Part 5 (2/2)
During the past few weeks great events had happened in the new-made chamber of the field-voles' burrow. Hundreds of dry gra.s.s-bents, bleached and seasoned by the winter frosts and rains, had been collected there, with tufts of withered moss, a stray feather or two dropped from the ruined nest of a long-tailed t.i.tmouse in the furze, and a few fine, hair-like roots of polypody fern from the neighbouring thicket. And now, their nursery complete, four tiny, hairless voles, with disproportionate heads, round black eyes beneath unopened lids, wrinkled muzzles, and abbreviated tails--helpless midgets in form suggestive of diminutive bull-dog puppies--lay huddled in their tight, warm bed. It was a time of great anxiety for Kweek. While his mate with maternal pride went leisurely about her duties, doing all things in order, as if she had nursed much larger families and foes were never known, he moved fussily hither and thither, visiting his offspring at frequent intervals during the night, creeping into the wood and back along his bowered path, scampering noisily down the shaft if the brown owl but happened to hoot far up in the glen, and doing a hundred things for which there was not the slightest need, and which only served to irritate and alarm the careful mother-vole.
Kweek inherited his timorous disposition from countless generations of voles that by their ceaseless watchfulness, had survived when others had been killed by birds and beasts of prey; and though, in his zeal for the welfare of his family, he often gave a false alarm, it was far better that he should be at all times prepared for the worst than that, in some unguarded instant, death should drop swiftly from the sky or crawl stealthily into his hidden home.
During spring, more frequently than at any other season, death waited for him and his kindred--in the gra.s.s, in the air, in the trees along the hedge-banks, and on the summit of the rock that towered above the glen. Vermin had become unusually numerous in the valley, partly because in the mild winter their food had been sufficient, and partly because the keeper, feeble with old age, could no longer shoot and trap them with the deadly certainty that had made him famous in his younger days.
Bold in the care of their young, the vermin ravaged the countryside, preying everywhere on the weak and ailing little children of Nature. But fate was indulgent to Kweek; though his kindred in the colony beyond the wood, and the bank-voles in the sheltered hollow near the pines, suffered greatly from all kinds of enemies, he and his mate still managed to escape unhurt.
One night a fox, prowling across the pasture, caught sight of Kweek as he hurried to his lair. Suspicious and crafty, Reynard paused at one of the entrances to the burrow, thrust his sharp nose as far as possible down the shaft, drew a long, deep breath, and commenced to dig away the soil from the mouth of the hole. Suddenly changing his mind--perhaps because the scent was faint and he concluded that his labour would not be sufficiently repaid--he ceased his exertions and wandered off towards the hedge. Next day a carrion crow, seeing the heap of earth that lay around the hole, and shrewdly guessing it to mean a treat in store, flew down from an oak-tree, and hopped sideways towards the spot. He peered inquisitively at the opening, waddled over to another entrance, returned, and listened eagerly. Convinced that a sound of breathing came from midway between the two holes he had examined, he moved towards the spot directly above the nest, tapped it sharply with his beak, and again returned to listen near the entrance. But all his artifice was quite in vain; the voles would not bolt; they were not even inquisitive; so presently, baffled in his hopes of plunder, he moved clumsily away, stooped for an instant, and lifted himself on slow, sable pinions into the air.
The mother vole, a.s.sisted in questionable fas.h.i.+on by meddlesome Kweek, spent several hours of the following night in repairing the damage done by the fox. She drew most of the soil back into the shaft, and then, where it acc.u.mulated in the pa.s.sage beneath, made the opening towards the inner chamber slightly narrower than before. Soon, moistened and hardened by the constant ”traffic” of tiny feet nearly always damp with dew, the mound of earth formed a barrier so artfully contrived that even a weasel might find it difficult to enter the gallery from the bottom of the shaft.
III.
A BARREN HILLSIDE.
Living a secluded life in the pasture with his little mate, Kweek escaped the close attention paid by the ”vermin” to his kindred in the colony beyond the wood. The brown owl still remembered where he dwelt, but, loath to make a special nightly journey to the spot, seldom caused him the least anxiety. She seemed to content herself with a strict watch over the bank inhabited by the red voles, and over the fields on the far side of the copse, where the grey voles, notwithstanding that they supplied her with many a delicious supper, were becoming numerous. She awaited an almost certain increase among the ”small deer” of the pasture, before commencing her raids on the grey voles there. As events proved, however, her patience was unrewarded.
Kweek's first experience in rearing a family ended disastrously. Two of the nurslings died a few hours after birth; one, venturing from the nest too soon in the evening, was killed by a magpie; and two, while sitting out near the hedge, were trampled to death by a flock of sheep rus.h.i.+ng, panic-stricken, at the sight of a wandering fox. By the middle of May, when another vole family of six had arrived, the number of vermin in the valley had perceptibly diminished. The old, asthmatic keeper in charge of the Cerdyn valley died, and a younger and more energetic man from a neighbouring estate came to take his place. Eager to gain the favour of his master by providing him good sport in the coming autumn, the new keeper ranged the woods from dawn till dusk, setting pole-traps in the trees, or baiting rabbit-traps in the ”creeps” of stoat or weasel, and destroying nests, as well as shooting any furred or feathered creature of questionable character. The big brown owl from the beech-grove, the kestrel from the rock on the far side of the brook, the sparrow-hawk from the spinney up-stream, together with the weasels, the stoats, the cats, the jays, and the magpies--all in turn met their doom.
A pair of barn-owls from the loft in the farm suffered next. These owls were great pets at the old homestead. For many years they had lived unmolested in their gloomy retreat under the tiles, and regularly at nightfall had flown fearlessly to and fro among the outbuildings, or perched on the ruined pigeon-cote watching for the rats to leave their holes.
The farmer, less ignorant than the keeper, recognised the owls as friends, and treated them accordingly. They were his winged cats, and a.s.sisted to check the increase of a plague. Like the brown owl, they knew well the habits of the voles; but their attention was diverted by the rats and the mice at the farm, and they seldom wandered far afield except for a change of diet or to stretch wings cramped by a long summer day's seclusion. The rats, however, were far from being exterminated; and so, when a little child who was all suns.h.i.+ne to his parents in the lonely homestead died from typhoid fever, the village doctor, fearing an epidemic, advised that the pests should be utterly destroyed. Loath to use strychnine, since he knew that in a neighbouring valley some owls had died from eating poisoned rats, the farmer sought the aid of the village poachers, who, with their terriers and ferrets, thoroughly searched the stacks and the buildings. During the hunt it was noticed that about a score of rats took refuge in a narrow chamber under the eaves. The farmer, directing operations in another part of the yard, was unaware of what had occurred. The poachers, knowing nothing of the presence of the owls, pushed a terrier through the opening beneath the rafters of the loft, and blocked the hole with the rusty blade of a disused shovel. For a few moments the quick patter of tiny feet indicated that the terrier was busily engaged with his task; then cries of rage and terror came from the imprisoned dog, while with these cries were mingled the sounds of flapping wings. When at last the poachers unstopped the hole and dragged the terrier out, they found that every rat had been killed, and that the place was thickly strewn with the feathers of two dying owls.
During the rest of the summer, Kweek led a strangely peaceful life, having little to fear beyond an occasional visit from Reynard, or from an astute old magpie that, evading with apparent ease the keeper's gun and pole-traps, lived on till the late autumn, when, before a line of beaters, he broke cover over some sportsmen waiting for their driven game. As soon as the leaves began to fall and exhausted Nature longed for winter's rest, the burrow in the pasture became the scene of feverish activity. Kweek was now the proud sire of five or six healthy families, and the grand-sire of many more. Even the youngest voles were growing fat and strong; and, when the numerous members of the colony set about harvesting their winter stores, ripe, delicious seeds were plentiful everywhere along the margin of the wood.
The winter was uniformly mild, with exception of one short period of great cold which brought a thorough, healthful sleep to the voles; and in the earliest days of spring, when the love-calls of chaffinches and t.i.ts were heard from almost every tree, Kweek and his tribe resumed their work and throve amazingly. Every circ.u.mstance appeared to favour their well-being. But for the fox, that sometimes crouched beside an opening to the burrow and snapped up an incautious venturer peeping above ground, a young sheep-dog, whose greatest pleasure in life seemed to be found in digging a large round hole in the centre of the burrow, and an adder, that stung a few of the weaklings to death, but found them inconveniently big for swallowing, the voles were seldom troubled. Their numbers, and those of every similar colony in the neighbourhood, increased in such a fas.h.i.+on that, before the following autumn, both the pasture and the near ploughland were barren wastes completely honeycombed with their dwellings. Every gra.s.s-root in the pasture was eaten up; every stalk in the cornfield was nibbled through so that the grain might be easily reached and devoured; and the root-crops--potatoes, turnips, and mangolds--on the far side of the cornfield were utterly spoiled; and in the hedgerows and the copse the leaves dropped from the lifeless trees, each of which was marked by a complete ring where the bark was gnawed away close to the ground.
But capricious Nature, as if regretting the haste with which she had brought into the world her destructive little children, and desiring, even at the cost of untold suffering and the loss of countless lives, to restore the pleasant Cerdyn valley to its beauty of green fields and leafy woods, sent her twin plagues of disease and starvation among the voles, till, like the sapless leaves, they withered and died. And from far and near the hawks and the owls, the weasels, the stoats, and the foxes hastened to the scene. The keeper, at a loss to know whence they came, and not understanding the lesson he was being taught, bewailed his misfortune, but dared not stay their advent. At almost any hour of the day, five or six kestrels might be seen quartering the fields or hovering here and there among the burrows. And, long before dark, the stoats and the weasels, as if knowing that, fulfilling a special mission, they were now safe from their arch-enemy, the keeper, hunted their prey through the ”trash” of the hedge-banks, or in and out of the pa.s.sages underground.
The farm labourers, in desperate haste, dug numerous pitfalls, wide at the bottom but narrow at the mouth, and trapped hundreds of the voles, which, maddened by hunger but unable to climb the sloping sides, attacked one another--all at last dying a miserable death. Not only did the customary enemies of the voles arrive on the scene: Nature called to her great task a number of unexpected destroyers--sea-gulls from the distant coast, a kite from a wooded island on a desolate, far-off mere, and a buzzard from a rocky fastness, rarely visited save by keepers and shepherds, near the up-country lakes. Food had gradually become scarce even for the few hundred voles that yet remained. No longer were they to be seen at play together, in little groups, during the cool, hazy twilight, that, earlier in the year, s.h.i.+mmered like a wonderful afterglow on the mossy pasture-floor. Now their only desire was for food and sleep.
Unnoticed by a pa.s.sing owl, Kweek, worn to a skeleton by sickness and privation, crawled from his burrow into the moonlight of a calm, clear autumn night, and lay in the shadow of the stone where the old male vole had watched and listened for the cruel ”vear.” A big blow-fly, attracted, with countless thousands of his kind, to the place of slaughter and decay, had gone to sleep on the side of the stone, and Kweek, in a last desperate effort to obtain a little food, moved forward to secure his prize; but at that moment his strength failed him, his weary limbs relaxed, and the dull, grey film of death overspread his half-closed eyes.
The owl, hearing a faint sound like the rustle of a dry gra.s.s-bent, quickly turned in her flight; then, slanting her wings, dropped to the ground, and presently, with her defenceless quarry in her talons, flew away towards the woods.
THE FOX.
I.
THE LAST HUNT.
A dark and wind-swept night had fallen over the countryside when Reynard left the steep slope above the keeper's cottage, and stole through gorse and brambles towards the outskirts of the covert, where a narrow dingle, intersected by a noisy rill and thickly matted with brown bracken, divided the furze from some neighbouring pine-woods.
For months nothing had occurred to disturb the peace of his woodland home. Once, about a year ago, he had fled for his life before the hounds; and again, during the last autumn, while lying hidden in the ditch of the root-crop field above the pines, he had been surprised by two sheep-dogs that nipped him sorely before he could make good his escape. But at no other time had he been in evident peril, and so, though naturally cunning and suspicious, he had grown bolder, and better acquainted with the neighbourhood of cottage and farmstead than were certain members of his family living on the opposite side of the valley, among thickets hunted regularly, where guns and spaniels might be heard from early morning till close of day.
<script>