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Updated: June 24, 2025
Hay, 'you can't watch nothing now a minute without some great lout coming along with a stale baccy pipe in his mouth, making the air stink; they spoils everything, these here half-towny fellows; everybody got a neasty stale pipe in their mouths, and they gets over the hedges anywhere, and disturbs everything. It is common on the banks of a stream or a pond to see half a dozen of these little beaver-like water-voles out feeding in the grass, and they eat it when they find it.
The rest of the animals, like the dormice and the water-voles and the bats, they will have to go back and live in the fields where they were born till we come home again. But as most of them sleep through the Winter, they won't mind that and besides, it wouldn't be good for them to go to Africa."
That night no otter from the down-stream trout-reach wandered to the salmon-pool beneath the farm. The water-voles and the moorhens were unusually alert as they swam hither and thither in the little bays along the edge of the current. The fear of man and his loud-tongued hounds rested, like a spell, on the creatures of the river.
It is said to have strange health-giving qualities; and the water is drunk beneath the moon by old country folk for wasting and weakening complaints. Its strength and potency have no enmity to animal life, for the water-voles burrow in the banks and plunge with a splash in the stream; but it seems that no vegetable thing can grow within it, for the pool and channel are always free of weeds.
The number of water-voles in the banks of this stream seems to increase year by year. The damage they do is not great; but the millers and the farmers do not like them, because with their numerous holes they undermine the banks of the millpound, and the water finds its way through them on to the meadows.
But if a stone is thrown at him, finding his subterfuge detected, he is apt to lose his head either coming back towards you, and being obliged to come up for air before he reaches his hole, or else swimming boldly across to the opposite bank. In the latter case he is safe. Tom Peregrine is a great hand at catching water-voles in a landing-net.
Rabbits, as well as water-voles and field-voles, are particularly careful to nibble off wind-blown or sprouting twigs that encroach on their tracks through the undergrowth; but foxes, otters, and badgers simply brush them aside as they pass. The sun had not yet gone down when we arrived at the "set."
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