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 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 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 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.
[Illustration: "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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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. 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 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 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 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,
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 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 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.
[Illustration: "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 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 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 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.