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"There's no one to throw big stones here. That was Mr Jack." "Well, did he throw stones?" I said wonderingly. "No! What a fellow you are! A jack a pike a big fish took one of the young moorhens for his dinner." "Why, I thought pike lived on fish," I cried. "They live on anything. I've seen them swallow young ducks and water-rats and frogs anything they can get.
Across the middle of the pond a tree had fallen; it was just on a level with the surface of the water. A pair of water-rats always ate their food on this tree. They would go out into the grass of the meadow, bite off the vegetation that suited their taste, and carry it back in their mouths to the tree, and there eat it in safety, with water, as it were, all round them like a moat.
Pursuing his walk along the side of the river, he was checked by a horrible smell, and looking downward, he perceived a carcass in the last stage of decomposition lying in the mud. It had been washed ashore by the tide, and a large bird of prey was contending for the possession of it with a legion of water-rats.
"Oh, I say, what a boy I am still!" he said, half aloud. "Here I am, half starved for want of food. I'm a king's officer taken prisoner by a pack of dirty smugglers, and I'm keeping up my dignity as a gentleman in the king's service by thinking about chasing water-rats and fishing for carp and pike. 'Pon my word I'm about ashamed of myself.
They love water-rats and moorhens more than any other food. A strange prejudice exists among hunting men against cleaning out artificial earths. There was never a greater fallacy. Fox-earths want looking to from time to time, say every ten years, for rabbits will render them practically useless by burrowing out in different places.
And as they drifted from one experience to another, forced camps for days on stony outcrops in the midst of seas of water were touched on lightly as hardly worth mentioning; while "eating yourself out of tucker, and getting down to water-rats and bandicoots," compared favourably with a day or two spent in trees or on stockyard fences. As for crossing a river on a stout wire rope!
It is possible that the musk-rat of Siberia, as well as several species of water-rats belonging to South America and known vaguely by the name of Lutras and Nutrias may be animals of the beaver kind, rather than Water-Rats or Otters, among which they are generally classed.
The crowd dispersed reluctantly, with low mutterings about rabbits, pigs, and water-rats, like the murmurs of a stage mob; and then Bessie led her friend into a large sunny room fronting westward, a room with three windows, cushioned window-seats, two pretty white-curtained beds, and a good deal of old-fashioned and heterogeneous furniture, half English, half Indian.
The only gun he had to bring was a single-barrelled muzzle-loader which had belonged to his father. With this he had shot water-rats, sparrows, and, on one occasion when they were very numerous, fieldfares; but not flying he had never attempted that. No; he had stalked his small bird till he got within thirty yards of the bough where it was perched, and taken a steady pot-shot.
Those were troublous times to Saxon dwellers by the sea, for the Danish water-rats swarmed round each river mouth, scenting treasure from afar; and by none was the white flash of their sharp, strong teeth more often seen than by the men of Eastern Anglia, and by none in Eastern Anglia more often than by the watchers on the walls of the town of seven towers that once stood upon the dry land, but which now lies twenty fathom deep below the waters.
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