on the
litter of withered grass-bents that formed
his winter couch, crept towards the nearest
bolt-hole of his burrow, and peeped at the
fleecy clouds as they wandered idly overhead.
He inhaled long, deep breaths of
the fresh, warm air; then, conscious of new,
increasing strength, he continued his way
underground to the granary in which, some
months ago, his mother had stored the
columbine seeds. But the earth had been
scratched away from the storehouse door,
and nothing remained of the winter supplies.
Hungry and thirsty, yet not daring to roam
abroad while the sun was high, the vole[Pg 153]
moved from chamber to chamber of his
burrow, washed himself thoroughly from the
tip of his nose to the tip of his tail, then,
feeling lonely, awakened his parents from
their heavy sleep, and spent the afternoon
thinking and dreaming, till the sun sank
low in the glory of the aureolin sky, and
the robin’s vesper trilled wistfully from the
hawthorns on the fringe of the shadowed
wood. Becoming venturesome with the
near approach of night, but still remembering
the danger that had threatened him before
the last period of his winter sleep, he lifted
himself warily above the ground, and for a
little while stayed near the mound of earth
beside the door of his burrow. Cramped
from long disuse, every muscle in his body
seemed in need of vigorous exertion, while
with each succeeding breath of the cool
twilight air his hunger and thirst increased.

Determined to find food and water,
Kweek started towards the copse. No
beaten pathway guided his footsteps; wind
and rain, frost and thaw, and the new,
slow growth of the grass, had obliterated
every trail. But by following the scent of
the parent voles that had already stolen into[Pg 154]
the wood, he reached in safety the banks of
the rill. Having quenched his thirst, he
scratched the soft soil from beneath a stone
and satisfied his hunger with some succulent
sprouts of herbage there exposed to sight.
Soon, tired from his unwonted exertion,
and feeling great pain through having torn
the pads of his feet—which, like those of all
hibernating animals, had become extremely
tender from want of exercise—he crept
home to his burrow, and rested till the
soreness had gone from his limbs, and he
felt active and hungry again.

For the vole, guided as he was by
his appetite, the most wholesome vegetable
food was a ripe, well-flavoured seed. It
contained all that the plant could give; leaf
and stalk were tasteless compared with it,
and were accepted only as a change of diet,
or as a medicine, or as a last resource.
Next to a seed, he loved a tender root, or
a stem that had not yet thrust itself
through the soil, and was therefore crisp and
dainty to the taste. But the vole did
not subsist entirely on vegetable food.
Occasionally, when the nights were warm,
he surprised some little insect hiding in the[Pg 155]
moss, and pounced on his prey almost as
greedily as the trout in the stream below
the hill rose to a passing fly. And just
as the cattle in the distant farm throve
on grain and oil-cake, and the pheasant
in the copse near by on wood-ants’ “eggs,”
and the trout in the Cerdyn brook on
ephemerals hatched at the margin of the
pool, so Kweek, the field-vole, abroad in
the nights of summer, grew sleek and well
conditioned on good supplies of seeds and
grubs. But now, worn out by long
privation, he was tired and weak.

Gradually, from the bed of winter death,
from the rotting leaf-mould and the cold,
damp earth, the fresh, bright forms of
spring arose. The purple and crimson
trails of the periwinkle lengthened over
the stones; then the spear-shaped buds,
prompted by the flow of pulsing sap, lifted
themselves above the glossy leaves and
burst into flowers. The dandelion and the
celandine peeped from the grass; the
primrose garlanded each sunny mound on
the margin of the wood; and the willow
catkins, clothed with silver and pearly grey,
waved in the moist, warm breeze as it[Pg 156]
wandered by the brook. The queen-ant,
aroused by the increasing warmth, carried
her offspring from the deep recess where,
in her tunnelled nest, she had brooded over
them while the north-east wind blew
through the leafless boughs, and laid
them side by side in a roomy chamber
immediately beneath the stone that
screened the spot to which, in the autumn
dusk, the father vole resorted that he
might watch and wait before the darkness
deepened on the fields and woods.
The bees from the hives in the farm
garden, and innumerable flies from their
winter retreats in the hedgerows, came
eagerly to the golden blossoms of the furze
near the bank-voles’ colony. The bees
alighted with care on the lower petals of
the flowers, and thence climbed quickly
to the hidden sweets; but the flies, heedless
adventurers, dropped haphazard among
the sprays, and were content to filch
the specks of pollen dust and the tiny
drops of nectar scattered by the honey-bees.
A spirit of restlessness, of strife, of
strange, unsatisfied desire, possessed all
Nature’s children; it raised the primrose[Pg 157]
from amid the deep-veined leaves close-pressed
on the carpet of the grass, it tuned
the carols of the robin and the thrush, it
caused the wild jack-hare to roam by
daylight along paths which hitherto he had
not followed save by night. Kweek felt
the subtle influence; long before dark he
would venture from his home, steal through
the “creeps,” which had now become
evident because of frequent “traffic,” and
visit the distant colonies of his kindred
beyond the wood.

Of the flourishing community living in
the burrow before the weasels’ raid none
survived but Kweek and his parents. One
night, however, the father vole, while
foraging near the hedgerow, was snapped
up and eaten by the big brown owl from
the beech-wood across the valley. In the
woodlands the greatest expert on the ways
of voles was the brown owl. His noiseless
wings never gave the slightest alarm, and
never interfered with his sense of hearing—so
acute that the faint rustle of a leaf or a
grass-blade brought him, like a bolt, from
the sky, to hover close to the earth,
eager, inquisitive, merciless, till a movement[Pg 158]
on the part of his quarry sealed its
doom.

The mother vole, feeling lonely and more
than ever afraid, wandered far away, and
found another mate in a sleek, bright-eyed
little creature inhabiting a roomy chamber
excavated in the loose soil around a heap
of stones on the crest of the hill. Kweek,
nevertheless, remained faithful to the place
of his birth. Though most of his time was
spent near the colony beyond the wood, he
invariably returned to sleep on the shapeless
litter which was all that now remained of
the neat, round nest in which he had been
nursed.

Kweek’s frequent visits to his kindred
beyond the wood led to numerous adventures.
Every member of the colony seemed suddenly
to have turned to the consideration of household
affairs, and a lively widow-vole flirted
so outrageously with bachelor Kweek that,
having at last fallen a victim to her persistent
attentions, he was never happy save
in her company. Unfortunately a big ruffian
mouse also succumbed to the widow’s wiles,
and Kweek found himself awkwardly placed.
He fought long and stubbornly against his[Pg 159]
rival, but, unequally matched and sorely
scratched and bitten, was at last forced
to rustle away in the direction of his
burrow as quickly as his little feet could
carry him. He slept off the effects of his
exhaustion and the loss of a little blood
and fur, then returned, stealthily, to his
well-known trysting place, but found, alas!
that his fickle lady-love had already regarded
with favour the charms of the enemy.
Kweek caught a glimpse of her as she
carried wisps of withered grass to a hole
in the middle of the burrow, and at once
recognised that his first fond passion had
hopelessly ended.

Fortune continued to treat him unkindly:
that night, while returning homewards,
he was almost frightened out of his wits
by the shrieks of some little creature
captured by the cruel owl, and, immediately
afterwards, a rabbit, alarmed by the same
ominous sounds and bolting to her warren
in the wood, knocked him topsy-turvy as
he crouched in hiding among the leaves.
These adventures taught him salutary
lessons, and henceforth the confidence of
youth gave place to extreme caution; he[Pg 160]
avoided the risk of lying near a rabbit’s
“creep,” and was quick to discern the
slightest sign, such as a shadowy form above
the moonlit field, which might indicate the
approach of the slow-winged tyrant of the
night.

Among animals living in communities it
is a frequent custom for a young male, if
badly beaten in his first love episode by a
rival, to elope with a new spouse, and seek
a home at some distance from the scene of
his defeat. Kweek suffered exceedingly
from his disappointment; it was a shock
to him that he should be bullied and
hustled at the very time when his passion
was strongest and every prospect in his
little life seemed fair and bright.

For a time he dared not match himself
against another of the older voles. But in
an unimportant squabble with a mouse of
his own age, he soon proved the victor,
and, finding his reward in the favour of a
young she-vole that had watched the quarrel
from behind a grass-tuft, ran off with her
at midnight to his old, deserted burrow in
the pasture. After thoroughly examining the
various galleries in the underground labyrinth,[Pg 161]
the fastidious little pair dug out a clean,
fresh chamber at right angles to the main
tunnel, and, contented, began in earnest the
duties of the year.

April came; and often, as he sat by his
door, Kweek watched the gentle showers
sweep by in tall pillars of vapour through
the moonbeams falling aslant from the
illumined edges of an overhanging cloud,
and through the shadows stretching in long,
irregular lines between the fallow and the
copse; and night after night the shadows
near the copse grew deeper, and still deeper,
as the hawthorn leaf-buds opened to the
warmth of spring.

The grass-spears lengthened; the moss
spread in new, rain-jewelled velvet-pile over
the pasture floor; the woodbine and the
bramble trailed their tender shoots above
the hedge; a leafy screen sheltered each
woodland home; and even the narrow path
from the field-voles’ burrow to the corner
of the copse led through a perfect bower
of half-transparent greenery. The birds
were everywhere busy with their nests in
the thickets; sometimes, in the quiet
evening, long after the moon had risen[Pg 162]
and Kweek had ventured forth to feed,
the robin and the thrush, perched on a
bare ash-tree, sang their sweet solos to the
sleepy fields; and, with the earliest peep
of dawn, the clear, wild notes of the missel-thrush
rang out over the valley from the
beech-tree near the river. The rabbits
extended their galleries and dug new
“breeding earths” in their warren by the
wood; and often, in the deep stillness of
the night, the call-note of an awakened bird
echoed, murmuring, among the rocks
opposite the pines far down the slope.

During the past few weeks great events
had happened in the new-made chamber of
the field-voles’ burrow. Hundreds of dry
grass-bents, bleached and seasoned by the
winter frosts and rains, had been collected
there, with tufts of withered moss, a stray
feather or two dropped from the ruined nest
of a long-tailed titmouse in the furze, and
a few fine, hair-like roots of polypody fern
from the neighbouring thicket. And now,
their nursery complete, four tiny, hairless
voles, with disproportionate heads, round
black eyes beneath unopened lids, wrinkled
muzzles, and abbreviated tails—helpless[Pg 163]
midgets in form suggestive of diminutive
bull-dog puppies—lay huddled in their tight,
warm bed. It was a time of great anxiety
for Kweek. While his mate with maternal
pride went leisurely about her duties, doing
all things in order, as if she had nursed
much larger families and foes were never
known, he moved fussily hither and thither,
visiting his offspring at frequent intervals
during the night, creeping into the wood
and back along his bowered path, scampering
noisily down the shaft if the brown owl
but happened to hoot far up in the glen, and
doing a hundred things for which there was
not the slightest need, and which only served
to irritate and alarm the careful mother-vole.

Kweek inherited his timorous disposition
from countless generations of voles that
by their ceaseless watchfulness, had survived
when others had been killed by birds and
beasts of prey; and though, in his zeal for
the welfare of his family, he often gave a
false alarm, it was far better that he should
be at all times prepared for the worst than
that, in some unguarded instant, death
should drop swiftly from the sky or crawl
stealthily into his hidden home.[Pg 164]

During spring, more frequently than at
any other season, death waited for him and
his kindred—in the grass, in the air, in the
trees along the hedge-banks, and on the
summit of the rock that towered above
the glen. Vermin had become unusually
numerous in the valley, partly because in
the mild winter their food had been
sufficient, and partly because the keeper,
feeble with old age, could no longer shoot
and trap them with the deadly certainty
that had made him famous in his younger
days. Bold in the care of their young, the
vermin ravaged the countryside, preying
everywhere on the weak and ailing little
children of Nature. But fate was indulgent
to Kweek; though his kindred in the colony
beyond the wood, and the bank-voles in
the sheltered hollow near the pines, suffered
greatly from all kinds of enemies, he and
his mate still managed to escape unhurt.

One night a fox, prowling across the
pasture, caught sight of Kweek as he
hurried to his lair. Suspicious and crafty,
Reynard paused at one of the entrances to
the burrow, thrust his sharp nose as far as
possible down the shaft, drew a long, deep[Pg 165]
breath, and commenced to dig away the soil
from the mouth of the hole. Suddenly
changing his mind—perhaps because the
scent was faint and he concluded that his
labour would not be sufficiently repaid—he
ceased his exertions and wandered off
towards the hedge. Next day a carrion
crow, seeing the heap of earth that lay
around the hole, and shrewdly guessing
it to mean a treat in store, flew down from
an oak-tree, and hopped sideways towards
the spot. He peered inquisitively at the
opening, waddled over to another entrance,
returned, and listened eagerly. Convinced
that a sound of breathing came from midway
between the two holes he had examined,
he moved towards the spot directly above
the nest, tapped it sharply with his beak,
and again returned to listen near the
entrance. But all his artifice was quite in
vain; the voles would not bolt; they were
not even inquisitive; so presently, baffled
in his hopes of plunder, he moved clumsily
away, stooped for an instant, and lifted
himself on slow, sable pinions into the air.

The mother vole, assisted in questionable
fashion by meddlesome Kweek, spent[Pg 166]
several hours of the following night in
repairing the damage done by the fox.
She drew most of the soil back into the
shaft, and then, where it accumulated in
the passage beneath, made the opening
towards the inner chamber slightly narrower
than before. Soon, moistened and hardened
by the constant “traffic” of tiny feet nearly
always damp with dew, the mound of earth
formed a barrier so artfully contrived that
even a weasel might find it difficult to
enter the gallery from the bottom of the
shaft.

III.

[Pg 167]

A BARREN HILLSIDE.

Living a secluded life in the pasture with
his little mate, Kweek escaped the close
attention paid by the “vermin” to his
kindred in the colony beyond the wood.
The brown owl still remembered where he
dwelt, but, loath to make a special nightly
journey to the spot, seldom caused him
the least anxiety. She seemed to content
herself with a strict watch over the bank
inhabited by the red voles, and over the
fields on the far side of the copse, where
the grey voles, notwithstanding that they
supplied her with many a delicious supper,
were becoming numerous. She awaited an
almost certain increase among the “small
deer” of the pasture, before commencing
her raids on the grey voles there. As[Pg 168]
events proved, however, her patience was
unrewarded.

Kweek’s first experience in rearing a
family ended disastrously. Two of the
nurslings died a few hours after birth; one,
venturing from the nest too soon in the
evening, was killed by a magpie; and two,
while sitting out near the hedge, were
trampled to death by a flock of sheep
rushing, panic-stricken, at the sight of a
wandering fox. By the middle of May,
when another vole family of six had
arrived, the number of vermin in the valley
had perceptibly diminished. The old,
asthmatic keeper in charge of the Cerdyn
valley died, and a younger and more energetic
man from a neighbouring estate came
to take his place. Eager to gain the
favour of his master by providing him good
sport in the coming autumn, the new
keeper ranged the woods from dawn till
dusk, setting pole-traps in the trees, or
baiting rabbit-traps in the “creeps” of
stoat or weasel, and destroying nests, as
well as shooting any furred or feathered
creature of questionable character. The big
brown owl from the beech-grove, the kestrel[Pg 169]
from the rock on the far side of the brook,
the sparrow-hawk from the spinney up-stream,
together with the weasels, the stoats,
the cats, the jays, and the magpies—all in
turn met their doom.

A pair of barn-owls from the loft in the
farm suffered next. These owls were great
pets at the old homestead. For many years
they had lived unmolested in their gloomy
retreat under the tiles, and regularly at
nightfall had flown fearlessly to and fro
among the outbuildings, or perched on the
ruined pigeon-cote watching for the rats to
leave their holes.

The farmer, less ignorant than the
keeper, recognised the owls as friends, and
treated them accordingly. They were his
winged cats, and assisted to check the
increase of a plague. Like the brown owl,
they knew well the habits of the voles; but
their attention was diverted by the rats and
the mice at the farm, and they seldom
wandered far afield except for a change
of diet or to stretch wings cramped by a
long summer day’s seclusion. The rats,
however, were far from being exterminated;
and so, when a little child who was all[Pg 170]
sunshine to his parents in the lonely homestead
died from typhoid fever, the village
doctor, fearing an epidemic, advised that the
pests should be utterly destroyed. Loath to
use strychnine, since he knew that in a
neighbouring valley some owls had died
from eating poisoned rats, the farmer sought
the aid of the village poachers, who, with
their terriers and ferrets, thoroughly searched
the stacks and the buildings. During the
hunt it was noticed that about a score of
rats took refuge in a narrow chamber under
the eaves. The farmer, directing operations
in another part of the yard, was unaware
of what had occurred. The poachers, knowing
nothing of the presence of the owls,
pushed a terrier through the opening beneath
the rafters of the loft, and blocked the hole
with the rusty blade of a disused shovel.
For a few moments the quick patter of tiny
feet indicated that the terrier was busily
engaged with his task; then cries of rage
and terror came from the imprisoned dog,
while with these cries were mingled the
sounds of flapping wings. When at last
the poachers unstopped the hole and dragged
the terrier out, they found that every rat[Pg 171]
had been killed, and that the place was
thickly strewn with the feathers of two
dying owls.

During the rest of the summer, Kweek
led a strangely peaceful life, having little
to fear beyond an occasional visit from
Reynard, or from an astute old magpie
that, evading with apparent ease the keeper’s
gun and pole-traps, lived on till the late
autumn, when, before a line of beaters, he
broke cover over some sportsmen waiting
for their driven game. As soon as the
leaves began to fall and exhausted Nature
longed for winter’s rest, the burrow in the
pasture became the scene of feverish
activity. Kweek was now the proud sire
of five or six healthy families, and the
grand-sire of many more. Even the
youngest voles were growing fat and
strong; and, when the numerous members
of the colony set about harvesting their
winter stores, ripe, delicious seeds were
plentiful everywhere along the margin of
the wood.

The winter was uniformly mild, with
exception of one short period of great
cold which brought a thorough, healthful[Pg 172]
sleep to the voles; and in the earliest
days of spring, when the love-calls of
chaffinches and tits were heard from
almost every tree, Kweek and his tribe
resumed their work and throve amazingly.
Every circumstance appeared to favour
their well-being. But for the fox, that
sometimes crouched beside an opening to
the burrow and snapped up an incautious
venturer peeping above ground, a young
sheep-dog, whose greatest pleasure in life
seemed to be found in digging a large
round hole in the centre of the burrow,
and an adder, that stung a few of the
weaklings to death, but found them
inconveniently big for swallowing, the voles
were seldom troubled. Their numbers,
and those of every similar colony in the
neighbourhood, increased in such a fashion
that, before the following autumn, both the
pasture and the near ploughland were
barren wastes completely honeycombed
with their dwellings. Every grass-root in
the pasture was eaten up; every stalk in
the cornfield was nibbled through so that
the grain might be easily reached and
devoured; and the root-crops—potatoes,[Pg 173]
turnips, and mangolds—on the far side of
the cornfield were utterly spoiled; and in
the hedgerows and the copse the leaves
dropped from the lifeless trees, each of
which was marked by a complete ring
where the bark was gnawed away close to
the ground.

But capricious Nature, as if regretting
the haste with which she had brought into
the world her destructive little children,
and desiring, even at the cost of untold
suffering and the loss of countless lives, to
restore the pleasant Cerdyn valley to its
beauty of green fields and leafy woods,
sent her twin plagues of disease and
starvation among the voles, till, like the
sapless leaves, they withered and died.
And from far and near the hawks and the
owls, the weasels, the stoats, and the foxes
hastened to the scene. The keeper, at a
loss to know whence they came, and
not understanding the lesson he was
being taught, bewailed his misfortune, but
dared not stay their advent. At almost
any hour of the day, five or six kestrels
might be seen quartering the fields or
hovering here and there among the burrows.[Pg 174]
And, long before dark, the stoats and the
weasels, as if knowing that, fulfilling a
special mission, they were now safe from
their arch-enemy, the keeper, hunted their
prey through the “trash” of the hedge-banks,
or in and out of the passages underground.

The farm labourers, in desperate haste,
dug numerous pitfalls, wide at the bottom
but narrow at the mouth, and trapped
hundreds of the voles, which, maddened by
hunger but unable to climb the sloping
sides, attacked one another—all at last
dying a miserable death. Not only did the
customary enemies of the voles arrive on the
scene: Nature called to her great task a
number of unexpected destroyers—sea-gulls
from the distant coast, a kite from a
wooded island on a desolate, far-off mere,
and a buzzard from a rocky fastness, rarely
visited save by keepers and shepherds, near
the up-country lakes. Food had gradually
become scarce even for the few hundred
voles that yet remained. No longer were
they to be seen at play together, in little
groups, during the cool, hazy twilight, that,
earlier in the year, shimmered like a
wonderful afterglow on the mossy pasture-floor.[Pg 175]
Now their only desire was for food
and sleep.

Unnoticed by a passing owl, Kweek, worn
to a skeleton by sickness and privation,
crawled from his burrow into the moonlight
of a calm, clear autumn night, and
lay in the shadow of the stone where the
old male vole had watched and listened for
the cruel “vear.” A big blow-fly, attracted,
with countless thousands of his kind, to the
place of slaughter and decay, had gone to
sleep on the side of the stone, and Kweek,
in a last desperate effort to obtain a little
food, moved forward to secure his prize; but
at that moment his strength failed him, his
weary limbs relaxed, and the dull, grey
film of death overspread his half-closed eyes.

The owl, hearing a faint sound like the
rustle of a dry grass-bent, quickly turned
in her flight; then, slanting her wings,
dropped to the ground, and presently,
with her defenceless quarry in her talons,
flew away towards the woods.

THE FOX.

[Pg 177]

I.

[Pg 179]

THE LAST HUNT.

A dark and wind-swept night had fallen
over the countryside when Reynard left the
steep slope above the keeper’s cottage, and
stole through gorse and brambles towards
the outskirts of the covert, where a narrow
dingle, intersected by a noisy rill and thickly
matted with brown bracken, divided the furze
from some neighbouring pine-woods.

For months nothing had occurred to disturb
the peace of his woodland home. Once,
about a year ago, he had fled for his life
before the hounds; and again, during the
last autumn, while lying hidden in the ditch
of the root-crop field above the pines, he
had been surprised by two sheep-dogs that
nipped him sorely before he could make
good his escape. But at no other time had[Pg 180]
he been in evident peril, and so, though
naturally cunning and suspicious, he had
grown bolder, and better acquainted with
the neighbourhood of cottage and farmstead
than were certain members of his family
living on the opposite side of the valley,
among thickets hunted regularly, where
guns and spaniels might be heard from
early morning till close of day.

Here and there, as the fox crept stealthily
among the blackthorns and the gorse-bushes,
he stopped for a moment on the scent of a
rabbit; but the night was not such as to
induce Bunny to remain outside her cosy
burrow in the bank. He examined each
“creep” in the tangled clumps along his
way, and sometimes, resting on his haunches,
sniffed the air and listened intently for any
sign to indicate the presence of a feeding
coney; but even the strongest taint was
“stale,” and no sound could be detected
that might betray the whereabouts of any
creature feeding in the grass. Disappointed,
the fox turned towards the uplands and
crossed the hedgerow into the nearest stubble.
Louping leisurely along, he surprised and
killed a sleeping lark. Further on he crossed[Pg 181]
the scent of a hare, but Puss was doubtless
some distance away, feeding in a quiet
corner of the root-crop field. Reynard now
instinctively made for the farmyard among
the pines, trusting meanwhile that luck
would befriend him. Across the gap, by
the side of the hedgerow, and through an
open gateway, he went, seeking spoil everywhere,
but finding none. With all his senses
alert, he climbed the low wall around the
yard, peeped into the empty cart-house, and
stealthily approached an open shed. There,
unluckily, the dogs were sleeping on a load
of hay in the furthest corner. Careful not
to arouse his foes, the fox retreated, and,
passing the pond at the bottom of the yard,
moved silently towards another shed, in
which, as he knew from a former visit,
the poultry roosted. Though the door
was shut, an opening for the use of the
fowls seemed to afford the possibility of
success. With difficulty Reynard managed
to squeeze himself in, only, however, to no
purpose. Just beyond the door lay a loose
coil of wire, brought home by the labourers
after fencing and thrown here out of the
way. The fox, fearing a trap, reluctantly[Pg 182]
abandoned his project, returned to the bank
by the pond, and crept down the lane to a
spot where the ducks were housed in a
neat shelter built in the wall. But here he
found everything securely fastened. At this
moment a door of the farmstead creaked
loudly, the light of a lantern flooded the
yard, and the baffled marauder sprang over
the wall and trotted across the field towards
the wood.

His pace soon slackened when he found
himself free from pursuit; and before he
reached the end of the meadow he had
regained all his cool audacity and was
busily planning a visit to the cottage at
the foot of the dingle. Hardly had his
thoughts turned once more to hunting when
fortune favoured him. A hen from the
farmyard had laid her eggs in the hedgerow
bordering the wood, and was brooding
over them in proud anticipation of one day
leading home a healthy family, thus causing
an agreeable surprise to the farmer’s wife.
The fox almost brushed against her as he
sprang over the hedge, and she paid to
the utmost the penalty of indiscretion.

After feasting royally on the eggs, the fox[Pg 183]
took up the dead bird, and moved slowly
away through the trees towards his home.
Re-entering the covert, he was met by a
prowling vixen that, in company with her
four young cubs, inhabited an “earth” not
many yards away. Reckless through hunger
and maddened by the scent of blood, she
attacked him savagely, bullied him out of
the possession of the dead fowl, and bore
her prize away in triumph to her den. The
fox endured his ill-treatment with the submission
of a Stoic—he happened to be the
pugnacious vixen’s mate, and the sire of her
family. Soon recovering from the chastisement,
he set off, and skirted the covert as
far as the cottage garden. Finding the gate
of the hen-coop closed, he sprang on the
water-butt, climbed to the roof of the shed,
and tried to enter the coop from above; but
there, as at the farm, he feared a trap, and
dared not creep beneath the loose wire netting
overhanging the shed. As he jumped from
the coop to the wall of the stye, he caught
sight of several rats scampering to their
holes. Lying flat on the wall, he awaited
patiently their re-appearance. At last one of
them ventured out beneath the door of the[Pg 184]
cot, and was instantly killed. But, much to
his chagrin, Reynard found the carcass a
decidedly doubtful tit-bit, and so, having
conveyed it gingerly to the margin of the
covert, he scratched a shallow hole among
the rotting leaves, and buried his prey, that,
perhaps, its flavour might improve with
keeping. Afterwards, till the sky lightened
almost imperceptibly, and a steel-blue bar,
low down beneath the clouds, first signalled
the coming of day, he lay motionless
among the undergrowth near a warren in
the dingle. Then an unsuspecting rabbit
hopped out into the grass, and Reynard,
his watch rewarded, disappeared with his
spoil into the wilderness of the gorse.

Dawn was breaking over the hills. Blue
smoke curled up into the sky from the lodge
cottage at the foot of the tree-clad slope.
The door of the cottage stood wide open,
and the scent of the wood-fire hung on
the chill, damp air filling the narrow lane.
A blackbird flew into the apple-tree overlooking
the thatch, shook the moisture from
his wings, and cleaned his bright orange bill
on a bough. Then his full, reed-like music
floated over the fields. The skylarks soared[Pg 185]
above the upland pastures, and a shower of
song descended to the valley out of the
pearl-blue haze just lifting in a cloud from
the hill-top. Presently the blackbird flew
from the apple-tree to feed beside the hedge,
and the larks dropped from the mist
into the grass. But for the crackle of the
cottage fire as the keeper busied himself
with the preparation of his morning meal,
and the rustle of a withered leaf as the
blackbird moved to and fro in the ditch,
not a sound disturbed the silence of the
dawn. Soon the haze lifted, leaving the
dew thick on the grass by the ditch, and on
the moss and the ivy in the hedgerow bank.
The larks soared once more into the sky; a
robin sang wistfully in the ash; a brown
wren, with many a flick of her tiny wings
and many a merry curtsy, hopped in and
out among the trees, trilling loudly a gleeful
carol. The tits flew hither and thither,
twittering to each other as they flew. The
hedge-sparrows’ metallic notes sounded clear
amid all the varied music, as the birds,
moving among the hazels and gently flirting
their wings, pursued their coy mates from
bough to bough. Through the raised curtain[Pg 186]
of the mist the sun—a white globe hardly
too brilliant to be boldly looked at—illumined
the dewy fields with its faint beams,
till the cloud-streaked sky became a clear
expanse, and the blue and brown countryside
glowed with the splendour of a perfect
morning. The wind changed and freshened,
so that the call of a farm labourer to his
team and the constant voice of the river
were distinctly heard in the level valley
below the wood.

As the morning advanced, signs of unusual
stir and bustle were apparent in the neighbourhood
of the lodge. Messengers came
and went between the cottage and the
mansion at the bend of the river, or between
the mansion and the distant village. The
keeper appeared at his door, and, after
satisfying himself that the lane seemed clean
and well-kept, walked off briskly in the
direction of the “big house.” Scarlet-coated
horsemen, and high-born maids and matrons,
with all the medley of the Hunt in their
train, cantered along the winding road—a
mirthful, laughter-loving company. There
were the General, stout and inelegant, wont
to take his fences carefully, who changed his[Pg 187]
weight-carrying mount thrice during the day,
and liked a gateway better than a thorny hedge,
and for the last fifteen years had never been
in at the death; and his wife, the leader of
fashion, but not yet the leader of the Hunt;
the Major, an old shekarry from India, who
still could ride as straight and fast as any
man in the west; and his niece, the belle of
the countryside, whose mettlesome hunter
occasionally showed a sudden fondness for
taking the bit between his teeth, and carrying
his mistress, with reckless abandon, over
furrow and five-barred gate and through the
thickest hedgerow—anywhere, so long as
he had breath and the music of the hounds
allured him onward in his impetuous career.
The sun glanced between the trees as they
passed the cottage door. Then came the
Magistrate’s Clerk, faultlessly attired, with
florid face and glittering eyeglass, who, in
an ambitious youth, finding his name too
suggestive of plebeian blood, changed a
vowel in it, and thereby gave an aristocratic
flavour to the title of his partnership, and
who acquired, with this new dignity, the
taste for a monocle, a horse, and a good
cigar. Following were the members of the[Pg 188]
medley—the big butcher on his sturdy
pony, the “dealer” on his black, raw-boned
half-bred, the publican on his stolid old mare,
farmers, drovers, after-riders, on cropped and
uncropped mounts more accustomed to the
slow drudgery of labour than to the rollicking,
hard-going hunt; and after them the crowd
on foot—village children, farm labourers,
and apprentices from forge and counter.
Riding side by side, and earnestly conversing,
were the “vet,” whose horse at the last hunt
bolted and left him clinging to a bough, and
the shopkeeper, whose grave attire and sober
mien seemed strangely out of keeping with
the bright, hilarious throng. These were
soon met by the main party from the meet,
and hounds and hunters sped away in the
direction of the hillside covert, while the
onlookers adjourned to the uplands, whence
an almost uninterrupted view of the valleys
for miles around might be enjoyed, and the
movements of the fox and his enemies
followed more closely than from the hollows
beneath the woods.

Reynard, abundantly satisfied with his
supper of eggs and early breakfast of rabbit,
was lying asleep in a tuft of grass at the top[Pg 189]
of the thicket when the huntsman passed
down the dingle after the meet. Awakened
by the noise that reached him from below,
he arose, stretched his limbs, and listened
anxiously—the clatter of hoofs seemed to
fill the valley. Suddenly, from the outskirts
of the wood, came the deep, sonorous note
of a hound, followed by the sharp rebuke of
the whipper-in; Jollity, the keen-nosed puppy,
was “rioting” on the cold scent near the
stream. Peering between the bushes, the
fox could as yet see nothing moving in the
covert, but a few minutes afterwards his
sharp eye caught a glimpse of a hound leaping
over the bank above the gorse, followed
by another, and another, and yet another,
till the place seemed alive with his foes.

Whither should he flee? The dingle was
occupied; men and horses were everywhere
in the lane; and the hounds were closing
in above the gorse. The far side of the
covert offered the only chance of escape,
and thither he must hie, else the hounds,
now pouring down the slope, would cut off
his retreat. Quickly he threaded his way
through the gorse, by paths familiar only to
himself and the rabbits, till he reached the[Pg 190]
bank by the willows; but, even while he ran,
the full chorus of the hounds echoed from
hillside to hillside, as, having “struck the
line,” they tore madly in pursuit. He reached
the edge of the covert at a point furthest
from his foes—then, as he crossed the
meadow, a single red-coated horseman, standing
sentinel far up the hillside, gave the
“view-halloo,” and over the brow of the
slope streamed the main body of the Hunt.

It was at once evident to Reynard that by
skirting the margin of the covert he could
not for the present escape, so he headed
down-wind towards the opposite hill, hoping
to find refuge in a well-known “earth” amid
the thickets. To his surprise he found the
entrance “stopped” with clods and prickly
branches of gorse, and had perforce to continue
his flight. Having well out-distanced
his pursuers, he stayed to rest for a while near
the stream that trickled by the hedgerow;
then, with the horrid music of the hounds
again in his ears, he turned, by a long
backward cast, in the direction of his home.

But he was wholly unable to shake off
his pursuers. For four long hours he was
hustled from covert to covert, and hillside[Pg 191]
to hillside, finding no respite, no mercy, no
sanctuary. Breathless, mud-stained, footsore,
and sick with fright, his draggling “brush”
and lolling tongue betraying his distress, he
sought at last the place he had long avoided,
and, entering the mouth of the den where
the vixen and her cubs were hiding, lay there,
almost utterly exhausted. Some minutes
elapsed, during which no sound but that of
his laboured breathing, and of the tiny sucklings
busy by the side of the dam, disturbed
the stillness.

Suddenly, a deep-voiced hound broke through
the bushes and bayed loudly before the
entrance. His fellow joined him, and their
foreboding clamour reverberated in the
chamber. Terrified, the fox crawled slowly
into the recess of the den. Presently a
shaggy terrier came down the tunnel, and
bit him sorely on the flank. He scarcely
had the courage to turn on the aggressor;
but the enraged vixen, thrusting her mate
aside, quickly routed the daring intruder,
and followed his retreat to the very
mouth of the “earth,” where she turned
back, threatened by the great hounds that
stood without. But even the reckless courage[Pg 192]
of maternity was unavailing. Soon the noise
of blows and of falling earth was heard, as the
passage was gradually opened by brawny
farm labourers, working with spade and pick,
and assisted in their task by the eager huntsman,
who ever and anon thrust a long
bramble-spray into the tunnel and thus ascertained
the direction of its devious course.

At last the tip of the fox’s “brush” was
seen amid the soil and pebbles that had fallen
into the chamber. The huntsman had cut
two stout hazel rods; these he now thrust into
the hollow, one along either flank of the fox;
then, grasping their ends firmly about the
exposed tail, he drew poor Reynard from his
hiding place, and thrust him, defiant to the
last, and with his teeth close-locked on one
of the hazel rods, into an old sack requisitioned
at the nearest farm. The vixen met
a similar fate, while the sleek, furry little
cubs, treated with the utmost gentleness, were
wrapped together in the Master’s handkerchief
and given to the care of an attendant.

Reynard’s life was nearing its close. In
the meadow behind the keeper’s cottage the
hounds were summoned by the huntsman’s
horn, and the bag was opened. The scene[Pg 193]
that followed marred, for some of us at
least, the beauty of the bright March morning.
The vixen and her cubs were carried away,
and found a new home in an artificial
“earth” prepared for their reception near a
distant mansion.

II.

[Pg 194]

A NEW HOME.

When the vixen recovered from the excitement
and distress consequent on her
capture, she found herself in a commodious,
well ventilated chamber, circular in shape
and slightly above the level of two low and
narrow passages leading into the covert.
The sack had been opened at the entrance
of one of these passages, and the vixen
had crawled through the darkness till,
finding further retreat impossible, she had
lain down, with wildly beating heart, on
the floor of her hiding place.

Her senses seemed to have forsaken her.
Had she dreamed? Often, during the
warm, quiet days of a bygone summer,
while lying curled in a cosy litter of dry
grass-bents—which she had neatly arranged[Pg 195]
by turning round and round, and with her
sensitive black muzzle pressing or lifting
into shape each refractory twig—she had
dreamed of mouse-hunting and rabbit-catching;
her body had moved, her limbs
twitched, her ears pricked forward, and
her nostrils quivered as the delightful
incidents of past expeditions were recalled.
And when, with a start, she had awakened,
as some venturesome rabbit frisked by
her lair, or a nervous blackbird, startled by
her movements, made the woodlands ring
with news of his discovery, she had retained
for a moment the impressions of her vivid
dreams. But never in her sleep had she
been haunted by such a bewildering sense
of mingled dread and anger, such an awful
apprehension of the presence of men and
hounds, as that which had recently possessed
her. Now, however, all was mysteriously
tranquil; the full-toned clamour of the
hounds and the sharp, snarling bark of the
terriers had ceased; no longer was she
confined and jostled in the stuffy, evil-smelling
sack that yielded to, and yet
restrained, her every frantic effort to regain
liberty. Her heart still beat violently, as[Pg 196]
though at any moment it might break;
and she crept back towards the entrance,
where she might breathe the free, fresh air.

Suddenly she realised, to the full, that
the day’s bitter experiences were not a
dream—the scent of the human hand
remained on her brush, her fur was damp
and matted with meal-dust, and, alas! her
little ones were missing from her side. She
was furious now; at all risks she would
venture forth on the long, straight journey
back towards home; her helpless cubs might
still be somewhere under the bushes—perchance
in sore need of warmth and food,
and whining for their dam.

With every mothering instinct quickened,
the vixen crept down the slanting passages
in the direction of a faint moonlight
glimmer beyond. Reaching the end of the
tunnel, she, in her impetuosity, thrust her
muzzle into a mass of prickles—the “earth”
had been stopped with a branch of gorse.
Baffled for the time, she returned to the
central chamber; then cautiously, for her
eyes and nostrils were smarting with pain,
she tried the other outlet, but here, too, a
gorse-bush baulked her exit. Now, however,[Pg 197]
a faint, familiar scent seemed to fill the
passage, some tiny creatures moved and
whimpered, and, with almost savage joy,
the vixen discovered her cubs, alive and
unharmed, huddled together near the furze.
Quickly she carried them, one by one, into
the chamber; then, lying beside the little
creatures, which, though blind and helpless,
eagerly recognised the presence of their
mother, she gathered them between her
limbs, covered them with her soft, warm
brush, and, in a language used only amid
the woodlands, soothed and comforted
them, while they nestled once more beneath
her sheltering care. When she had fed
them and licked them clean from every
taint of human touch, and when she had
shaken herself free from dust and removed
from her brush the man-scent left by the
huntsman’s right hand while “drawing” her,
she became more collected in her mind and
more contented with her strange, new
situation.

Leaving her cubs asleep, she moved along
the passage, determined, if possible, to
explore the thickets in hope of finding a
young rabbit or a few field-voles wherewith[Pg 198]
to satisfy her increasing hunger. The
entrance was still blocked with furze, but
just in the spot where she had found her
cubs a couple of dead rabbits lay, and from
one of these, though after much misgiving,
she made a hearty meal. She endeavoured,
but vainly, to dig a shallow trench in which
to hide the rest of her provisions; the floor
of the artificial “earth” was tiled, and only
lightly covered with soil. Her efforts to
scratch out a tunnel around the furze-bush
proved alike unavailing, so she returned to
her cubs, lay down between them and the
narrow opening from the chamber, and slept.

That night and the following day were
spent in drowsy imprisonment, till, towards
the afternoon, the vixen began to feel the
pangs of thirst and made fresh efforts to
escape. As she was endeavouring to dislodge
the tile nearest the furze, she heard the
tramp of heavy feet and the sound of human
voices.

“They be nice cubs,” said the “whip” to
the huntsman; “as nice a little lot as ever
I clapped eyes on. If only they can give
us such a doing as the old vixen gave us
twice last December, they’ll pass muster.[Pg 199]
Them Gwyddyl Valley foxes be always
reg’lar fliers. Their meat ain’t got too easy-like;
that’s why, maybe, they’re always in
working order. Any road, their flags o’
distress (tongues) don’t flop over their
grinders without the hounds trim ’em hard
on a straight, burning scent.” “Well, we’ll
give ’em a good start, whatever happens,”
replied the huntsman; “here’s two more
bunnies for the larder. If the old girl
shifts her quarters, find out her new “earth,”
and feed her well. I shouldn’t like to be
near the guv’nor if the young uns turn out
mangy when we hustle ’em about a bit in
the autumn.”

The voices ceased, the furze-bushes were
removed from the tunnel entrances, a cold,
steady current of air filled the chamber
and the passages, and the vixen knew
that a way had been made for her escape.
She was not, however, so foolhardy as to
venture forth while the scent of her foes
remained strong in the thicket; she lingered,
in spite of extreme thirst, till the shadows
of evening deepened perceptibly in her
underground abode.

When the vixen stole out into the grass,[Pg 200]
the pale moon was brightening in the
southern sky, and a solitary star glimmered
faintly above the tree-tops. A thrush sang
his vesper from the bare branch of an oak
near by, and a blackbird, startled by the
sight of a strange form squatting beside the
brambles, sounded his shrill alarm and
dipped across the clearing towards a clump
of blackthorn bushes. As soon as she heard
the blackbird’s warning, the vixen vanished;
but, presently reappearing, she trotted across
the open space and sat beneath the thorns.
For some minutes she remained motionless
in the dark patch of shadow, listening
intently; then, passing slowly down a
narrow path, she reached a trickling streamlet
that fell with constant music from stone
to stone between luxuriant masses of moss
and lichen; and there, at a gravelly pool
among the boulders, she cautiously stooped
to drink. With exceeding care, she now proceeded
to make a thorough inspection of the
covert. The night was so calm and bright
that the rabbits were feeding everywhere on
the margin of the thickets, but the vixen
passed them by with nothing but a casual
glance; her mind, for the present, was not[Pg 201]
concerned with hunting. After skirting the
covert, she turned homewards by a pathway
through the trees.

At the end of the path she paused, with
head bent low and hackles ruffled along the
spine—the scent of another vixen lay fresh
on the ground. The peculiar taint told
her a complete story. The strange vixen
was soon to become a mother, and
probably, in anticipation of the event,
inhabited an “earth” close by. Casting
about like an experienced hound, she
picked up the trail, and followed it into
a great tangle of heather, brambles, and
fern, where the scent led, by many a
devious turn, to the spreading roots of a
beech, beneath which a disused rabbit
warren had been prepared for the little
strangers presently to be brought into the
world. The dwelling place was empty.

Retracing her steps as far as the spot
where first she had struck the trail, then
turning sharply towards the clearing, the
crafty creature hastened back to the “earth,”
determined to remove her cubs without
delay to the newly discovered abode. One
by one she bore her offspring thither, holding[Pg 202]
them gently by the loose skin about
their necks, and housed them all before
the dispossessed tenant returned from a
slow and wearisome night’s hunting. The
evicted vixen, seeking to enter her home,
speedily recognised that in her distressed
condition she was no match for her savage,
active enemy, and so, reluctantly retiring,
took up her quarters in the artificial “earth.”

Henceforth, through all the careless hours
of infancy, till summer ended and the nights
gradually lengthened towards the time of
the Hunter’s Moon, the stillness of the
woodlands was never broken by the ominous
note of the horn, or by the dread, fascinating
music of the hounds in full cry. Three
of the cubs grew stout and strong, but the
fourth was a weakling—whether from injury
at the hands of the huntsman or from some
natural ailment was not to be determined.
He died, and mysteriously disappeared, on
the very day when the rest of the cubs
first opened their eyes in the dim chamber
among the roots of the beech.

Vulp was the only male member of the
happy woodland family. His indulgent sisters
tolerated his bouncing, familiar manners as[Pg 203]
if they were born to be his playthings—he
was so serious and yet so droll, so
stupidly self-assertive and yet so irresistibly
affectionate! He seemed to take his
pleasures sadly, wearing, if such be possible
to a fox, an air of melancholy disdain;
and yet his beady eyes were ever on the
lookout for mischief, and for the chance of
a helter-skelter romp with his sisters round
and round the chamber, or to the entrance
of the “earth,” where the sprouts of the
green grass and the flowers of the golden
celandine sparkled as the sunlight of the
fresh spring morning flickered between the
trees.

As yet, Vulp was unacquainted with the
wide, free world. It seemed very wonderful
and awe-inspiring, as he sat by the mouth
of the tunnel in the shadow of an arching
spray of polypody and, for sheer lack of something
better to do, half lifted himself on his
hind-legs to rub his lips against the edge of a
fern, or to peep, with a feeling that his whereabouts
were a secret, between the drooping
fronds. His mother restrained his rashness;
once, when he actually thrust his head beyond
the ferns, she with a stern admonition[Pg 204]
warned him of his mistake; and he promptly
withdrew to her side, frightened at his own
boldness, but grunting in well assumed defiance
of the imagined danger from which he
had fled.

This, in fact, was the first lesson learned—that
a certain sign from the vixen meant
“No,” and that disobedience was afterwards
punishable according to the unwritten laws of
woodland life. Another sign that he learned
to obey meant “Come.” It was a low, deep
note, gentle and persuasive; and directly Vulp
heard it he would hasten to his mother to
be not only fed but also cleansed from every
particle of dirt. Such toilet operations were
not always welcome to the youngsters, and
were sometimes vigorously resented. But
the vixen had a convincing method of
dealing with any refractory member of her
family; she would hold the cub firmly
between her fore-feet while she continued her
treatment, or administered slight, well-judged
chastisement by nipping her wayward offspring
in some tender spot, where, however, little
harm could be the result.

The cubs were ten days old when they
opened their eyes, but more than three weeks[Pg 205]
passed before they were allowed beyond the
threshold of their home. Then, one starlight
night, their mother, having returned from
hunting, awoke them, and, withholding their
usual nourishment, gave the signal “Come.”
The obedient little family followed her along
the dark passage, and ventured, close at her
heels, into the grass-patch in the middle of
the briar-brake. Vulp was slightly more
timid than his sisters were; even at that early
age he showed signs of independence and
distrust. While the other cubs played
“follow-my-leader” with the dam, he hung
back, hesitating and afraid. Even an unusual
show of affection by his mother failed to
reassure him. A rabbit dodged quickly across
a path, and immediately he stood rigid with
fright. Hardly had he recovered before an
owl flew slowly overhead. Enough! He
paused, motionless, till the awful presence had
disappeared; then darted, with astonishing
speed, straight towards the “earth,” and
vanished, with a ridiculously feeble “yap” of
make-believe bravado, into the darkness of
the den. Confidence, however, came and
increased as the days and the nights went by,
till, at the close of a week’s experiences, Vulp[Pg 206]
was as bold in danger as either of his playmates.
He learned to trust his mother
implicitly, and, in her absence, became the
guardian of the family when some fancied
alarm brought fear. He was always last in
learning his lessons; but, as if to make
amends, he always profited most by the
teaching.

Happy, indeed, were those hours of innocence—filled
with sleep, and love, and play.
Till Vulp was six weeks old, he was wholly
unconscious of that ravenous hunger for flesh
which was fated to make him the scourge of
the woodlands. Nevertheless, his instincts
were slowly developing, and so, when on a
second occasion the old buck rabbit that
had frightened him in the thicket bolted
before his eyes across the path, the little fox
bristled with rage and, but for his mother’s
presence, would doubtless have tried to pursue
the exasperating coney. Invariably, when
the night was fine, the cubs gambolled about
the vixen on the close-cropped sward beyond
the den, climbing over her body, pinching
her ears, growling and grunting, tugging at
each other’s brushes, and in general behaving
just as healthy, happy fox-cubs might be[Pg 207]
expected to behave; while the patient, careful
mother looked on approvingly—save when,
uniting in one strong effort, they endeavoured
to disjoint her tail by pulling it over her back—and
smiled, as only a fox can smile, with
eyes asquint and a single out-turned fang
showing white beside the half-closed lip.

A great event occurred when the mother
first brought home her prey that she might
educate her youngsters in the matter of
appetite and prepare them for an independent
existence. The victim was an almost full-grown
rabbit. Laying it down close to the
entrance of the “earth,” the vixen called her
cubs, and instantly they rushed from the den,
tumbling over each other in their haste, till
they gained the spot where she was waiting.
At that moment, however, they caught sight
of the strange grey object in the grass, and,
leaping back, bolted round to their mother’s
side. Then, feeling safe under her care, they
cautiously advanced in a row to sniff
the rabbit, and wondered, yet instinctively
guessed, at the meaning of the situation.
The vixen growled, and, picking up her prey,
carried it to the bramble-clump. The cubs
followed, making all sorts of curious noises[Pg 208]
in mimicking their dam, and evincing the
utmost inquisitiveness as to the reason of
her unexpected conduct. Presently, having
succeeded in arousing their inborn passion for
flesh, the vixen resorted to a neighbouring
mound, and left her offspring in possession
of the dead animal, on which they immediately
pounced, tooth and nail. How terribly in
earnest they became, how bold and reckless
in their vain attempt to demolish the subject
of their wrath! Vulp fastened his needle-like
teeth in the throat, and each of his sisters
gripped a leg, while together they jerked,
strained, scolded, and threatened, till the
mother, fearing lest the commotion would
betray their whereabouts to some lurking foe,
rated her noisy progeny and in anger drove
them away. But as soon as she had gone
back to her seat among the grass-bents, the
youngsters returned to their work. Anyhow,
anywhere, they hurled themselves on the dead
creature, sometimes biting each other for
sheer lack of knowing exactly what else they
should bite, and sometimes simply for the
excitement of a family squabble.

At last, their unwonted exertions began to
tire them; then the careful vixen, desirous[Pg 209]
of bringing the lesson to its close, “broke up”
her prey and divided it among her hungry
children. They fed daintily, choosing from
each portion no more than a morsel, and
soon afterwards, exhausted by excitement and
fatigue, and forgetful of their differences,
were fast asleep, huddled together as usual
in the roomy recess of the den. For a while
the vixen remained to satisfy her hunger;
then, having buried a few tit-bits of her
provender, she also retired to rest; and silence
brooded over the woodlands till the break of
day set every nesting bird atune.

The vixen proved to be an untiring teacher,
and the education of the cubs occupied a part,
at least, of every night. The young foxes
were growing rapidly, and accompanied their
dam in her wanderings about the thickets.
She never went far afield, food being easily
procured at that time of year, particularly
as in a certain spot additional supplies for the
larder were frequently forthcoming because
of the vigilance of the huntsman, whose one
desire was to fit the cubs to match his
hounds in the first “runs” of the coming
season.

III.

[Pg 210]

THE CUB AND THE POLECAT.

The young fox’s education, varied and
thorough, steadily proceeded. Though the
vixen-cubs were slightly quicker to learn,
they were more excitable, and consequently
did not benefit fully by each lesson. Vulp
soon began to hunt for his own sport and
profit. In the meadow above the wood he
would sit motionless, his eyes fixed on the
ground, till the voles came from their burrows
to play beneath the grass-bents; then, with
a quick rush, he would secure a victim
directly its presence was betrayed by a
waving stalk. With the same patience he
would watch near a rabbit warren, till one
of the inhabitants, hopping out to the mound
before her door, gave him the sure chance
of a kill. But in the wheat-fields on the[Pg 211]
slope his methods were altogether different.
To capture partridges required unusual
cunning and skill, and such importance did
the vixen attach to this branch of her field-craft,
that, before initiating her youngsters
into the sport of hunting these birds at
night, she instructed them diligently in the
methods of following by scent, training them
how to pursue the winding trail left by the
larks that fed at evening near their sleeping
places, or by the corncrakes that wandered
babbling through the green wheat. Vulp’s
first attempt to capture a partridge chick
resulted in failure. The vixen-cubs “fouled”
the line he had patiently picked out in the
ditch around the cornfield, and, “casting”
haphazard through the herbage, alarmed the
sleeping birds, and sent them away to a
secure hiding place in the clover. But his
second attempt was crowned with success,
and he proudly carried his prey into a
sequestered nook amid the gorse, where he
enjoyed a quiet meal.

The cub was fully six months old before
he knew the precise difference between stale
and fresh scent, or between the scent of one
creature and that of another, and how to[Pg 212]
hunt accordingly; and several years, with
many dangers and hair-breadth escapes, were
destined to pass before he became expert in
avoiding or baffling the numerous enemies—chiefly
dogs, and men, and traps—that
threatened his life. And yet, during the
first few months of his existence, he
gained sufficient knowledge for the needs
of the moment; and when August drew on
towards the close of the summer, and he
was three parts grown, he had so extended
his nightly rambles that the “lay of the
land” was familiar for miles around the
covert. His outdoor existence—for now he
was wont to sleep in a lair among the gorse
and the bracken, instead of in the stuffy
“earth”—gave him strength in abundant
measure, while his scrupulously clean habits,
the care with which he removed even the
slightest trace of a burr from his sleek,
brown coat, and the plentiful supplies of fresh
food which he was able to obtain, naturally
preserved him from mange and similar ailments
to which carnivorous animals are always prone.
For the present, indeed, life meant nothing
more to him than the sheer enjoyment of
vigorous health, at home by day amid the[Pg 213]
grateful shadows of the bushes and the trees,
or basking in the sun, and abroad at night
in the cold, clear air of the dewy uplands.

Just as sportsmen occasionally meet with
a run of ill-luck, when for some apparently
unaccountable reason they either fail to find
game, or fail to kill it, and, to intensify the
annoyance, an accident occurs that leaves a
bitter memory, so Vulp, during one of his
long rambles over the countryside, failed
entirely to find sport, and gained a decidedly
unpleasant experience. If only his mother
had not taught him that in a season of
scarcity a weasel might reasonably be considered
an article of food! One summer
night, as he started on his usual prowl, the
covert seemed strangely silent. With the
exception of a solitary rabbit that bolted to
its burrow when the young fox crossed the
clearing, and another that disappeared in
similar fashion when nothing more than a
slight crackle of a leaf betrayed Vulp’s
whereabouts near a bramble-clump, every
animal had apparently deserted the thickets.
So, leaving his accustomed haunts, he crossed
the furze-clad dingle, and watched near a
large warren in the open. But there, again,[Pg 214]
not a rabbit could be seen. A field-vole
rustled by over the leaves; the cub made
a futile effort to capture it, stood for an
instant listening to its movements, then thrust
his nose into the herbage in another vigorous
but vain attempt; the vole, like the rabbits,
had sought refuge underground. An owl,
that had frightened the cub about five months
before when first he ventured outside his
home, rose from the hedge, and flew slowly
down the valley with a little squealing
creature in her talons; she, at any rate, had
not hunted in vain.

At last Vulp struck a fresh line of scent
which, though particularly strong and uninviting,
he took to be that of a weasel. It
was mingled with the faint odour of a
field-vole that, doubtless, had been pursued
and carried away by its persistent enemy.
The cub followed the trail, hoping to secure
both hunter and victim, but it soon led him
to a hole in the hedgerow, and there abruptly
ceased. He was about to turn from the
spot, when the eyes of the supposed weasel
suddenly gleamed at the mouth of the hole,
but disappeared when the presence of the
cub was recognised. The fox, retreating to[Pg 215]
a convenient post of observation behind a
tuft of grass, settled down to await his
opportunity. A few minutes elapsed, and
the pursued creature came once more in
sight. It appeared like a shadow against
the sky, lifted its nose inquiringly, quitted
the burrow, sat bolt upright for a moment,
then, reassured, proceeded towards the
covert on the opposite side of the path.
With a single bound, the cub cleared the
grass-tuft, reached out at his prey, missed
his grip, bowled the animal over, and, turning
rapidly, caught it across the loins instead of
by the throat. Unfortunately for himself,
the fox had made a slight miscalculation.
With a scream of rage and pain, the polecat—for
such the creature proved to be—turned
on the aggressor, and instantly fastened its
formidable teeth, like a steel trap, on his
muzzle. Vulp had been taught that his fangs,
also, were a trap from which there should
be no escape, and so he held on firmly,
trying meanwhile to shake the life from his
victim. He pressed the polecat to the
ground, and frantically endeavoured to disengage
its hold by thrusting his fore-paws
beneath its muzzle; but every effort alike[Pg 216]
was useless. A scalding, acrid fluid emitted
by the polecat caused the lips and one of
the eyes of the cub to smart unbearably,
and the offensive odour of the fluid grew
stronger and stronger, till it became almost
suffocating. At last the polecat convulsively
trembled as its ribs and spine were crushed
in the fox’s tightening jaws, its teeth relaxed
their hold, and the fight was over.

Sickened by the pungent smell, and with
muzzle, lips, and right eye burning horribly
from his wounds and the irritant poison, Vulp
hastily dropped his prey, and ignominiously
bolted from the scene of the encounter.
Soon, however, he stopped; the pain in his eye
seemed beyond endurance. He tried to rub
away the noxious fluid with his paws, but his
frantic efforts only increased the irritation by
conveying the poison to his other eye and
to his wounds. He rolled and sneezed and
grunted in torment; he drew his muzzle and
cheeks to and fro on the ground, wrestling
with the great Earth-Mother for help in
direst agony. He could not open his eyes;
he stumbled blindly against a tree-trunk, and
at last became entangled in the prickly
undergrowth. This was Nature’s method[Pg 217]
of succour—she forced her wildling to
remain quiet, in helpless exhaustion, till the
pain subsided and life could once again be
endured. Panting and sick, the cub lay outstretched
among the thorns, while the tears
flowed from his eyes and the froth hung on
his lips. Presently, however, relieved by the
copious discharge, he recovered his senses,
and, miserably cowed, with head and brush
hanging low, returned before dawn to the
covert. But the vixen in fury drove the
cub away; the scent still clung to him,
and rendered him obnoxious even to his
mother. In shame he retired to a dense
“double” hedge of hawthorn, where he hid
throughout the day, till he could summon
sufficient courage at dusk to hunt for some
dainty morsel wherewith to tempt his sickened
appetite. But before taking up his position
above the entrance to a rabbit warren, he
drank at the brook, dipped his tainted fore-paws
in the running water, and, sitting by
the margin, removed from his face, as far as
possible, the traces left by the previous night’s
conflict. Repeatedly, at all hours of the
day and the night, he licked his paws and
with them washed his wounded muzzle and[Pg 218]
inflamed eyes; but so obstinately did the
offensive odour cling to him that a fortnight
elapsed before the last vestige of the nuisance
disappeared. Meanwhile, he narrowly escaped
the mange; and, to add to the discomfort of
his wounds, he experienced, now that his
mother’s aid was lacking, some difficulty in
obtaining sufficient fresh food.

At length he recovered, and new, downy
hair clothed the wounds and the scratches on
his muzzle and throat. Sleek and strong once
more, he was welcomed as a penitent prodigal
by the relenting vixen, and, having in the
period of his solitary wanderings learned
much about the habits of the woodland folk,
was doubtless able to assist his mother in
the future training of the vixen-cubs.

In that luckless fortnight he had acquired
a taste for young pheasants, had picked up
a few fat pigeon-squabs belonging to the
last broods of the year, and had sampled
sundry articles of diet—frogs, slugs, snails,
a young hedgehog or two, and a squirrel
that, overcome with inquisitiveness, descended
from the tree-tops to inspect the young fox
as he dozed among the bilberries carpeting the
forest floor.[Pg 219]

Another incident occurred, to which, at the
time, the cub attached considerable importance.
He had killed what seemed to be a
large, heavy rabbit, which, though evidently
possessed of a healthy appetite, was almost
scentless, and differed in taste from any he had
hitherto captured. He was not particularly
hungry, so he buried the insipid flesh, and
resolved never to destroy another rabbit that
did not yield a full, strong scent. Shortly
afterwards, when, under the eye of the bright
August moon, Vulp and the vixen were
hunting in the wheat-fields, he detected a
similarly weak scent along the hedgerow, and
learned from his wise mother it was that of
a doe-hare about to give birth to her young,
and therefore hardly worth the trouble
of following. The vixen further explained
that, except when other food was scarce,
creatures occupied, or about to be occupied,
with maternal cares—even the lark in the
furrow and the willow-warbler in the hole
by the brook—were far less palatable than
at other times. The cub was also told how,
just before he came into the world, the
hounds had chased his mother from the
thicket, and how old Reveller, the leader[Pg 220]
of the pack, had headed the reckless puppies,
and, rating them for their discourtesy, had
led them away to scour another part of the
covert.

With the advance of autumn, a great change
passed over the countryside. The young fox
now found it necessary to choose his paths
with care as he wandered through the darkness,
lest the rabbits should be warned of his
approach by the crisp rustle of his “pads” on
the leaves that had fallen in showers on the
grass. Hitherto he had associated the presence
of man with that of something good for food.
An occasional dead rabbit was still to be
found near the old “earth,” and, strange to
relate, the man-scent leading to the place
was never fresher or staler than that of the
rabbit. In another spot—a wood-clearing
not far from the keeper’s lodge—the strong
scent of pheasants always seemed to indicate
that the birds had ventured thither in numbers
to feed, and there, too, the man-scent was
strong on the grass. The tracks of innumerable
little creatures intersected the clearing
in all directions, and, if but for the sport
of watching the pheasants, the pigeons, the
sparrows, and the voles playing and quarrelling[Pg 221]
in the undergrowth or partaking of the food
provided by the keeper, the fox loved to lurk
in the gorse near by. He evinced little real
alarm even at the sight of man, though he
felt a misgiving and instinctively knew that
he must hide or keep at a distance till the
curiously shaped monster had gone. The
vixen warned him repeatedly; and she herself,
after giving the signal “Hide!” would
slink away, and wander for miles before returning
to her family, if only the measured footfall
of a poacher or a farm labourer sounded
faintly through the covert.

But soon the young fox learned, in a
way not to be misunderstood, that the
presence of man meant undoubted danger.
One day in October, as he was intently
watching the movements of a sportsman
in the copse, a big cock pheasant rose
with a great clatter from the brambles,
a loud report rang through the covert,
and a shaggy brown and white spaniel
dashed yelping into the bushes. Darting
impetuously from his lair, the cub easily
out-distanced the dog, and quickly found
refuge in an adjoining thicket, where he
remained in safety during the rest of the[Pg 222]
day. Night brought him another adventure.
While crossing a pasture towards a wooded
belt on the hillside, he discovered, to his
surprise, that a man was creeping stealthily
towards him through the shadows. A
moment later, a great lurcher came bounding
over the field. The fox turned, made
for the hedgerow, and gained the friendly
shelter of the hawthorns just as the dog
crashed into the ditch. The frightened
creature now ran along the opposite side
of the hedge in a straight line towards
the wood, and for a second time narrowly
escaped the lurcher’s teeth; but, by keeping
close to the ditch and among the prickly
bushes on the top of the hedge-bank, he at
last succeeded in baffling his long-legged
foe and reached the wood unharmed.

Vulp had thus awakened to the dangers
which, during winter and the earliest days
of spring, were always to beset him. But the
apprehensions caused by his little affair with
the spaniel, and even by his narrow escape
from the lurcher, were trifling compared with
the dread and distress of being driven for
hours before the hounds. And so full of
perils was the first winter of his life that[Pg 223]
nothing but a combination of sheer luck
with great endurance could then have
sufficed to save him from destruction.
Quickly, one after the other, the young
vixens were missing from the thickets;
soon afterwards, three of the cubs belonging
to the litter that had been reared in
the artificial “earth” disappeared; and an
old fox, the sire of that litter, was killed
after a long, wearisome chase almost to the
cliffs on the distant coast.

One dark and dismal night in December,
Vulp, on returning to the home thickets,
failed to find his dam. Her trail was fresh;
she had evidently escaped the day’s hunt;
but all his efforts to follow her met with
no sort of success. Nature had brought
about a separation; in the company of an
adult fox, whose scent lay also on the
woodland path, the vixen had departed from
her haunts. The fox-cub remained, however,
among the woodlands where he had learned
his earliest lessons, and, for another year,
hunted and was hunted—a vagrant bachelor.

IV.

[Pg 224]

A CRY OF THE NIGHT.

One starlit night, when in early winter
the snow lay thick on the ground, Vulp
heard the hunting call of a vixen prowling
through the pines. A similar call had
often reached his ears. Not long after
his dam deserted him, the cry had come
from a furze-brake on a neighbouring hill-top,
and, hastening thither, he had wandered
long and wearily, recognising, though with
misgiving, his mother’s voice. But the exact
meaning of the call, not being a matter
for his mother’s teaching, was unknown to
him at the time. Now, however, he was
a strong, well fed, fully developed fox, able
to hold his own against all rivals, and the
cry possessed for him a strange, new
significance: “The night is white; man[Pg 225]
is asleep; I hunt alone!” Almost like a
big brown leaf he seemed to drift across
the moonlit snow, nearer and nearer to the
pines. He paused for a moment to sniff
the trail; then, with a joyous “yap” of
greeting, he bounded over the hedge, reached
the aisles of the wood, and gambolled—again
like a big, wind-blown leaf—about
the sleek, handsome creature whose call
he had heard. The happy pair trotted
off to hunt the thickets, till, just before
dawn, Vulp, eager to show his skill and
training, surprised two young rabbits sitting
beneath a snow-laden tangle of briar and
gorse, and gallantly shared the spoil with
his woodland bride. They feasted long and
heartily, afterwards journeying to the banks
of a rill, that, like a black ribbon, flowed
through the glen; and there, crouching
together at the margin, they lapped the
water with eager, thirsty tongues.

Presently, happening to glance behind
along the line of the trail, Vulp caught
sight of another fox, a rival for the vixen’s
affections, crouching in some bracken scarcely
a dozen yards away. With a low grunt of
rage, he dashed into the fern, but the watchful[Pg 226]
stranger simply moved aside, and frisked
towards the vixen as she still crouched at
the edge of the stream. In response to
this insulting defiance, Vulp hurled himself
on the intruder, and bowled him over
into the snow. The fight was fast and
furious; now one gained the advantage,
then the other. The grass beneath them
became gradually bared of snow by their
frantic struggles, and marked here and there
by a bunch of fur or a spot of blood. At
last the rival fox, his cheek torn badly
beneath the eye, showed signs of exhaustion;
his breath came in quick, loud gasps; and
Vulp, pressing the attack, forced him to flee
for life to a thicket on the brow of the
slope. There he dwelt and nursed his
wounds, till, when the snow melted, the
huntsman’s “In-hoick, in-hoick, loo-loo-in-hoick!”
resounded in the coverts, and he
was routed from his lair for a last, half-hearted
chase, that ended as Melody pulled
him down at a ford of the river below the
woods.

During the period of their comradeship—a
period of privation for most of Nature’s
wildlings—Vulp taught the vixen much of[Pg 227]
the lore he had learned from his mother,
while the vixen imparted to him the knowledge
she herself had gained when a cub.
He taught her how to steal away from the
covert along the rough, rarely trodden paths
between the farm-labourers’ cottages—where
the scent lay so badly that the hounds were
unable to follow—directly the first faint notes
of a horn, or the dull thud of galloping hoofs,
or the excited whimper of a “rioting” puppy,
indicated the approach of enemies. She
taught him to baffle his foes by chasing
sheep across the stubbles, and then passing
through a line of strong scent where his
own trail could not readily be distinguished;
also that to cross the river by leaping from
stone to stone in the ford was as sure a
means of eluding pursuit as to swim the
pools and the shallows. He taught her,
when hard pressed, to leap suddenly aside
from her path, run along the top rail of a
fence, return sharply on her line of scent, and
follow, with a wide cast, a loop-shaped trail,
which, with a tangent through a ploughed
field or dry fallow, was usually sufficient to
check pursuit till the scent became faint and
cold. And gradually each of these woodland[Pg 228]
rovers grew acquainted with the peculiar
whims and habits of the other. Vulp loved
to follow stealthily the trail of the rabbit, and
then to lie in wait till some imagined cause of
alarm sent Bunny back through the “creep”
and almost straight into her enemy’s open
jaws. The vixen preferred to hide in the
brambles to leeward of a burrow till an
unsuspecting rabbit crept out into the open.
Vulp, since his adventure with the polecat,
bristled with rage whenever he crossed the
track of a weasel, but never dreamed of
following; polecat and weasel were the same
animal for aught he knew to the contrary.
The vixen, however, was not daunted by the
unpleasant memory of any such adventure;
having chanced to see a weasel in the act of
killing a vole, she had recognised a rival and
acted accordingly. And so Vulp’s repeated
warnings to his mate on this matter produced
no effect beyond making her slightly more
careful than she had hitherto been to obtain
a proper grip when she pounced on her savage
little quarry. The vixen was exceedingly
fond of snails, and would eagerly thrust a
fore-paw into the crannies of any old wall
or bank where they hibernated; but Vulp[Pg 229]
much preferred to scratch up the moss in a
deserted gravel-pit, and grub in the loosened
soil for the drowsy blow-flies and beetles
that had chosen the spot for their winter
abode. This was the reason for such different
tastes: the vixen, when a cub, had often
basked in the sun near a snails’ favourite
resort, and had there acquired a liking for
the snails; while the fox, on the other hand,
had times out of number amused himself,
in the first summer of his life, by leaping
and snapping at the flies as they buzzed
among the leaves when the mid-day sun
was hot, and at the beetles as they boomed
along the narrow paths in the thicket near
the “earth” when the moon rolled up
above the hedge, and the dark, mysterious
shadows of intersecting boughs foreshortened
on the grass. But Vulp knew
well, from an unpleasant experience, the
difference between a fly and a wasp.

One day in August, as he lay in his outdoor
lair, the brightness and heat of the
sunshine were such that his eyes, blinking
in the drowsiness of half-awakened slumber,
appeared like mere slits of black across
streaked orbs of yellow, and gave no indication[Pg 230]
of the fiery glow that lit the round,
distended pupils when he peered at nightfall
through the tangled undergrowth. His
tongue lolled out, and he panted like a
tired hound, but from thirst rather than
weariness. The flies annoyed him greatly,
now settling on his brush, till with a flick
of his paw he drove them away, then,
nothing daunted, alighting on his back, his
ears, his haunches, till his fur wrinkled and
straightened in numberless uneasy movements
from the tormenting tickling of the little
pests. Presently, with a shrill bizz of rapid
wings, a large, yellow-striped fly passed close
to his ears. He struck down the tormenting
insect with a random flip of his paws,
snapped at it to complete the work of
destruction, and proceeded leisurely to eat
his victim. To his utter surprise, he
seemed to have captured a living, angry
thorn, which, despite his most violent efforts
to tear it away with his paws, stuck in his
lip, and produced a smarting, burning
sensation that was intolerable. He rolled
on the ground and rubbed his muzzle in
the grass, but to no purpose. No wonder,
then, that subsequently his manner towards[Pg 231]
an occasional hibernating wasp among the
moss-roots in the gravel-pit was deferential
in the extreme!

Vulp and his mate soon learned that in
rabbit-hunting it was exceedingly profitable
to co-operate. Thus, while the vixen “lay
up” near a warren, Vulp skirted the copse
and chased the conies home towards his
waiting spouse. After considerable practice,
the trick paid handsomely, and food was
seldom lacking. The vixen possessed,
perhaps, a slightly more delicate sense of
smell than the fox. Frequently she
scented a rabbit in a clump of fern or gorse
after Vulp had passed it by; suddenly
stopping, she would tell her lord of her
discovery by signs he readily understood,
and then, while he kept outside the tangle,
would pounce on the coney in its retreat,
or start it helter-skelter into his very jaws.
But of all the tricks and the devices she
taught him, the chief, undoubtedly, were
those concerned with the capture of hens and
ducks from a neighbouring farmstead. An
adult fox, as a rule, does not pay frequent
visits to a farmstead; but Vulp, like his
sire, was passionately fond of poultry, and[Pg 232]
so, in after years, the vixen’s instructions
caused him to become the dread of every
henwife in the district. Undoubtedly he
would have been shot had he not been
the prize most sought for by the Master
of the Hounds, who cared little for the
frequent demands made on his purse by
the cottagers, so long as the fox that
slaughtered the poultry gave abundant
sport when running fast and straight
before the pack.

The months drifted by, and signs of
spring became more and more abundant
in the valley. About the beginning of
March, Vulp deserted the “earth” prepared
by himself and the vixen for their prospective
family, and took up his abode among the
hazels and the hawthorns in a thick-set hedge
bounding the woods.

In preparing the “breeding earth,” Vulp
and the vixen observed the utmost care in
order that its whereabouts should not be
discovered. The chosen site was a shallow
depression, scratched in the soil by a fickle-minded
rabbit that had ultimately fixed on
another spot for her abiding place. This
depression was enlarged; a long tunnel[Pg 233]
was excavated as far as the roots of an oak,
and there broadened. Then another long
tunnel was hollowed out towards the
surface, where it opened in the middle of
a briar-brake. The foxes worked systematically,
digging away the soil with their
fore-paws, loosening an occasional stubborn
stone or root with their teeth, and thrusting
the rubbish behind them with their
powerful hind-legs. As it accumulated,
they turned and pushed it towards the
mouth of the den, where at last a fair-sized
mound was formed. When the burrow
had been opened into the thicket, the crafty
creatures securely “stopped” the original
entrance, so that, when the grass sprouted
and the briar sprays lengthened in the
woodlands, the “earth” would escape all
notice, unless a prying visitor penetrated
the thicket and discovered the second
opening—then, of course, the only one—leading
to the den.

When summer came, and the undergrowth
renewed its foliage, and the grass
and the corn grew so tall and thick that
Vulp could roam unseen through the
fields, he left his haunts amid the woodlands[Pg 234]
at the first peep of dawn, and as
long as daylight lasted lay quiet in a snug
retreat amid the gorse. There all was
silent; no patter of summer rain from
leaves far overhead, no rustle of summer
wind through laden boughs, prevented
him hearing the approach of a soft-footed
enemy; no harsh, mocking cry of jay
or magpie, bent on betraying his whereabouts,
gave him cause for uneasiness and
fear. Of all wild creatures in the fields
and woods, he detested most the meddlesome
jay and magpie. If he but ventured
by day to cross an open spot, one of these
birds would surely detect and follow him,
hopping from branch to branch, or swooping
with ungainly flight almost on his
head, meanwhile hurling at him a thousand
abuses. Unless he quickly regained his
refuge in the gorse, the blackbirds and the
thrushes would join in the tantalising
mockery, till it seemed that the whole
countryside was aroused by the cry of
“Fox! fox!” After such an adventure,
it needed the quiet and solitude of night
to restore his peace of mind; and even
when he had escaped the din, and lay[Pg 235]
in his couch among the bleached grass
and withered leaves, his ears were
continually strained in every direction to
catch the least sound of dog or man.
When in the winter he ran for life before
the hounds, and tried by every artifice to
baffle his pursuers, these “clap-cats” of
the woods would jeer him on his way.
Once, when he ventured into the river,
and headed down-stream, thinking that the
current would bear his scent below the
point where he would land on the opposite
bank, the magpie’s clatter caused him
the utmost fear that his ruse might not
succeed. But luckily the hounds and the
huntsman were far away. The birds,
however, were not the only advertisers of
his presence; the squirrel, directly she
caught sight of him, would hurry from her
seat aloft in fir or beach, to the lowest
bough, and thence—though more wary of
Vulp than of Brighteye, the water-vole—fling
at him the choicest assortment
of names her varied vocabulary could
supply. Still, for all this irritating
abuse Vulp had only himself and his
ancestry to blame. The fox loved—as an[Pg 236]
article of diet—a plump young fledgling
that had fallen from its nest, or a tasty
squirrel, with flesh daintily flavoured by
many a feast of nuts, or beech-mast, or
eggs. It was but natural that his sins,
and those of his forefathers, should be
accounted to him for punishment, and
that it should become the custom, in
season and out of season, when he was
known to be about, for all the woodland
folk to hiss and scream, and expostulate
and threaten, and to compel his return to
hiding with the least possible delay. Thus
it happened that he scarcely ventured,
during the day, to attack even a young
rabbit that frisked near his lair, lest,
screaming to its dam for help, it should
bring a very bedlam about his ears.

While roaming abroad in the summer
night, Vulp gradually became acquainted
with all sorts of vermin-traps used by the
keepers. Once, treading on a soft spot
near a rabbit “creep,” he suddenly felt a
slight movement beneath his feet. Springing
back, he almost managed to clear the
trap; but the sharp steel teeth caught him
by a single claw and for a moment held[Pg 237]
him fast. He wrenched himself loose,
and retired for a while to examine his
damaged toe-nail. Then, reassured, he
again approached the trap, so that he might
store up in memory the circumstances of
his near escape. He learned his lesson
thoroughly, and never afterwards did the
smell of iron, or the slightest taint of the
trapper’s hand, escape him. He even
walked around molehills; they reminded him
too much of the soft soil about the trap.
And, for the same reason, he avoided treading
on freshly excavated earth before the
holes of a rabbit warren.

The succeeding years of Vulp’s eventful
life were in many respects similar to the
year that began with his courtship of the
sleek young vixen in the white wilderness
of the winter fields. His fear of men and
hounds increased, while his cunning became
greater with every passing day. He never
slept on a straight trail, but cast about,
returned on the line of his scent, and leaped
aside, before retiring to sleep in his retreat
amid the bracken. Often he heard the wild,
ominous cry of the huntsman, “Eloa-in-hoick,
hoick—hoick, cover—hoick!” as the hounds[Pg 238]
dashed into the furze; and the loud “Tally-ho!”
as he himself, or, perchance, a less
fortunate neighbour, broke into sight before
the loud-tongued pack. And more than
once, from a safe distance, he heard the awful
“Whoop!” that proclaimed the death of one
of his kindred.

As the years wore on, Vulp gradually
wandered far from his old home. The
countryside, for twenty or thirty miles around,
was known as intimately to him as a little
garden, nestling between sunny fruit-tree
walls, is known to the cottager who makes
it the object of his daily care. His ears
were torn by thorns and fighting; his
russet coat was streaked with grey along
the spine. At last, when age demanded ease
and comparative safety from the long, hard
chase over hill and dale, he retired to a
rocky fastness on the wild west coast, and
there, far above the leaping waves and
dashing spray, lived his free, lonely life.
And there he died.

“HE RETIRED TO A ROCKY FASTNESS ON THE WILD WEST COAST.”
To List

It was a bright, hot day in July. Lying
among the boulders on the shore, I watched
through a field-glass the antics of some birds
that wheeled and soared above the cliffs,[Pg 239]
when, to my surprise, I saw Vulp crawl
slowly along a shelf of rock above a deep,
dark cavern. His movements, somehow,
appeared unnatural. Instead of crouching,
with legs bent under him and brush curled
gracefully about his “pads,” to bask, his
eyelids half-closed, in the sun, he lay on his
side. Guided by a companion, who, with
waving hand, directed my course as I climbed,
I gradually mounted the steep ascent, and
peeped over the edge of the rock on which
the fox lay. Despite my excessive caution,
he was aware of my presence. Slowly and
drowsily he lifted his head, uttered a feeble
half-grunt, half-whine of alarm, and for
a moment bared his teeth defiantly. I
remained absolutely still. Then his head
fell back, and with a tremor of pain he
stretched a stiffened limb. I crawled across
the ledge to a rugged path among the cliffs,
and descended to the shore. Next day I
found him on the rock again, lying in the
same position, but dead, while far up in the
blue the sea-birds circled and called, and
far below, at the edge of the flowing tide,
the crested billows leaped and sang.

His “mask” hangs above my study door.[Pg 240]
It has been placed there—not as a thing
of beauty. The hard, set pose devoid of
grace, the bent, dried ears once ever on
the alert, the glassy, artificial eyes in sockets
once tenanted by living balls of fire that
glowed in the darkness of the night—all
are unreal and expressionless. Yet the
“mask” suggests a hundred pictures, and
when I turn aside and forget for a moment
the unreality of this poor image of death, I
wander, led by fancy, among the moonlit
woods, where the red mouse rustles past, and
the mournful cry of the brown owl floats
through the beeches’ shadowed aisles. Then
I hear a sudden wail, that echoes from hillside
to hillside, as the vixen calls to Vulp:
“The night is white; man is asleep; I hunt
alone!” And the fox, standing at the edge
of the clearing, sends back his sharp, glad
answer, “I come!”

THE BROWN HARE.

[Pg 241]

I.

[Pg 243]

THE UPLAND CORNFIELD.

In midsummer, when the sun rises over the
hillside opposite my home its first bright
beams glance between the branches of a giant
oak in the hedgerow of a cornfield above
the wooded slope, and sparkle on my study
window. And when at evening the valley
is deeply shadowed, the light seems to linger
in benediction on the same cornfield, where
the great oak-tree, no longer silhouetted
darkly against a golden dawn, shines faintly,
with a radiance borrowed from the west,
against the pearl-blue curtain of the waning
day. Except during the early morning or
at dusk, the cornfield does not stand out
conspicuously in the landscape. The eye is
attracted by the striking picture of the woodland
wall stretching across the slope from[Pg 244]
the brink of the river, or by the lower
prospect of peaceful meadows and orchards
through which the murmuring stream wanders
towards the village bridge; but the peaceful
uplands beyond rarely greet the vision.
For many years I was wont to look from
my window only at the woods and the
meadows, and somehow I was accustomed
to imagine that the line of my vision was
bounded by the top of the wood. It was
not till more than usual interest had been
awakened in me concerning the wild life
inhabiting the cornfield, that my eyes were
daily turned in the direction of the uplands,
where, every evening, the rooks disappear
from sight on their way to the tall elms in
a neighbouring valley.

Except during harvest, the cornfield is
seldom visited by the country folk. It lies
away from the main road, and the nearest
approach to it is by a grass-grown lane
leading from some ruined cottages to a farmstead
in the middle of the estate. Many years
ago, it was a wilderness of furze and briar,
one of the thickest coverts on the countryside,
affording safe sanctuary for fox and
badger. But gradually it has been reclaimed,[Pg 245]
till now only a belt of undergrowth, scarcely
twenty yards wide, stretches along the horizon
between the upper hedgerow and the wheat.

Here, one starry April night, in a snug
“form” prepared by the mother hare, a
leveret was born. The “form” was hardly
more than a depression in the rank grass,
to which, for some time past, the doe had
been in the habit of resorting at dawn, that
she might hide secure through the day,
till the dusk brought with it renewed
confidence, and tempted her away into the
open meadows beyond the cornfield, where
the young clover grew green and succulent.
A thick gorse-bush, decked with a wealth
of yellow bloom, grew by the side of the
“form,” and, all around, the matted grass and
brambles made a labyrinth, pathless, save for
the winding “run” by which the hare
approached or left her home.

Unlike the offspring of the rabbit—born
blind and naked in an underground nest
lined with its parent’s fur—the leveret was
covered with down, and her eyes were open,
from the hour of birth. Nature had fitted
her for an existence in the open air. At
first she was suckled by day as well as by[Pg 246]
night, but as she grew older she seldom felt
the want of food till dark. While light
remained, she squatted motionless by her
mother’s side in the “form,” protected by
the resemblance in colour between her coat
and the surrounding herbage, where the
browns and greys of last autumn might still
be seen among the brambles, with here and
there a weather-worn stone or the fresh castings
from a field-vole’s burrow. In the gloaming,
she followed her mother through the “creeps”
amid the furze-brake, and sometimes to the
edge of the thicket as far as the gap, where
she learned to nibble the tastiest leaves in
the grass. But soon after nightfall, she was
generally alone for some hours while the doe
wandered in search of food.

Before daybreak, the doe always returned
to suckle her little one. Often in the quiet
night, the leveret, feeling lonely or afraid,
would call in a low, tremulous voice for
help. If the doe was within hearing she
immediately responded; but frequently the
cry, “leek, leek,” did not reach the roaming
hare, and the leveret, crouching in the undergrowth,
had to wait till she heard her mother’s
welcome call. Soon the little home in the[Pg 247]
thicket was deserted, and the leveret
accompanied her mother on her nightly
journeys till the fields and the woods for
miles around became familiar.

About a month after her birth, the leveret,
having grown so rapidly that she was able
to take care of herself, parted from her
mother, and, crossing the boundary hedge of
the estate, took up her quarters on the
opposite side of the valley. The doe and
her leveret had lived happily in the cornfield
and the meadows above the wood. The
mother had attended with utmost solicitude
to the wants of her offspring, allowing no
intruder among her kindred to trespass on
her own particular haunts, and careful to
select for each day’s hiding place some
sequestered spot where a human footstep
was seldom heard, and the noise of the farmyard
sounded faint and remote.

The leveret had learned, partly through a
wonderful instinct and partly through her
mother’s teaching, how to act when there
was cause for alarm. Immediately on detecting
the presence of an intruder, she lay as
still as the stone beside the ant-heap near,
trusting that she would not be distinguished[Pg 248]
from her surroundings. But if flight was
absolutely necessary, she sped away towards
the nearest gap, and thence over pasture and
cornfield, always up-hill if possible, out-distancing
any probable pursuer by the
marvellous power of her long hind-limbs.

During the late summer and the early
autumn, nothing occurred to endanger the
leveret’s life. The corn grew tall and slowly
ripened. Amid its cool shadows the leveret
dwelt in solitude. Her “creeps” were out
of sight beneath the arching stalks. A
gutter for winter drainage, dry and overgrown
with grass, formed a tunnel in the
hedge-bank between the corn and the root-crop
field beyond; and through this gutter
the leveret, when at night she grew hungry,
could steal into the dense tangle of thistles
and nettles fringing the turnips, thence,
between the ridges under the wide-spreading
leaves, to the narrow pathway dividing
the rape from the root-crop, and across the
field to a furrow where sweet red carrots,
topped with dew-sprinkled plumes, tempted
her dainty appetite.

When the calm night was illumined, but
not too brightly, by the moon and stars,[Pg 249]
the leveret would venture far away from
her retreat to visit a cottage garden where
the young lettuces were crisp and tender.
Her depredations among the carrots and
lettuces were scarcely such as to deserve
punishment. She ate only enough of the
lettuces to make a slight difference in the
number of seeding plants ultimately devoured
by the cottager’s pig, or thrown to the refuse-heap;
and from the great pile of carrots, to
be gathered and stored in the peat-mound
by the farmstead, the few she destroyed
could never by any chance be missed.
On all the countryside she was the most
inoffensive creature—the harmless gipsy of
the animal world, having no fixed abode,
her tent-roof being the dome of the sky.

As autumn advanced, the reapers came to
the corn. She heard them enter by the
gate; and presently, along the broad path
cut by the scythe around the field, the great
machine clanked and whirred. All day the
strange, disturbing noise continued, drawing
gradually nearer the spot where the leveret
lay. Through the spaces between the stalks
she watched the whirling arms swinging over,
and the horses plodding leisurely by the edge[Pg 250]
of the standing wheat. At last, but almost
too late, she leaped from her “form” as the
cruel teeth cut through the stalks at her
side; and, taking the direction of her “creep,”
rushed off towards the nearest gap and
disappeared over the brow of the hill.

In the middle of the night she wandered
back to the wheat-field. The scene before
her eyes revealed a startling change. The
corn stood in “stooks” on the stubble; no
winding paths led here and there through a
silent sanctuary, where countless waving,
nodding plumes, bent and released by a
gentle-flowing wind, had shimmered in the
bright radiance of the harvest moon, when,
coming home late at night from the marsh
across the hill, she had stayed for a while
on the mound by the gate, and tiptoe, with
black-fringed ears moving restlessly, had
listened to some ominous sound in the farmyard.
The prickly stubble felt strange to
her feet, so, carefully picking her way by
the ditch, she crossed to the nearest gate
and ambled down the lane. But the change
noticed in the wheat-field seemed to have
passed over the whole countryside. It was
more and more pronounced during the[Pg 251]
following week, till, in October, the late
harvest had all been cleared. The habits of
the hare altered with the season. Having
at last grown accustomed to the varied conditions
of her life, she sometimes frequented
the old tracks over the upland, but rarely
resorted to the “forms” in which she had
lain amid the summer wheat.

October brought her an experience which
might have proved disastrous, but which,
fortunately, resulted in nothing more than a
passing fright. In the stalk of the rye occurs
a knot, forming a slight bulge known to the
peasantry as the “sweet joint.” Rabbits and
hares are extremely fond of this succulent
morsel, and, in consequence, the rye-crop, if
near a large warren, is in danger of being
totally destroyed. Puss one night had wandered
far to a field, where, some time before,
she had discovered a patch of standing rye.
The few remaining stalks were hard and uninviting,
but there were some delicious parsnips
among the root-crops. At dawn she settled
down to hide between the rows of swedes
close by, and remained secreted for the day;
but towards evening a sportsman came in at
the gate, and, with a low word of command[Pg 252]
and a wave of the arm, “threw off” his brace
of red setters to range the field. Working
systematically to right and left, the dogs
sought eagerly for game. Soon the hare
was scented, and while Juno, with stiffened
“stern” and uplifted paw, stood almost over
her, Random, “backing” his companion, set
towards the furrow where Puss, perfectly
rigid, and with ears well over her shoulders,
crouched low, prepared for instant flight.
Step by step the sportsman, with gun in
readiness, moved towards Juno, cautioning
her against excitement; while Random,
sinking on his haunches, awaited patiently
the issue of events. Suddenly, convinced
that in flight lay her surest chance of escape,
the hare leaped from her “seat,” and with
the utmost speed, though from the ease
of her motions appearing to run slowly,
made her way towards the hedgerow. There
was a quick rush behind her as she
started from the furrow, and then a loud,
rasping exclamation from the sportsman, but
nothing more; no shot was fired. She
owed her life to several circumstances. The
dogs were young, and in strict training;
their master, knowing the natural fondness[Pg 253]
of “first season” setters for “chasing fur,”
had purposely refrained from killing the hare,
and had turned his attention to the behaviour
of his dogs. Then, again, he cherished a
certain fondness for Puss, believing her to
be the most persecuted, as well as the most
innocent and interesting, of Nature’s wildlings
in the wind-swept upland fields.

Henceforward, but for one other incident,
the life of the hare was singularly uneventful
till the early spring. That incident occurred
within a week of her escape from the setters,
and once more her luck was due to the humanity
of him who had found her among the turnips.
The farm-lands frequented by the leveret were
a favourite resort of many of her kind, and
when moving about in the darkness of the night
she often found signs of their presence near the
gaps and gateways. The sportsman, knowing
well that after harvest the poaching instincts
of the peasantry and of the professional village
“mouchers” would receive fresh stimulus,
determined to forestall his enemies, and render
futile some, at least, of their endeavours. So it
came about that one night a keeper, assisted by
several of the guests at the “big house” in the
valley, and having previously made every[Pg 254]
preparation for the event, placed a net near
each gate and before each likely gap within a
radius of half a mile from the heart of the
estate.

Unless hard pressed, a hare seldom leaves a
field except by certain well-known openings in
the hedgerow. Unlike the rabbit, she will not
readily leap over any obstacle beneath which
she can crawl; and whereas the “creep” of
a rabbit through a gateway or a hedgerow is
well-nigh invariably at right angles to the
line of that gateway or hedgerow, the “creep”
of a hare tends sideways and is sometimes
slightly curved. To net hares successfully it is
necessary to know their habits; and the keeper,
having served a lifelong apprenticeship in field-craft,
was prepared for every emergency. His
object at this time was not to kill the hares,
but simply to educate them, to warn them
thoroughly once for all against the wiles of
their worst enemy, the poacher.

As Puss was busily feeding in the dewy
clover, she heard the quick, continuous gallop
of a dog. This time, however, she had not
to deal with Juno, the setter, but with a
trained lurcher, borrowed for the occasion
from a keeper who had captured the animal[Pg 255]
during a poaching affray. The leveret,
peeping over the grass-tops, saw the dog
coming rapidly on. He was over and past
her in an instant. As he turned, she started
off straight towards an opening where some
sheep had partly broken down the hedge.
The lurcher closed in, and drove her thither
at tremendous speed. She strained every
nerve, and, gaining the ditch, blundered
blindly through the gap, and fell, helpless
and inert, entangled completely within the
treacherous folds of the unseen net. Her
piteous cries, tremulous, wailing, heart-rending—similar
to the cries of a suffering
infant—were borne far and wide on the
wind. The keeper soon reached the spot, and,
placing his hand over her mouth to stop
the cries, tenderly extricated the frightened
creature from the treacherous meshes and
allowed her to go free. For a few seconds,
she lay in abject fright, panting and unable
to move. Then, hearing the cries of another
hare entangled in a bag-net some distance
away, she bounded to her feet, and darted
off—somewhere, anywhere, so long as she
might leave the awful peril behind.
Bewildered, but with every instinct assisting[Pg 256]
her in the desire for life, she ran along by
the hedgerow, and, unexpectedly catching
sight of a familiar gate, crouched and
passed quickly through the “creep” beneath
the lowest bar. But here, again, a net was
spread; again the hare fell screaming and
struggling into the meshes; and again the
keeper released her. Exhausted by intense
excitement and fear, she crawled into the
“trash” in the ditch, and kept in hiding,
not daring the risk of another capture.
Luckily for Puss, the lurcher had already
hunted the field in which she was now
secreted, and so the timid creature remained
undisturbed beneath the fern. When her
wildly throbbing heart had been quieted by
rest and solitude, she stole from her hiding
place to nibble the clover at the side of the
path. Towards dawn, she journeyed to a
wide stretch of moorland on the opposite
hills, and there made a new “form” on a
rough bank that separated a reedy hollow
from the undulating wilderness of heather
and fern.

The leveret’s adventures were destined to
effect a considerable change in her habits.
She was being roughly taught that to preserve[Pg 257]
her life she must be ever cautious and
vigilant. Though danger threatened her by
day and by night, she lived beyond the usual
period of a hare’s existence, partly because
her early education was thorough and severe.
Thus taught, she would pause for an instant
at every gap and gateway before she passed
through, and, if she found a net in her path,
would turn aside, creep along by the hedge,
and seek an exit at another place.

The perils to which she had been exposed
created a feeling of intense restlessness, which
harassed her throughout the winter months,
and caused her to travel long distances, by the
loneliest lanes and fields, to and from the
moorland where now she had made her home.
She remembered the scent of a human being
since her experiences with the keeper, and, her
powers of smell being wonderfully acute, was
able to detect even the faintest signs which
indicated that her dread enemy—man—had
crossed her path. One night she smelt
the touch of a hand on the grass-bents
near her “form,” and found also that the
herbage had been moved aside. Though
the scent was faint—the intruder having
visited the spot soon after the leveret had[Pg 258]
set out in quest of food—the cautious
creature forsook her lair, and spent the day
in a sheltered retreat beside a heap of dry
and withered leaves near the outskirts of
a copse on the slope overlooking the moor.

Gradually she grew big and strong, becoming
unusually fat as the autumn advanced, so that
she would be able, if required, to withstand the
rigour and the waste of a severe winter. Her
coat was thick and beautifully soft, for protection
against cold and damp. But while
she increased in weight, she remained in hard
condition because of her long journeys and
frequent change of quarters.

It happened, however, that her first winter
was helpful to the welfare of animal life in
general. The heavy rains, it is true, greatly
distressed the leveret. The nights were so
dark, and the constant patter of the rain
so interfered with even her highly trained
powers of hearing, that, while the wet
weather lasted, she seldom dared to leave
the neighbourhood of her favourite resort,
but crouched in the grass at the margin
of the copse, and tried to obtain a meal
as best she could from the sodden herbage.

Though on certain occasions Puss might[Pg 259]
have been discovered in hiding on the
marsh, yet there, whenever possible, she
chose a dry spot for her “seat.” She
loved, best of all, the undulating hills far
above the river-mists, which, chilled at
nightfall by an occasional frost, descended
on the fields like crystal dust, and almost
choked her if she chanced to pass within
these wreathing drifts that brought discomfort
and disease to man and beast alike.

But the want of exercise so affected
her, that, when again the weather was fine
and she ventured from her lair, she found
herself unable to cover the usual distance
of her nightly rambles. As the first cold
glimmer of the dawn appeared in the
south-eastern sky, she started back, in
alarm at her fatigue, to complete the
remaining mile of her journey home. Her
weakness soon became apparent. Then,
finding herself powerless to proceed, she
turned reluctantly aside, and crouched,
with Nature’s mimicry for her protection,
on the brown ploughland where the winter
wheat was thrusting up its first green
sprouts above the soil. But after a few
days she was well and strong again. She[Pg 260]
suffered far less from the short, sharp
frost that bound the countryside with its
icy fetters, than from the rains. The frost
scarcely interfered with her movements;
indeed, it made exercise more than ever
necessary. Forced to seek diligently for
her food, she found it in a deserted
stubble; there, when the sheep lay sleeping
in the bright winter moonlight, she
would squat beside them, nibbling the
turnips scattered over the field as provender
for the flock.

II.

[Pg 261]

MARCH MADNESS.

March came in “like a lion.” The wind
whistled round the farmstead on the hill, and
through the doorway of the great kitchen,
and down the open chimney. It woke up
the old, grey-haired farmer who dozed on
the “skew” in the ingle-nook by the crackling
wood-fire; it almost made him feel young
again with the vigour of the boisterous spring.
It sang in the key-hole of the door between
the passage and the best parlour; the mat
at the threshold flapped with a sound as of
pattering feet; and the gaudy calendars on
the wall flew up like banners streaming in
the breeze. The old man turned, and eagerly
watched the hailstones, as they dropped tinkling
on the roofs of the outhouses, or, driven aslant[Pg 262]
by the wind, crashed hissing against the
ground, and, rebounding, rolled across the
pebbled yard. The labourers came home to
the mid-day meal, and, pausing at the door,
shook the hail from their garments.

“Lads,” said the farmer, “I’ve been spared
to hear the whisper of another spring.”

“God be thanked!” said the hind, “for
seasonable weather at last. Every man to
his trencher! the broth is in the bowls.”

Out on the marsh the reeds beat in the
wind. Every grass-fibre twisted and swung;
the matted tussocks, drooping over stagnant
pools near which the snipe, with ruffled
feathers, probed the soil in search of food,
were shaken and disentangled, so that the
bleached blades of last year’s growth fell
apart, and exposed the fresh young sprouts
rising from the bed of winter’s death. Over
the wide waste the March wind drove
furiously, with blessing in the guise of
chastisement, while, far above, the grey-blue
clouds whirled fast across a steely sky, till
the ashen moon gazed coldly on the waning
day, as one by one the stars flashed
overhead, the clouds rolled down into the
pink and silver west, and the song of the[Pg 263]
wind became only a murmur in the leafless
willows by the brook.

With the advent of March, a great change
passed over the wild life of the uplands.
The jack-hares threw aside their timidity,
and wandered, reckless of danger, over the
marsh, across the stubbles, and through the
woods. Even in broad daylight, they frisked
and quarrelled, in courtship and rivalry.

The leveret was now full-grown, and
Nature’s mothering instincts were strong
within her. One evening, as she louped
along her accustomed trail towards the
turnip-field, she discovered a suitor following
in her wake. Half in misgiving, half in
wantonness, she turned aside and hid in the
ditch. Presently she felt a soft touch on
her neck: the jack-hare was pushing his way
through the undergrowth. For a moment
she stopped to admire him as the moonlight
gleamed on a white star in the centre of
his forehead. Then away she jumped,
dodging round the bushes and hither and
thither among the grassy tangles, while her
admirer followed, frisking and leaping in
sportive gaiety. Another jack-hare now
came along the hedgerow. In utter mischief,[Pg 264]
Puss called “leek, leek, leek,” as if pretending
to be in distress and in need of help.
“Leek, leek,” came the low response, as,
quickening his pace, the second hare sprang
into the fern. But his audacity was not to
go unchallenged. The first suitor immediately
showed himself, and, making a great pretence
of reckless bravery, prepared to give the
second a warm reception. The doe-leveret,
apparently indifferent, but nevertheless keenly
interested in the combat, crouched on a little
knoll by the path, while the jack-hares, sitting
on their haunches, boxed and scratched, and
rolled over each other in a singularly harmless
conflict, neither suffering more than the
loss of a few tufts of fur. The comedy
might, however, have had a tragic ending.
Presently one of the combatants—the hare
that had come late on the scene—became
slightly exhausted, and, ignominiously yielding
to his rival’s superior dexterity, ran back
towards the distant hedge. Almost at once
a fox crept out from the furze at the
corner of the field, and trotted away on the
scent of the fleeing hare, while Puss and
her mate made off in the direction of a
more secluded pasture.[Pg 265]

A month passed—a month of general
hilarity and indiscriminate fighting among all
the hares in the district—and then, within
a neat, dry “form,” that Puss, with a
mother’s solicitude, had made in a carefully
selected spot on a mound where the grass
was tall and thick, her little leveret was
“kittled.” The doe-hare tended her offspring
as carefully as she herself had been tended
a year before. Her faithless lover had gone
his own way. But Puss cared little for his
desertion: she wished to live alone, under
no monopoly as far as her affections were
concerned, though for the time her leveret
wholly engaged her mothering love.

So strong was her strange new passion that
she was ready, if needs be, to brave death
in defence of her young. And, not long
after the leveret’s birth, the mother’s courage
was tested to the utmost. A peregrine falcon,
from the wild, rocky coast to the west,
came sailing on wide-reaching wings across
the April sky. Puss was resting in a clump
of brambles not far from her “form,” and
saw the big hawk flying swiftly above. Any
movement on her part would have instantly
attracted the attention of her foe, so she[Pg 266]
squatted motionless, while her leveret also
instinctively lay still in its “form.” But
the keen eyes of the falcon detected the
young hare, and the bird descended like a
stone on his helpless victim. Instantly,
the doe rushed to the rescue, and, effectually
warding the attack, received the full
force of the “stoop” on her shoulders. As
the hawk rose into the air, the doe felt
a sharp pain in one of her ears—the
big talons, closing in their grasp, had
ripped it as with the edge of a knife.
She screamed, then, grunting savagely,
leaped hither and thither around the leveret,
meanwhile urging it to escape into the
adjacent thicket. The bird, aloft in the
air, seemed perplexed, and eventually prepared
to “stoop” again. In the nick of
time, Puss vanished with her little one
beneath an impenetrable tangle of friendly
thorns, while the baffled peregrine proceeded
on his way.

For some weeks, the hare languished under
the effects of the falcon’s blow. When her
leveret was old enough to find food for itself,
she rested, forced by the wound to live
quietly in hiding, till the scar healed and[Pg 267]
life once more became enjoyable. But she
always bore the marks of the talons, and so
was spoken of by the country folk as “the
slit-eared hare.”

The superstitious recalled the tales of a
bygone century, and half believed the hare
to be a witch in disguise, for she seemed
to bear a charmed life, and, though known
everywhere in the parish, successfully eluded
to the end all the devices that threatened her.
No matter how artfully the wire noose was
set above the level of the ground in her
“run,” she brushed it by and never blundered
into the treacherous loop. A net failed even
to alarm her: it might almost be imagined
that she became an experienced judge of any
such contrivance, and knew every individual
poacher by the method with which his toils
were spread across her path.

Not having bred during the year in which
she was born, Puss had thrived, and weighed
about nine pounds in the late autumn of
her second season. But according to popular
opinion she was much heavier. Will, the
cobbler, who was fond of coursing, stoutly
maintained, to a group of interested listeners
in the bar-parlour of the village inn, that she[Pg 268]
seemed like a donkey when she escaped
from his greyhound into the wood.

Family cares again claimed the hare’s
attention in July; and, having taken to
heart her experience with the peregrine, she
left the uplands and made her home in the
thickets of a river-island. At that time
the river was low, and, on one side of the
island, the bed of the stream had become a
dry, pebbly hollow, save for a large pool fed
by the backwater at the lower end, where
the minnows played, and whither the big
trout wandered from the rapids to feed during
the hot summer nights.

Late one afternoon, when long shadows
lay across the mossy bank of the river beyond
the tall beeches standing at the entrance to
the island thickets, Puss was waiting for the
dusk, and dozing meanwhile, but with wide-open
eyes, beside her leveret. Since there
was another little mouth besides her own
requiring food, she generally felt hungry long
before nightfall, and so, when the afterglow
began to fade in the west, was wont to
steal away to the clover above the woods
that fringed the long, still pool up-stream.

As the day wore on, the hare heard the[Pg 269]
unmistakable tread of human feet approaching
through the woods. The sounds became
increasingly distinct; then a pebble rattled
and splashed into the water as the intruder
walked across the river-bed. He passed close
to the “form,” and, turning down-stream,
was lost to sight amid the bushes. At
intervals, the hare imagined that the faint,
muffled sounds of footsteps came from the
distance; but again the sounds drew near,
ceasing, however, when the man was a few
yards from the nest.

I can complete the story. Since spring
I had been studying the wild life of this
lonely island below the rocky gorge extending
hither from the village bridge. The
wood-wren, the willow-wren, and the garden-warbler
had nested in the thickets, and every
evening I had visited the place to pry on
their doings, and to note how the flowers in
glad succession blossomed and faded—their
presence in this lonely sanctuary known only
to myself, and to the birds, bees, and butterflies,
and to the little shrews that rustled
over the dry leaves beneath. But now the
garden-warblers had left for the copse on
the far side of the river, and the wood-wrens[Pg 270]
and the willow-wrens had retreated to
the inner recesses of the thickets, where, amid
the luxuriant verdure of midsummer, their
movements baffled my observation.

On the July evening, as I lay in the matted
grass at the edge of the copse by the pebbles,
watching a whitethroat among the bushes
opposite, my eye happened to rest for an
instant on a patch of bare mud immediately
before me. There, to my surprise, I discovered
the footprints of the hare. The five
toes of the fore-feet, and the four toes of
the hind-feet, were as clearly outlined as if
each impression had been taken in plaster.
And yet, when I stood up to look at the
spot, the marks seemed to have wholly disappeared.
On nearer examination I found
that the track of the hare was in the direction
of the island. From their shape, and the
distance between each, the footprints indicated
that the movements of the hare had not
been hurried. Similar footprints were visible
in a straight line between the bank and the
island. Only one conclusion seemed possible—the
hare had crossed to the island early that
morning, after the heavy shower that had
fallen just before dawn. It would have been[Pg 271]
contrary to her habits had she crossed later;
and, had she passed the place at any time
before, the rain would have washed away
the marks in such an open spot, or, at
any rate, would have blurred them beyond
recognition.

After placing a white stone by the footprints
to indicate their whereabouts, I
searched along the river-bed for signs that
would show a track towards the bank; but
not a single mark could be found pointing
in that direction. It was obvious that the
hare had not left the island till, at any rate,
some hours after the rain. Then, however,
the sun would have been so high that Puss
would have been loath to leave her lair.
Faintly discernible beside a large pebble, one
other footprint appeared, leading like the
rest towards the island. The mark was old,
and had been saved from obliteration by the
sheltering stone; but it suggested that the
hare had made her home not far away.
Taught by experience, I decided not to
penetrate the copse and risk disturbing its
probable tenant. I approached it only so
far as to examine another bare place in a
line with the footprints on the mud, where,[Pg 272]
to my delight, I found fresh footprints
similar to those at the dried-up ford, together
with other and much smaller marks
undoubtedly made by a tiny leveret.

I now re-crossed the ford and went home.
But before nightfall I returned, and, hiding
behind the hedgerow on the bank, watched,
unseen, the approach to the island. My
patience was soon rewarded. Just as the
dusk was deepening over the woodlands,
“the slit-eared hare” left her “form” and
stood in full view by the ford. There,
having lazily stretched her long, supple limbs,
she played awhile with her leveret, sometimes
pausing to nibble a few clover-leaves
as if to direct the little one’s attention
towards its suitable food. Then she ambled
leisurely across the river-bed, and, with
graceful, swinging gait, passed through the
meadow beyond—while her offspring disappeared
within the thickets of the island.

The hot weather broke up in July, and
henceforth, till late September, rain descended
almost every day. The shower that had
revealed the whereabouts of the hare was the
first sign of the change. On the following
night, a thunderstorm broke over the countryside,[Pg 273]
washed down the soil from the pastures,
and sent the river roaring in flood through
the gorge. While on the far side of the
island the main torrent raged past beneath
the willows, the divided stream under the
near bank formed salmon-pools and trout-reaches,
where, before, the pebbles had been
bare and dry.

Anxious to know how the flood would
interfere with the movements of the hare,
I came back on the following evening to
my hiding place by the hedgerow. In the
dusk, Puss appeared at the margin of the
copse, and moved down the bank to the
edge of the stream. There she paused,
apparently perplexed, and called to her
leveret. Presently the young hare joined
her mother at the water’s edge, and both
hopped along the brink, seeking a dry place
by which they might reach the field on the
slope. Finding none, they adjourned to the
mossy bank where I had seen the leveret’s
footprints. Then the doe went down boldly
to the stream, called to her companion,
waded in, and swam across. Ascending into
the field, she shook the water from her fur,
and again called repeatedly. The young[Pg 274]
one hesitated, and ran to and fro crying
piteously, “leek—leek.” Suddenly, in the
excitement, it missed its footfall and fell
into the river. Bewildered, but hearing its
mother’s call, it swam down the pool
through the still water below the little
rapid, and landed on the opposite bank,
where it joined its parent, and, following
her example, shook the water from its
downy limbs. Soon both disappeared within
the wood; and, satisfied with my evening’s
sport, I turned homewards across the
fields.

During the rest of the summer, the hare
frequented the rough pastures skirting the
ploughlands, and visited the cornfields only
when the weather was dry. Hares suffer
little discomfort in rainy weather, if only
the fine fur beneath the surface of the coat
remains dry—after a shower they can easily
shake off any outside moisture. But they
dislike entering damp places where the
vegetation is tall and their fur may get
matted and soaked by the raindrops collected
on the herbage. In wet weather hares may
often be found in cover, especially near thick
furze-brakes on a well drained hillside, but[Pg 275]
their presence in such a situation may imply
that they sought shelter before the rain began
to fall.

In September, for the third time during
the year, Puss was occupied with family
affairs. Now, three tiny leverets were
“kittled,” and the nest occupied an almost
bare place on the top of a ridge in the
root-field where last season the succulent
carrots grew. The hare had been greatly
distressed by the unusually wet summer,
and one of her leverets was in consequence
a weakling; another leveret was
killed by a prowling polecat while the
mother wandered from the “form”; and
only the third grew up robust and
strong.

The approach of winter brought Puss many
strange experiences, from some of which she
barely emerged with her life. When the
season was passed, it had become more
than ever difficult to approach her; she
would slip away to cover directly her keen
senses detected the presence of a stranger
in the field where she lay in her “form.”
As she grew older, her leverets sometimes
numbered four or five, but as a rule she[Pg 276]
gave birth to three only, her productiveness
being probably dependent on the ease with
which she obtained food.