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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.
But Brighteye was undoubtedly different from his fellows: he was almost as noisy as a shrew in the dead leaves of a tangled hedgerow, and his voice was like a shrew's, high-pitched and continuous, but louder, so that I could hear him at some distance from his favourite resort in the reeds and the rushes by the willows.
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.
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.
Brighteye had been repeatedly warned by his mother to avoid the presence of man, and had also learned to fear it because of his experiences with the angler and the trout. Alarmed at the approach of men and hounds, he waded out, swam straight up-stream to a tiny bay, and hid beneath a willow-root to wait till the danger had passed.
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.
The birds, however, were not the only advertisers of his presence; the squirrel, directly she caught sight of him, would hurry from her seat aloft in fir or beach, to the lowest bough, and thence though more wary of Vulp than of Brighteye, the water-vole fling at him the choicest assortment of names her varied vocabulary could supply.
While many of his kindred perished, Brighteye survived this period of flood; and when the waters, having cleansed each riverside dwelling, abated to their ordinary winter level, he returned to his burrow in the buttress by the stakes, and once more felt the joy of living in safety among familiar scenes.
The buck "drummed" again, then the rustling "pat, pat" of the rabbits ceased in the wood, and one by one the adult voles feeding in the reed-bed slipped silently into the shallows and disappeared. Brighteye was loath to relinquish the juicy rush that he held in his fore-paws, but the signs of danger were insistent.
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.
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