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Updated: June 2, 2025
'That little brown cousin of yours' he said, 'makes me think of a water-vole, there one minute and gone the next. He seemed to think you a rather amusing child, as of course you are." Rose put up a delicate hand and playfully caressed the glowing cheek nearest to her. "I told him you were not any relation, but just a dear little friend of mine who had never seen anything of the world before.
When I crossed the river and examined the stump I found all the four bullets close together just below the spot on which the animal had been sitting, and neither of them two inches from its body. Although the balls had missed the water-vole, they must have sharply jarred the stump. I was afterwards informed that this semi-paralysis from sudden fear is a known characteristic of the animal.
It was so close to me that if it had been a fish or a rat I must have seen him. I had a terrier with me, but of course he was unable to find an otter. A dog unbroken to the scent is worse than useless. On another occasion I saw a water-vole running away from some larger animal under the opposite bank of the river. Some bushes prevented my seeing very well, but I am almost certain it was an otter.
The water-vole is often called, wrongly, the water-rat, but it is of very different habits, and is well nigh entirely a vegetable feeder, and one of the most charming and most inoffensive creatures in Britain. To the close observer of Nature, differences in the character of animals even among the members of one species soon become apparent.
These water-haunting creatures are naturally mistaken for the vegetable-feeding water-vole, and so the latter has to bear the blame of their misdoings. There are lesser inhabitants of the brook which are injurious both to the eggs and young of fish.
After another uneventful interval a slight movement was observable in the reeds directly opposite. Straight in the line of the silver bar a water-vole came towards me, only the head of the little swimmer being visible at the apex of a V-shaped wake lengthening rapidly behind him.
It just seemed as if a dark blur whizzed about more bird-like than beast-like around the astonished and prancing heron, and then into nowhere. It was like watching a blue-bottle in a tumbler, and very extraordinary. The heron never even professed to follow it or lunge at it. He preferred the water-vole, whose agility was not too fast to see.
A bitter, dull paling of the sky, which by courtesy we will call dawn, found them cleaning again, with their hand-like forepaws, exactly like cats, inside a water-vole burrow. The owner had been out, bark-chipping, all night it was the only thing he could find to keep body and life from parting company and was not over-pleased, on his return, to find that he had company at home.
But if the water-vole should succeed in gaining its burrow, or in plunging into the stream, I doubt whether any dog would be able to catch it. Moreover, the water-vole is so clever in tunnelling, that when it drives its burrows into cultivated ground, it almost invariably conceals the entrance under a heap of stones, a wood pile, or some similar object.
Then they fell apart, and one of them, at any rate the brown one ran away in the shape of a water-vole water-"rat," if you will the heron making spear-lunges at him with his bill as he ungainlily skipped at the other's tail all the way up the bank. The other fighter, the black one, could not rightly be said to have turned into anything very much at least, not anything that any one could swear to.
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