The Heart of the Wild: Nature Studies from Near and Far

by S. L. Bensusan

From time to time he would look with a patronising eye upon Mrs. Moorhen who often brought her little black babies past the door of his house when the mantle of summer was spread over the land. In her early days Mrs. Moorhen had quite mistrusted him, she thought he was like the big brown rats that lived about the barns and sometimes came to the water side, and did what harm they could from the time when their eyes opened until the fatal day came when the keeper brought his terriers and his ferrets to the home farm and killed them in their hundreds.

“I assure you, Madam,” said Jock, upon the day when he cleared his character, “I would not harm you if I could, and I could not harm you if I would. I have nothing at all to do with the brown rats of the barn, my skin is darker than theirs, and my tail is altogether different. Why, the white tip ought to have told you as much, even if the length had not. Then too, my legs are shorter, and I have yellow claws, and yellow colouring on my fur. Those fellows who live up by the barns are merely brown. They will eat anything or anybody, and the dirtier their food is the better they like it, but I have delicate tastes and am altogether a clean liver.”

“Will you give me your word of honour,” said Mrs. Moorhen, “that you have never eaten an egg?”

“Quite readily,” he replied. “My food consists entirely of roots and flowers and water weeds. I’ve never tasted an egg in my life.”

Perhaps Mrs. Moorhen was not altogether satisfied at first, for she watched very carefully from among the rushes and roots to see when and where Jock fed. The sight reassured her. After sitting very quietly for an hour or so enjoying the view and the music, he would let himself down easily into the water, and swim to some plant that seemed to tempt his appetite. He would bite it from root or stem, swim back again to his doorway, and then squat upon his hind-legs and eat with great deliberation. When he had finished he would remove all the débris very carefully, and wash himself like the clean little animal he was. Sometimes he would carry his food on to the bank, or even seek it on the bank and eat quite away from his burrow, but his movements were all so simple and so harmless that Mrs. Moorhen could but be reassured, and she soon came to the conclusion that it was a good thing to have a friend in a world that was so full of enemies.

“I haven’t seen you here for long,” she explained, “and when I saw you first you were running on the land, and that made me suspicious. You were not in these parts when I came to them in the autumn.”

“The truth is,” he explained, “that I have only just come back to my home for the summer. During the winter months I could not face the water for long, and I could not sit at the door of my burrow because the river had risen so high, so I was forced to go inland when I was not asleep.

“You may not know,” he went on, seeing that his companion looked rather puzzled, “that during the very cold weather I sleep as long as I can, sometimes for days together. Then I wake up very hungry and must go in search of food, and as I cannot find much to eat in the water it is sometimes necessary to go to the fields to find a meal in the roots.”

“Are they not all cleared away by the time the very bad weather comes?” inquired Mrs. Moorhen.

“They have been taken up,” he replied, “but there is generally enough left to yield more than I could possibly eat if I started at the end of the summer and never went to sleep until the spring. Sometimes I store roots and grasses in my burrow, but last year two land rats came to it. I was frightened and would not return. I have no trouble at all about the food supply; my only care is to avoid the creatures that one sometimes meets on the fields in early morning or at dusk.”