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The bank vole turned back into his hole, knowing the law against taking chances in the wild, and the first stride fetched him up short in violent collision with another bank-vole otherwise red-backed field-mouse, if you like coming the other way. The blow, full on the forehead, did not break his neck; but it ought to have done.
Then, still grunting, he went away, slowly, nosing here and there, rustling loudly in that stillness, an odd, squat figure in the moonlight; and the bank-vole thought he had seen the last of him, and came out to pass about his "lawful occasions," as per custom.
His removal was one kind of quick dodge in the art of quitting; that of the viper another, and a very beastly one. The crawling thing was not much more than one-tenth of a second after the poor bank-vole in getting under way, and the rest was a was a oh, anything you please! I call it a sliding flicker that you rather "felt" than saw.
The job was to see what was there. A tiny alderman of the red bank-vole people, whose tunnels marched with the road through the wood, taking the afternoon sun a slanting copper net, it was at his own front-door under the root of the Scots fir, was aware of a flicker at a hole's mouth. He looked again, and saw the mouth of that hole was empty.
And so great are the owl's powers of sight and hearing, and so swift is her "stoop" from the sky to the ground, that the bank-vole has little chance of escape should a single grass-stalk rustle underfoot when she is hovering near his haunt.
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