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And if a learned native had come along the road at that moment on tiptoe, of course he would have said the viper had hypnotized friend vole with fear. Hypnotize your grandmother! But you may take it from me that serpent thing was playing his game, too.
The whole interior of the nest seemed occupied by a swift-circling, curling, sinuous form. Small as he was, and crouching as only a vole can crouch, there was no escape from contact with it. Three times the hot loathsome breath hissed over him, as he lay flattened to the ground. Then, as the lithe body swept round, he was flung aside, and, by a lucky chance, found himself opposite the outlet.
When about two months old, Kweek, for the first time since the weasels had visited the burrow, experienced a narrow escape from death. The night was mild and bright, and the vole was busy in the littered loam of the hedgerow, where, during the afternoon, a blackbird had scratched the leaves away and left some ripe haws exposed to view.
It seemed inevitable that he should be there; part of the restless, glorious night, part of her mood. She gave no start of surprise, but half closed her eyes and leaned her fair head against a pillar of the veranda. He sang in a sweet undertone an old chanson of voyage. "Par derrier ches man pere, Vole, mon coeur, vole! Par derrier' chez mon pere Li-ya-t-un, pommier doux."
It was just as well, she declared; Lucien was getting beyond control, and only the night before had made the five Levasseur girls sob with grief. "Would you like to play at pigeon vole?" asked Pauline, who seemed to have lost her head with the thought of her impending marriage. "That wouldn't tire you." But Jeanne shook her head in refusal.
He appeared to be between the Devil and the deep sea. He had no confidence in the deep sea, or any other thing that he could think of in his world. Moreover, the deep sea, besides keeping all the air off, was most horribly bristly, even on the belly. Wherefore that vole made haste to quit station, so to speak.
A stout, lichen-covered branch, weighed down at the river's edge by a mass of herbage borne thither by a recent heavy flood, occupied a corner in the dense shadow of an alder; and the vole, climbing out of the water, sat on it, and was hidden completely by the darkness from the eager hounds.
No doubt in other respects he was in fair accordance with museum pattern, but he differed in one essential particular he was alive. His colour? When he had first retired to rest he had closely resembled a young red vole, buff grey all over save for his white waistcoat and the hair-parting along his back and down the ridges of his limbs. This was a delicate auburn.
Yet even there he was not allowed to remain in peace. Maddened by the scent of a few drops of blood coming from his wound, the adult voles chased him from the burrow, and drove him out into the field. Luckily for him the brown owl had meanwhile flown away with another young vole in her claws.
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.
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