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He was quite a baby water-vole when first I made his acquaintance, but the colour of his coat did not change with the succeeding months, and, evening after evening, when the noisy hounds were safe at home or strolling about the village street, I would quietly make my way back to his haunt, and, hidden behind a convenient tree, carefully watch him.
I do not mean to assert that the water-vole is never injurious to man.
So, even, if a water-vole should be seen by the master, the attention of the cat could not be directed to it, her instinct teaching her to take prey in quite a different manner. The dogs, supposing that they happened to be of the right breed, would have a better chance of securing the robber, providing that they intercepted its retreat to the water.
The moorhen called again from the reeds near the ford, then flew away over the fire-flushed river and disappeared into the gloom; and a water-vole dropped with a gentle plash into the pool. Casting a white moth quietly over the stream, I noticed beyond the shadows a round mass rising from the centre of the current, moving against the flood, and sinking noiselessly out of sight.
Now a kingfisher, then a dipper, sped like an arrow past the near corner of the pool; and the whiz of swift wings unheard by all except little creatures living in frequent danger, and listening with beating hearts to sounds unperceived by our drowsy senses dulled by long immunity from fear caused momentary terror to the water-vole.
Whereas before they had been alone, almost, in a frozen world, scarcely crossing a trail but the quadruple track of water-voles or the chain-pattern impression of a moorhen nor had seen a living thing but the square-ended, squat, little, black form of a water-vole out upon an alder-branch, gnawing bark they now began to be aware of gradually increasing company.
I may casually mention that the water-vole is one of the aquatic animals which, when zoological knowledge was not so universal as it is at the present day, were reckoned as fish, and might be eaten on fast days. I believe that in some parts of France this idea still prevails.
The cat crawled away down the dike in offended silence. He was wet, and the only cat I ever knew who did not seem to be scandalized past speech at the fact. Indeed, he went farther. Then, before you could take your pipe from your mouth to exclaim, the water-vole was not swimming.
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.
A water-vole crouching upon a stump presents no point at which to aim, the brown fur of the animal and the brown surface of the old weather-beaten stump seeming to form a single object without any distinct outline; moreover, it is very difficult to calculate distances over water. However, I fired, and missed. I naturally expected the animal to plunge into the river and escape.
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