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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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; 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.
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 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 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.
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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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.
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 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.