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 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, 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 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 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 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
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.
[Illustration: "SHE WAS HOLDING ONE OF HER OFFSPRING BY THE NECK, IN
PREPARATION FOR FLIGHT." (_See_ p. 139).]
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.
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.
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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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
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 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.