harvest mouse tasted the true joy of living. In the hedgerow it had
been mere existence; for there had been no real scope for his tail. The
grasping portion of it could only encircle the tiniest twigs. Here, Nature
herself seemed to have been at pains to suit him. Whichever way he looked,
there stretched before him long yellow avenues of pygmy trees. Had they
been passed through a gauge, they could not have better suited his
proportions. He could whip his tail round any one of them. As he travelled
from ear to ear, there was always something handy to grip on to. To reach
the top of a cornstalk from the ground took him just two seconds and a
half. He ran up it, he did not condescend to climb. Once among the ears,
he travelled with little jumps, sometimes waiting for the wind to sway the
corn, and help him, sometimes boldly leaping from the summit, and trusting
confidently to his tiny hands and feet to pull him up a foot or so below.
Even if he blundered to earth he had nothing to fear, for, of all the
denizens of the cornfield, he alone could thread the avenues in perfect
silence.
[Illustration: IN THE FIRST BUDDING AND RIPENING OF THE WHEAT HE TASTED
THE TRUE JOY OF LIVING.]
[Illustration: SOMETIMES WAITING FOR THE WIND TO SWAY THE CORN AND HELP
HIM.]
The stoat heralded his coming by a stealthy swish that could be heard full
twenty yards away. Many a foolish bewildered vole he caught, but never a
harvest mouse.
The rat's approach was a blundering four-footed _crescendo_, clear
to mouse-ears as is the ringing of a horse's hoofs to man. Little else
appeared at all. Now and again came a foolish hen-faced pheasant, strayed
from its nursery, and screaming for its keeper. One was shot as it crossed
the path in front of him, but we must not say anything about that. Now and
again a corn-crake, moving in silence, bowed to the ground, but betrayed
by its loquacity. Now and again a trembling glass-eyed rabbit. To each and
every footstep he had one invariable response. He ran up the nearest
cornstalk, as high as he could go, and watched the author of it pass
beneath him. He was rarely sighted. Once a weasel leapt at him. The weasel
is a pretty jumper, but this time a tendril of convolvulus upset his aim.
Before he reached the ground again the mouse was five and twenty feet
away, playing with his tail.
Half the summer passed before he tired of these diversions. The coming
of the sparrows put an end to them. They came just as the corn-ears had
commenced to harden. There must have been a thousand. They were not in
the field all day, but, while they were there, life was not worth living.
Picture it to yourself. A thousand unkempt, shrieking hooligans, plucking
at the corn-ears, flinging the milky grain aside half eaten, filling the
air with the whirring of their wings as they sighted man a hundred yards
away, back again as man departed, quarrelling incessantly, blatant, noisy,
vulgar. The cornstalks were no place for mice while sparrows were about.
[Illustration: AS DAINTY A LITTLE HARVEST MOUSE AS EVER CROSSED A
CORNFIELD.]
But the evil had been of short duration. A month had seen the end of it.
During that month the ways of the mouse were humble. He wandered in and
out the undergrowth, feeding on what the sparrows had discarded. Not that
he was really afraid of them. Had they cared to eat him, they assuredly
would have done so at the start. But they never missed the opportunity of
making him jump, and involuntary jumping is always unpleasant.
However, the life below had its compensations. He would certainly have
lost her in the waving maze above. As it was, he saw her at the end of a
straight avenue, and he could more or less mark her direction. She was
running at full speed, as dainty a little harvest mouse as ever crossed
a cornfield.
[Illustration: HER FRONT WAS OF THE PUREST WHITE, AND TWISTED IN A DAINTY
CURVE TO MATCH HER FEATURES.]
Her coat was of the softest fawn-chestnut; sharply contrasted with her
pure white front, and twisted in a dainty curve to match her features.
Her feet and tiny claws were the pink of a sea-shell. Her eyes were small
(harvest mice have small eyes), but they were very gentle. As she sighted
him, she swung lightly up a thistle stem, and sat for a moment balanced on
the head. Evidently he was not altogether uninteresting.
[Illustration: HER EYES WERE SMALL, BUT THEY WERE VERY GENTLE.]
* * * * *
Far into the evening he pressed his suit. When the inevitable rival
mouse appeared, half the sun's disk was already masked by the hedgerow.
Ungainly, straggling shadows spread across the field, dark bars across a
lurid crimson ground. Never was finer _mise-en-scène_ for such a conflict.
They fought on the very summits of the stalks, and the sun just managed to
see the finish.
* * * * *
[Illustration: NEVER WAS FINER _MISE-EN-SCÈNE_ FOR SUCH A CONFLICT.]
They built the nest together. It was his part to bite the long ribbon
leaves from their sockets, hers to soften them and knot them and plait
them until they formed a neat, compact, and self-coherent sphere.
Nine cornstalks formed the scaffolding. Six inches from the ground she
built between them a fragile grass-blade platform. Then she started on
the nest itself. Her only tools were her fore-paws, tail, and teeth. The
latter she employed to soften stiff material. The weaving she did from
below upwards by pure dexterity of hand and tail. For six hours she worked
indefatigably, and in six hours it was finished. But it was not meant to
live in; it was merely a nursery. All day long the happy pair enjoyed each
other's company aloft, leaping from corn-ear to thistle-head, from
thistle-head to poppy, and back again to corn-ear, feasting, frivolling,
stalking bluebottles. Their life was one long revel in the sunshine; for
the harvest mouse has this distinction also, that, like a Christian, he
loves the blue of the sky and sleeps at night.
[Illustration: FRIVOLLING.]
But he is wise in his generation, and lives far from the haunts of men.
You must be quieter than a mouse if you want to see him.
[Illustration: FOR AN HOUR THEY ENJOYED THE NOVEL SENSATION.]
At night they lived in a tiny burrow, a foot below the surface of the
ground. They had no claim to it, but they had found it empty. Empty
burrows belong to the first mouse that comes along.
Once only did they stay above the surface after sundown. For an hour they
enjoyed the novel sensation. Then the long-drawn wail of the brown owl
drove them below in haste.
Perhaps they realized that prey on the surface is the owl's ideal. It
is also the hawk's. But, where under-keepers are armed with guns, the
night-bird has the better prospects. Both would have their wings clear as
they strike. The owl's great chance comes when the corn is "stitched" in
shocks of ten. Then he quarters the stubble, and nothing clear of shelter
escapes him.
So the summer had passed--the perfect summer that comes once in a century.
Day after day the sun had blazed through a cloudless sky; night after
night the dews had fallen and refreshed the earth. The young mice, though
pink, as yet, about the nose and waistcoat, were as promising as young
mice could be. Everything was altogether and completely satisfactory.
[Illustration: THEN THE LONG-DRAWN WAIL OF THE BROWN OWL DROVE THEM BELOW
IN HASTE.]
So, as the western sky crimsoned and the shadow of each cornstalk gleamed
like copper on its neighbour, the harvest mouse stole down from his
eminence and sought his burrow, for, as I have said before, the nest was
only a nursery.
* * * * *
He was up betimes. He was a light sleeper, and half a noise of that kind
would have roused him. It was clank and whirr and swish and rattle in one.
At first it sounded from the far corner on the right; then it passed along
the hedgerow, growing more and more menacing until it seemed to be within
a yard of him. Then it shrank away to nothing on the left, ceased for a
moment, and, in obedience to human shouting, commenced afresh. So from
corner to corner, _crescendo_ and _diminuendo_. The harvest mouse was in
the very centre of a square field.
[Illustration: HE CLIMBED BETWEEN TWO TOWERING STALKS.]
[Illustration: IN FIVE MINUTES HE WAS UP ALOFT ONCE MORE.]
When the sound seemed at its greatest distance, he climbed between two
towering stalks and strained his eyes in its direction. He could not see
for more than twenty yards before him. The world beyond was wrapt in soft
white mist. Never had he seen anything so uncanny. Yet, had he been an
early riser, he might have seen it often. Even as he watched it, it
seemed to shrink away before the sunshine. The hedgerow loomed like a
mountain-ridge before him. Down he slid, making a bee-line for the nest.
That was all right; but his wife was evidently perturbed. Her mouth was
full of grass-blades, and she was sealing every crevice on its surface. In
five minutes he was up aloft once more. The whirring still continued, and
now, through the lifting haze, he could distinguish its origin. Horses it
was for certain, ay, and men--a small man sat upon the leading horse; but
there was something behind these.
Had the harvest mouse ever seen a windmill, he would assuredly have
concluded that a young one had escaped, and was walking in ever-narrowing
circuits, round the field. The mist lifted further, and he saw the thing
more clearly. Its great red arms swung dark against the sky, gathering the
corn in a giant's grasp to feed its ravenous cutters. Round and round the
field it went. Each time as it travelled to the distant corners the mouse
dropped down to earth; each time as it thundered close at hand, he dashed
like lightning up the stalk to look. Sometimes his wife came with him.
Closer it drew and closer. Nor was the mouse the only thing that noticed
it. All things that lived within the field, all things that loved its
borders, were crowding in mad confusion to its centre.
[Illustration: THE MOUSE CREPT TWO GRAINS HIGHER WHEN HE SAW HIM.]
First came the hare. His was a wild, blundering, panic-stricken stampede.
He hurtled through the corn, crossing his fore feet at every second leap,
his eyes starting backwards from his head, his ears pressed flat against
his back. He passed the harvest mouse heading for the farther side, and
the harvest mouse saw him no more, for he broke cover, trusting to his
speed. Then, one by one, bewildered rabbits. Backwards and forwards they
rushed. Now they sat up and listened; now they flung their white tails
skywards, and vanished down some friendly seeming alley. In two minutes
they were headed off.
Among the rabbits, of all things, a stoat! The mouse crept two grains
higher when he saw him. He stole in and out the undergrowth with easy
confidence, yet in some sense unstoatlike. The mouse looked down, and
for a moment caught his eye--the most courageous eye in all the world.
Something was very wrong indeed with the stoat--he never even bared his
teeth.
Next, a flurried brood of nestling partridges, flattened to earth, and
piping dismally to one another. Time after time they passed and repassed
below him, until at last they were utterly weary, and crouched in a
huddled mass together, with uplifted hunted eyes.
Then the rats and mice and voles. House-mice and wood-mice, red voles,
and grey. Last of all, Berus the adder. Not a mouse stepped aside, as he
worked his slow, sinuous length between the cornstalks. He, too, was of
the hunted to-day.
Nearer and nearer drew the hoarse rattle of the reaper. More and more
crowded were the few yards round the harvest mice. A large brown rat
limped through, bleeding about the head. He had come in from the
firing-line, and had incompletely dodged a stone. The stoat flung its
head up as it scented him, but let him pass. He had never let a rat pass
in his life before.
* * * * *
Only a square of forty yards remained, packed from end to end with
desperate field-folk. Each prepared for its last stand in different
fashion.
[Illustration: BERUS THE ADDER MADE A FLATTENED SPIRAL OF HIS COILS.]
The rat selected a stout thistle-clump, planted his back against it, and
sat back on his haunches. Berus the adder made a flattened spiral of his
coils, and raised his head a trifle off the ground, ready to fling his
whole weight forward from the tail. The pheasant chicks ceased piping, and
lay still as death. The red voles and wood-mice dashed aimlessly to and
fro. The stump-tailed voles trusted to the ludicrous cover of the broken
ground. The stoat arched his back and bared his teeth to the gums. But
the harvest mice sat on the top of the stalk and awaited events, to all
seeming unmoved. Perhaps they were too small to be frightened. They were
certainly too small to be confident. Yet, as things turned out, the top of
the stalk was the safest place of all. Swish went the cutter. The nest was
scattered to fragments before their eyes, and the rush began.
The rabbits started it. They flattened their ears, shut their eyes, and
made a blind dash for the open. Not a rabbit escaped, for there were dogs.
The rats fared no better; they held their ground to the last, and were
mercilessly bludgeoned. The partridges were cut to pieces. Most of the
mice and voles shared their fate. The stoat died game. He charged one
yokel and routed him. Then he was set upon by three with sticks. In the
open the stoat is no match for three with sticks.
Berus the adder lay still in a hollow. The cutter passed completely over
him. He was always ready, but his earth-colour saved him the necessity of
striking. As the evening shadows lengthened, he stole grimly from his
shelter, crossed the field, climbed the slope, and regained his
furze-bush.
[Illustration: THE HARVEST MOUSE'S NEST.]
And the harvest mice? The mother-mouse dashed to her nest as she saw it
falling, and a wheel of the reaper passed over her. The father-mouse was
saved, but through no merit of his own. Until the reaper was actually upon
him, he clung to his stalk with tail and eighteen toes. Then it was too
late to leave go. The great red arms gathered his stalk in the midst of a
hundred others, swept the whole on to the knives, and dropped them on the
travelling canvas platform. Up he went, and down again. For a moment he
thought that he was being stifled. His eyes started from their sockets.
His ribs seemed to crumple within him--fortunately they were elastic, as
ribs no thicker than a stout hair must be. Then the pressure relaxed. The
automatic binding was complete, and one more sheaf fell with a thud to
earth. In that sheaf was the harvest mouse, bruised but alive, a prisoner
in the dark. The stalks pressed tight against his body; but for the
pitchfork he could never have got out.
The pitchfork shot through the middle of the mass, and missed him by half
an inch. Once more he felt his surroundings flying upwards, but this time
they fell more lightly. They formed the outside of a stitch of ten. As the
fork was withdrawn the binding of the sheaf was loosened. He could breathe
with comfort, and he could also see. He peered out, and found the whole
face of Nature changed. The waving cornfield had gone. In its place was
a razed expanse of stubble. The corn-sheaves stretched in serried piles
across it. The harvesting had been neatly timed. Behind the hedge was the
crimson glow of sunset. After all, that had not changed.
For an hour he waited within the sheaf, dubious and uncertain. Then he
stole from his shelter. Within five yards he found her, gripping the
shattered fragments of the nest. Close by lay a bludgeoned rat, and, five
yards farther on, there sat a living one. It had its back to him, but by
its movements he could see that it was feeding.
The field was flooded with moonlight. On all sides resounded the ominous
hum of beetles' wings. Nature had summoned her burying squad. They had
their work cut out, and blundered down from every quarter. For death had
been very busy, and it was not the death that needs seeking out. About the
centre of the field the ground was stained with smears of half-dried
blood. So the beetles came in their thousands, and before morning broke
their task was done.
But the harvest mouse did not wait till the morning. The fragments of his
nest were empty, and he dared not look to see what the rat was eating.
He reached the sheaf-pile only just in time, for the brown owl was still
abroad, quartering the field with deadly certainty of purpose. As he crept
beneath it, he heard the brown rat scream.
His was the last sheaf to be piled, it was also the last sheaf to be
lifted. It travelled to the stack on the summit of the last load, and, by
a happy chance, formed one of the outside layer. By scratching and gnawing
continuously for an hour, he worked his way to the butt of it, paused for
a moment on the precipitous steep, and then scrambled lightly down to
earth. A perpendicular descent was nothing to him.
The foundations of the stack were already tenanted. Some of the inmates
had been, like himself, conveyed in sheaves, but more had rushed for
shelter across the bared expanse, which, on all previous nights, had been
a cornfield. There were mice of all kinds, there were half a dozen rats.
Before a week had passed, like had joined like. The rats were undisputed
masters of the basement; midway lived the common, vulgar mice; and,
highest of all, as befitted them, for they only could thread the
interstices of the upper sheaves, and they only had prehensile tails,
the harvest mice.
THE TRIVIAL FORTUNES OF MOLGE
It was a bubble that launched him into a practical existence. They were
rising by hundreds from the ooze that cloaked the bottom of the ditch. The
sunshine called them up and scattered them into nothingness as they
appeared. It was merely by chance that one, in its upward rush, hit his
envelope of starwort; it was merely by chance that the envelope needed no
greater stimulus to burst asunder.
Yet he was arranged to take advantage of the smallest jar. Like any other
newt, he had started life as a small white rounded egg; for ten days he
had remained, to all outward appearance, the same; cunningly enfolded,
neatly glued down, but still an egg. Then the temperature rose, and he
changed from sphere to cylinder, from cylinder to clumsy crescent, from
crescent to watchspring. The core of the watchspring was his head, the
extremity his tail, and, when the bubble touched him, he flicked out like
the works of a Waterbury. His first colour sensation was the green of
thick glass. As he sank, it grew dimmer and dirtier and browner, and
presently, as he reached the ooze, it was blotted out.
[Illustration: IT WAS MERELY BY CHANCE THAT ONE HIT HIS ENVELOPE OF
STARWORT.]
[Illustration: HE WAS STRAIGHT BUT UNLOVELY.]
[Illustration: IT WAS ONLY THE COPPER GLEAM OF HIS EYE THAT SAVED HIM FROM
INSIGNIFICANCE.]
He was straight, but unlovely--nothing but two black lines and three dots,
cased in a filament of jelly. The lines were destined for his backbone and
stomach; the dots for his eyes and mouth. The latter was ready for
immediate work, given only the impulse. As he sank slowly, head downwards,
the impulse was supplied. Out from his neck there floated two sprays of
gossamer network, of such delicate texture, such dainty tracery, that
nothing but the gentle laving of water could have unravelled them and
left them whole. Through them the water flowed, and with it came the dim
consciousness of individual life, the dim instinct of self-preservation.
As he touched the bottom, the middle dot resolved itself into a sucker.
Fortunately his tastes were vegetarian and indiscriminate. For three days
he contentedly sucked in his slush surroundings, and, in that time, the
two outer dots bedecked themselves with rings of burnished copper. He
could breathe, he could eat, he could see.
On the fourth day he could move. The black lines had also played their
part. Both had intensified, but not equally. The uppermost had outstripped
its fellow. For half its length it now ran alone, tapering to its end and
carrying with it a ribbon envelope, transparent and invisible as glass.
Its use he learnt by grim experience. When first he moved it, it drove him
headlong into inky darkness. His gills crumpled in the rough embrace of
the mud, and his eyes and sucker were choked with slime. It was only a
desperate, convulsive, aimless wriggle that freed him. The next time he
cleared his immediate surroundings, and shot a full six inches upwards,
only to sink slowly to the ooze again, motionless, and exhausted. He had
described an elegant parabola.
Day by day his excursions grew longer and higher. Nor were they without
adventure. Sometimes he would be caught in the wake of a stickleback, and
would reach the bottom spinning, or on his back. He was lucky to reach it
at all. Sometimes a sunbeam's dazzling radiance would check him in
mid-career, and his callow eyes would take an hour to recover. It was a
month before his eyelids developed. Sometimes he would collide with others
of his own kind, equally unskilled in steering, and sometimes a vague
quiver in the water caused him instinctively to mimic death, and thus
avoid death in reality.
In a week's time he had grown out of all knowledge. To be accurate, he had
doubled in size. But, even then, it was only the copper gleam of his eyes
that saved him from utter insignificance. The remainder of him, for the
most part of jelly transparency, was invisible against his sombre
surroundings. His sucker had taken the semblance of a mouth, his gills
were longer and more feathery, the curves of his tail were more shapely,
but still he was, as yet, the merest apology for a tadpole, and so he
remained until his limbs grew. They came in front at first--froggy's come
behind, he wants them to swim with--the most curious spindle-shanks of
arms that can be imagined, with elbows always flexed, and fingers always
stretched apart. In due course his legs followed, of like purpose and
absurdity. For swimming he only used his tail, but for balancing and
steering, his feet and hands. Would he rise to the surface, he must flick
his tail, and turn his toes and fingers upwards. Would he seek the bottom,
he must depress them. Would he lie motionless, suspended in mid-water, he
must point them straight outwards from his sides.
[Illustration: HIS SUCKER HAD TAKEN THE SEMBLANCE OF A MOUTH.]
[Illustration: HIS GILLS WERE LONGER AND MORE FEATHERY.]
It was the charm of a free-swimming existence that divorced him from a
vegetarian diet. To be continually sucking in plant sludge was a low
grubby business at the best. Besides, he was now furnished with a
respectable pair of jaws, not to mention the rudiments of teeth. Daphne
was his first victim. Daphne sounds somehow floral, but this Daphne was
equipped with one eye and several pairs of legs, and practised abrupt
jumpy flights through the water. In short, she was a branchiopod, to
be vulgarly precise, a water-flea. The succulence of Daphne led to
experiments on Cyclops--Cyclops is her first cousin--and the taste,
once acquired, never left him.
It was in the pursuit of this latter that he lost a leg, and thus realized
that the problems of existence before him were twofold: he must not only
eat, he must avoid being eaten. It was probably a stickleback that took
his leg. A more powerful enemy would have taken the whole of him. So
intent was he on his quarry that he scarcely realized the severance until
he found himself swimming in an aimless lopsided circle. Then he sought
the friendly shelter of the weeds, and sat still to ruminate. The leg was
undoubtedly gone--his right hind leg--it was nipped off close to his body.
He felt no pain, but, the moment he left his support, he realized that he
was at a great disadvantage. The more studied his efforts to progress
straight, the more certainly abnormal was his course. In letting himself
sink slowly to the bottom he showed prudence. It was only at the bottom
that he was likely to escape notice.
He stayed there for a succession of days, getting hungrier and hungrier,
for it was only the smallest fry that came within his reach. It was lucky
for him that his gills lasted out. It was a full month before a new leg
commenced to fill the vacancy, and, by that time, they had shrunk from
feathery exuberance to two ugly stunted tufts. It was the most painful
period in his whole career. Every day his breathing grew more laboured.
Instinct told him to seek the surface, but, each time he made the effort,
he capsized before half the distance was accomplished. In six weeks' time
came relief. He had not yet secured a new leg, but the growing stump
fulfilled its purpose. He reached, by strenuous efforts, the surface of
the water, opened his mouth and _breathed the air_.
[Illustration: HE STAYED THERE FOR A SUCCESSION OF DAYS.]