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Brighteye was exposed to exceptional danger by his compulsory retirement from the old burrow in the river-bank.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Night after night a sheet of ice spread and thickened from the shallows to the edge of the current, the wild ducks came down to the river from the frost-bound moors, and great flocks of geese, whistling loudly in the starlit sky, passed on their southward journey to the coast. For the first few nights Brighteye left his chamber only when acute hunger drove him to his storehouse in the wood.
Frequently I saw their footprints on the sandy margin, but never the footprints of Brighteye. Somehow, somewhere, he had met relentless fate. The sun had set, the evening was calm, and a mist hung over the countryside when a field-vole appeared at the mouth of his burrow in a mossy pasture.
As for Miss Foster, he suspected, he allowed himself to suspect, he audaciously whispered when he was alone in a compartment on the Underground, that Miss Foster was a pushing little thing. A reaction had set in against Flossie Brighteye.
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.
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.
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