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He only used a few traps one was set not at a hole, but at a sharp curve of the brook and the whole of these rats were taken in a part of the brook about 250 or 300 yards in length, just where it ran through a single field. Three moorhens were also caught; a fourth was only held by its claw in the gin; this one, not being in the least injured, he let go again.
No care had they, and the solitude of their retreat seemed likely never to be disturbed, till, one moonlit night, the fox, that last year had killed the baby hedgehog in the glen, stole through the shadows of the alders, caught the scent of the moorhens, and approached the nest where the female was brooding over her eggs.
I stopped at the house of the village elder, a crafty and clever 'forester, one of those foresters of whom they say he can see two yards into the ground. Early next morning, accompanied by the village elder's son, and another peasant called Yegor, I set off in a little cart with a pair of peasant's horses, to shoot woodcocks and moorhens.
For some time the little wavelets beat against the side of the boat; gradually they ceased, and the clear and beautiful water became still. Felix slept till nearly noon, when he awoke and sat up. At the sudden movement a pike struck, and two moorhens scuttled out of the water into the grass on the shore.
The warm sunshine gladdens the hearts of the moorhens floating on the water yonder by the bushes, and their singular note, "coorg-coorg," is uttered at intervals.
With that mental picture to guide him he believed that he could go to that angle by the porch where the flycatchers bred every year and find their nest; where in the hedge the blackberries were most abundant; where the elders grew by the stream from which he could watch the moorhens and watervoles; that he knew every fence, gate, and outhouse, every room and passage in the old house.
The river Rest itself was so clear and bright that it was difficult to associate rats with its silver flowing, yet rats there were, hiding among the osiers and sedges, frightening the moorhens and reed-warblers out of their little innocent lives.
Otters, kingfishers, dabchicks, moorhens, all of them about all day long and always wanting you to DO something as if a fellow had no business of his own to attend to! 'What lies over THERE' asked the Mole, waving a paw towards a background of woodland that darkly framed the water-meadows on one side of the river. 'That? O, that's just the Wild Wood, said the Rat shortly.
John's wort is the flower of the harvest; the yellow petals appear as the wheat ripens, and there are some to be found till the sheaves are carted. Once now and then a blue and slender bell-flower is lighted on; in Sussex the larger varieties bloom till much later. By still ponds, to which the moorhens have now returned, tall spikes of purple loosestrife rise in bunches.
There she made stay, and got off her horse, and stood awhile by him as he cropped the sweet grass; and the birds sang at the edge of the thicket, and the rabbits crept and gambolled on the other side of the water; and from the pool's edge the moorhens cried.
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