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Prompted by an increasing feeling of loneliness and a strong desire that one of his kindred should share with him his comfortable home, he occupied much of his time in enlarging the upper chamber of the burrow till it formed a snug, commodious sleeping place ceiled by the twisted willow-roots; and, throwing the soil behind him down the shaft, he cleared the floor till it was smooth and level.
He found some potatoes and carrots so small that they had been dropped as worthless by a passing labourer on the river-path and selected the best, leaving the others to rot among the autumn leaves. As the "pocket" was inadequate to contain his various stores, the vole used the chamber also as a granary, and slept in the warm, dry hollow by the willow-roots.
As he sat under the beech-limbs above the river, watching its brown current sweep the willow-roots of the banks, he thought how this same current, within its next short reach, passed from wooded seclusion to the noise and pollution of the mills. So his own life seemed to have passed once more from the tranced flow of the last weeks into its old channel of unillumined labour.
Brighteye's danger in some wild winter flood would, therefore, be far greater; so, timorous from his recent experiences, and sufficiently intelligent to devise and carry out plans by which he would secure greater safety, he occupied his spare time in the lengthening nights with driving a second shaft straight inward from the chamber to a roomy natural hollow among the willow-roots, and thence in devious course, to avoid embedded stones, downward to a tiny haven in the angle of the buttress far inside the archway of the bank, where the space was so confined that the otter could not possibly follow him.
If nothing stirred between the salmon "hover" and the bank, he dropped quietly into the pool, inhaled a long, deep breath, dived beneath the willow-roots, and watched, through the clear depths, each moving fish or swaying stem of river-weed within the range of his vision.
He strained his ears to catch each different sound as the "thud, thud" and the patter of feet came nearer. Then the gravel rattled, a stone fell into the stream, and a shaggy spaniel poked his nose into a hole between the willow-roots. The dog drew a long, noisy breath, and barked so suddenly and loudly, and so close to Brighteye's ear, that the vole involuntarily leaped from his resting place.
A moorhen splattered out from the willow-roots, and Brighteye crouched motionless, till he recognised that the noise made by the clumsy bird was almost as familiar to him as the rustle of the reeds in a breeze. The blue heron rose heavily from the backwater, and winged his slow flight high above the trees.
Selecting the best of the dry grass-stalks, the voles carried them home, and, after much labour, varied with much consultation in which small differences of opinion evidently occurred, completed, in the sleeping chamber beneath the willow-roots, a large, round nest.
Pleasant days at Licenza, duly noting in the house of Horace what I have noted with Shelley and other bards, namely, that these fellows who sing so blithely of the simple life yet contrive to possess extremely commodious residences; pleasant days among those wooded glens, walking almost every morning in the footsteps of old Ramage up the valley in whose streamlet the willow-roots sway like branches of coral aloft under the wild walnuts to that bubbling fountain where I used to meet my two friends, Arcadian goat-herds, aboriginal fauns of the thickets, who told me, amid ribald laughter, a few personal experiences which nothing would induce me to set down here.
Afar, too, many would have said there was not a sound; but there was, and Ian's ear was attuned to catch it. The immense inarticulate whisper of night came to him. It came to him from the deserted parks, from the distant Cherwell flowing through its willow-roots and osier-islands, from the flat meadow-country beyond, stretching away to the coppices of the low boundary hills.