The water-rat came from a hole five feet above the river-level. An overhanging grass-tuft masked her exit. As a rule, she used the back way—a gently sloping tunnel which led from nest to stream. But to-night it was very still. She padded quietly to the water’s edge, slid through the reeds that bordered it, and sat upon a silted crescent of mud that lay on their far side. She always sat there to commence with. From the bank she was invisible; up stream and down she could see for fifty yards, and the pith of the reed-stem, of all things in her menu most charming, lay ready to her orange-tinted teeth.
The noctules came from the hollow in the old chestnut. Twenty of them lived there together, because it was a convenient, roomy hollow. No one knows how it started—perhaps the wood-peckers could tell you—but rain had certainly finished its excavation. The entrance was some thirty feet above the ground—dank, noisome, and forbidding; the end was near the roots.
Of course the old chestnut was dying; but that did not concern the noctules. Each evening they crawled up to prove the weather; each evening, of late, they had shambled back again into the gloomy depths, cannoning awkwardly against each other, snarling and grumbling. The temper of bats is uncertain, and hunger does not improve it.
But to-night it was better. One by one the ghoulish muzzles emerged, peered into the darkness, and were satisfied; then the clumsy, ill-balanced bodies, entangled in loose-folded leathern cerements—the noctule’s wing-spread measures a full foot; lastly, the webbed curving triangle of feet and tail.
the noctules came from the hollow of the old chestnut.
Each, as it blundered free, clung, for a space, head downwards to the bark, then slacked the grip of its ten toes, unhooked its thumbs, dropped, and flew. Never was flight more graceful, never more perfectly controlled. For fear of the swallows, the summer beetles fly by choice at twilight; even then they must needs fly low, for the noctule never misses, and the crunch of his teeth in a beetle’s horny back is all he knows of music.
The stoat came from a tree which was even more decrepit than the chestnut. It had been an elm once. For four centuries it had defied the elements, towering full fifty feet in rugged, imperial grandeur. The elements had outstayed it. All that remained was a caverned stump, whose jagged summit pointed, like an accusing finger, to the sky.
But, from a stoat standpoint, the stump was unsurpassable. There were three exits from the hollow base. Up the shaft there was yet another. Thick brambles fringed it on every side, and in those brambles were many birds’ nests. The stump was an ideal nursery; as such the stoat had employed it. He had left to its friendly protection his family of six, with a young rabbit to keep them occupied. He, himself, was now in quest of frogs.
The hedgehog bore on his back clear tokens of his last retreat. A dozen withered leaves were clinging to his spines. The nearest pile of such lay heaped against the hen-house. The hedgehog footed through the knotgrass slowly, grubbing with his snout to right and left of him. Sometimes, when cover failed, he broke into a bow-legged run.