During the rest of the summer, Kweek led a strangely peaceful life, having little to fear beyond an occasional visit from Reynard, or from an astute old magpie that, evading with apparent ease the keeper's gun and pole-traps, lived on till the late autumn, when, before a line of beaters, he broke cover over some sportsmen waiting for their driven game. As soon as the leaves began to fall and exhausted Nature longed for winter's rest, the burrow in the pasture became the scene of feverish activity. Kweek was now the proud sire of five or six healthy families, and the grand-sire of many more. Even the youngest voles were growing fat and strong; and, when the numerous members of the colony set about harvesting their winter stores, ripe, delicious seeds were plentiful everywhere along the margin of the wood.
The winter was uniformly mild, with exception of one short period of great cold which brought a thorough, healthful sleep to the voles; and in the earliest days of spring, when the love-calls of chaffinches and tits were heard from almost every tree, Kweek and his tribe resumed their work and throve amazingly. Every circumstance appeared to favour their well-being. But for the fox, that sometimes crouched beside an opening to the burrow and snapped up an incautious venturer peeping above ground, a young sheep-dog, whose greatest pleasure in life seemed to be found in digging a large round hole in the centre of the burrow, and an adder, that stung a few of the weaklings to death, but found them inconveniently big for swallowing, the voles were seldom troubled. Their numbers, and those of every similar colony in the neighbourhood, increased in such a fashion that, before the following autumn, both the pasture and the near ploughland were barren wastes completely honeycombed with their dwellings. Every grass-root in the pasture was eaten up; every stalk in the cornfield was nibbled through so that the grain might be easily reached and devoured; and the root-crops—potatoes, turnips, and mangolds—on the far side of the cornfield were utterly spoiled; and in the hedgerows and the copse the leaves dropped from the lifeless trees, each of which was marked by a complete ring where the bark was gnawed away close to the ground.
But capricious Nature, as if regretting the haste with which she had brought into the world her destructive little children, and desiring, even at the cost of untold suffering and the loss of countless lives, to restore the pleasant Cerdyn valley to its beauty of green fields and leafy woods, sent her twin plagues of disease and starvation among the voles, till, like the sapless leaves, they withered and died. And from far and near the hawks and the owls, the weasels, the stoats, and the foxes hastened to the scene. The keeper, at a loss to know whence they came, and not understanding the lesson he was being taught, bewailed his misfortune, but dared not stay their advent. At almost any hour of the day, five or six kestrels might be seen quartering the fields or hovering here and there among the burrows. And, long before dark, the stoats and the weasels, as if knowing that, fulfilling a special mission, they were now safe from their arch-enemy, the keeper, hunted their prey through the “trash” of the hedge-banks, or in and out of the passages underground.
The farm labourers, in desperate haste, dug numerous pitfalls, wide at the bottom but narrow at the mouth, and trapped hundreds of the voles, which, maddened by hunger but unable to climb the sloping sides, attacked one another—all at last dying a miserable death. Not only did the customary enemies of the voles arrive on the scene: Nature called to her great task a number of unexpected destroyers—sea-gulls from the distant coast, a kite from a wooded island on a desolate, far-off mere, and a buzzard from a rocky fastness, rarely visited save by keepers and shepherds, near the up-country lakes. Food had gradually become scarce even for the few hundred voles that yet remained. No longer were they to be seen at play together, in little groups, during the cool, hazy twilight, that, earlier in the year, shimmered like a wonderful afterglow on the mossy pasture-floor. Now their only desire was for food and sleep.
Unnoticed by a passing owl, Kweek, worn to a skeleton by sickness and privation, crawled from his burrow into the moonlight of a calm, clear autumn night, and lay in the shadow of the stone where the old male vole had watched and listened for the cruel “vear.” A big blow-fly, attracted, with countless thousands of his kind, to the place of slaughter and decay, had gone to sleep on the side of the stone, and Kweek, in a last desperate effort to obtain a little food, moved forward to secure his prize; but at that moment his strength failed him, his weary limbs relaxed, and the dull, grey film of death overspread his half-closed eyes.
The owl, hearing a faint sound like the rustle of a dry grass-bent, quickly turned in her flight; then, slanting her wings, dropped to the ground, and presently, with her defenceless quarry in her talons, flew away towards the woods.