Creatures of the Night Part 3

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 ragam.u.f.fin hounds struck the line of n.o.bler 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 pa.s.sed the spot on returning from an angling expedition eight or ten 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 s.h.i.+ngle 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 a.s.sisted 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 gra.s.s by the 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 ma.s.ses, 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 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 gra.s.s-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 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 s.h.i.+ning 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "AN OPPORTUNITY CAME, WHICH, HAD SHE BEEN POISED IN THE AIR, COULD SCARCELY HAVE BEEN MISSED."]

For a long time the vole, not daring to move, remained in the shadow. I had almost concluded that he had dived through 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 gra.s.s-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 gra.s.s-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 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 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 and glittering in the brief, delicious autumn days, seemed to filter and yet stain the mellow suns.h.i.+ne, 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g river, and broken, here and there, by creamy lines of pa.s.sing 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, coa.r.s.er 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 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 gla.s.sy 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 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 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 salmon; the restless fish, however, did not stay long in the pool, but after a brief sojourn pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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 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 trespa.s.sers 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 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 pa.s.s 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 s.h.i.+fted their quarters to the shallow close by the reeds. 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.

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 sp.a.w.n, 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 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 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 ash.o.r.e, he sat for a time in the safe shelter of a rocky ledge, unnoticed by the brown rats as they wandered through the tall, withered gra.s.s-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 gra.s.sy 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 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 pa.s.sage 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 b.u.t.tress of gravel and soil, which, at its base, sloped abruptly inwards like an arch. This b.u.t.tress 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE BIG TROUT, IN HIS TORPEDO-LIKE RUSH TO CUT OFF BRIGHTEYE FROM SURE REFUGE." (_See_ p. 105).]

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 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 b.u.t.tress far inside the archway of the bank, where the s.p.a.ce 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 gra.s.s 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 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 pa.s.sing 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 h.o.a.rded 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 near the reed-bed, searched for salmon-sp.a.w.n 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 gra.s.s 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 a.s.sure a 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 pa.s.sed 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 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 circ.u.mstances 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 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 b.u.t.tress 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 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 p.r.i.c.kly roof, while he could readily elude, by diving, any stray creature attacking him from land.

Winter dragged slowly on its course, and, 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, pa.s.sed 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 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 pa.s.sed 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 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 b.u.t.tress, 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 gra.s.s, 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 following day the ice melted in the shaft below his chamber, and he was thus saved the trouble of tunnelling a third water-pa.s.sage--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.