Neighbors Unknown

by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts

After a few days the southwest gales blew themselves out, the tides drew back within their ordinary summer bounds, and most of the refugees returned to their old haunts among the “broad-leaf.” But the brown mouse elected to remain in his burrow beside the rose-thicket. His taste had turned to the clover and timothy stalks, and the meadow was alive with brown crickets and toothsome, big, green grasshoppers. Moreover, in the heat of late July, he loved to swim in the bland waters of the stream, keeping close along shore, under the shadow of the long grass and the overhanging roses, and avoiding the dense patches of weed which might give shelter to the darting pickerel. His burrow was roomy and gave accommodation to a silken-furred brown mate, who set herself without delay to the duty of replenishing the diminished population of the marsh-mice.

In spite of foraging hawks, foxes, weasels, and minks, in spite of calamities, swift and frequent, overtaking this, that, and another of the innumerable kindred of the mice, the summer hours passed benignly over the burrow by the rose-thicket. Then, one sultry scented morning, there came a change. The deep quiet of the meadow went to pieces in blatant clamor. Loud-voiced men and snorting, trampling, clanking horses came to the edge of the grass, and with them two strange scarlet machines which clattered as they moved.

One of these scarlet monsters, dragged by its horses, swerved off toward the farther side of the meadow. The other started straight down through the deep grass along the edge of the stream. Into the grass, belly-deep, the big horses plunged, breasting it like the sea. Instantly the scarlet machine, which was ridden by a man, set up a new cry. It was a harsh, strident, terrifying cry, as if a million twanging locusts had found one voice. Before it, to the amazed horror of all the furry, scurrying grass-dwellers, the grass went down flat in long ranks. The peril of the floods was as nothing to this loud uncomprehended peril. Marsh-mice, water-voles, shrews, with here and there a foraging musk-rat, here and there a murderous and ravaging weasel, all fled frantically before it. A few, a very few, fled too late. These never knew what happened to them, for great darting knives, dancing unseen through the grass close to the earth, caught them and slew them.

The high cry of the deadly scarlet thing, however, gave warning fair and sufficient. As the big brown marsh-mouse heard it approaching, he dived straight to the bottom of his burrow and lay there trembling. His companion, on the other hand, holding different views as to the proper place of safety, darted from the burrow, wriggled through the thorny stems of the rose-thicket, and plunged into the water, where she hid herself close under the opposite bank. The noise and the darting knives glided almost over the mouth of the burrow, and the thumping heart of the brown mouse almost burst itself with terror. But they passed. Slowly they marched away. And when they had grown comparatively faint, far down at the foot of the meadow, beside the dike, the brown mouse, recovering himself, dared to peep forth. He was astonished to see a long breadth of grass lying prostrate, with bewildered bumblebees and grasshoppers striving to extricate themselves from the ruins. Having a valiant heart and a quick eye for opportunity, he sprang out of his hole and began pouncing on the confused and helpless insects. This, for a few minutes, was a profitable game, and a safe one, too, for the strident noise, with the presence of the men and horses, had driven hawks and crows to a discreet distance. But presently the cry of the scarlet thing, which had turned at the dike and was moving straight up the middle of the meadow, began to grow loud again, and the brown mouse whisked back into his burrow.

All through the time of the haying the meadow-folk lived in a turmoil of alarm and change. At first, under the heavy prostrate ranks of the slain grass, they ran bewildered but secure, for their foes could not easily detect them. For another day they were comparatively safe under the long scented lines of the dying “windrows,” full of grasshoppers and wilted clover-heads. When the windrows were tossed together into innumerable pointed hay-cocks, they crowded beneath the ephemeral shelter, to be rudely bared next day to the blinding sun as the cocks were pitched into the rumbling hay-carts. It was a day of horrors, this, to the meadow kindreds, for a yellow Irish terrier, following the hay-makers, would run with wild yelpings under the lifted cocks, and slay the little people by the hundred. But as for the brown mouse, all this time he and his temporary mate dwelt secure, keeping to their burrow and to the barren but safe tunnels which they had driven amid the roots of the rose-thicket.

When the hay was gone—part of it carted away to upland barns, part built cunningly into high conical stacks—the meadow-dwellers found that they had fallen on evil times. The naked meadow, all bare close stubble, open to the eyes of hawk and crow by day, and of the still more deadly owl by night, had become their worst foe. Some drew back to the fringes of the uplands. Some colonized along the winding edges of the stream. Some returned across the dike to the salt meadow, where the broad-leaf grass was not yet ripe for mowing; while the remnant huddled precariously under the bases of the stacks, an easy prey for every foraging weasel. In a little while, however, the short thick herbage of the aftermath thrust its head above the stubble. Then new tunnels were run, and life for the scurrying and squeaking meadow-folk once more began to offer its normal attractions. It was now more perilously insecure, however, for the herds of cattle turned to pasture on the aftermath kept it eaten down; and the shrewd crows learned that their beaks could pierce the fragile and too-open roofs of the tunnels.

At last the snow came, the deep snow and the hard cold, enemy to almost all the other kindred of the wild, but friendly to the mouse-folk. The snow, some two feet deep all over the meadows, over the dikes, and to the eating edges of the tides, gave them a perfect shelter, and was exactly suited to the driving of their tunnels. Food was abundant, because they could subsist very well on the nutritious root-stalks of the grass. And none of their enemies could get at them except when they chose to seek the upper air. In the daytime they kept to the glimmering blue light of the tunnels, but at night they would slip forth and play about the firm surface of the snow. It was then that they suffered, for though the hawks were gone, and the crows asleep, the icy winter night was alive with owls; and foxes, weasels, and minks would come prowling hungrily down from the uplands. The owls were the worst peril by far—marsh-owls, barn-owls, the darting little Acadian owls, swift as the sparrow-hawk; and now and then the terror of the winter wilds, the giant snowy owl of the North, driven down by storm and famine from his bleak Arctic wastes. The revels of the mouse-folk over their dim-lit playgrounds were varied with incessant tragedy. But the memories of the little people, fortunately, were short. Their perilous diversions went on unchecked, while their furry battalions thinned amazingly.

But through all these dangers the brown marsh-mouse went his way secure. He kept every exit of his tunnels perfectly hidden among the thorny tips of the wild rose-bushes, which stood up some five or six inches above the top of the snow. The successive families which were born and grew up in his safe burrow passed out into the maze, to be merged in the precarious and passing legions. His first mate disappeared mysteriously, and as he had no facilities for pressing an inquiry among the hawks or weasels, he never knew the details of her disappearance. Her place was speedily filled in the burrow. But to the brown mouse himself nothing happened. He confined his nightly revels beneath the moon to the region of the rose-thickets, and so eluded effectually the eyes and claws of the owls.

It was along toward the end of winter, however, when the brown mouse met with his most dangerous adventure. Shunning, as he did so craftily, the games on the open snow, he was wont to amuse himself—and incidentally seek variations in his diet—beneath the ice of his threshold stream. An expert swimmer and diver, almost as swift as his cousin the musk-rat or his hereditary enemy the mink, he would swim long distances under the water, finding fresh bits of lily-root, tiny clams, water-snails, half-torpid beetles, and many kinds of larvæ. As the stream had been high at the time of freezing, and had afterwards shrunken in its channel, letting the ice down with it, there were many air-chambers along the brink, between ice-roof and water surface; and slanting downward to the nearest of these he had dug himself a tunnel from the roots of his thicket. Even here, to be sure, there were perils for him. There was one big mink which loved to hunt along these secret and dim-lit air-chambers, taking long swims beneath the ice. But he was an autocrat, and kept all rival minks away from his range; so the wise brown mouse knew that as long as he kept a sharp enough lookout against that foe, he was secure in the air-chambers. Then, in the stream itself, there was always the peril of the great pike, which had its lair at the bottom of the deep pool down by the abat-d’eaux. The brown mouse had seen him but once—a long, straight, gray-green, shadowy shape in the distance—but that one sight gave him counsels of caution. He never forgot, when in the water, to keep watch for that great darting shadow.

One day, when the brown mouse had swum far downstream, and was hurrying back home, he was alarmed by loud sounds on the surface of the ice, a little below his back door. Some one with an axe was chopping a hole in the ice. The brown mouse swam away downstream again as fast as he could, and the jarring noise of the axe-strokes, carried by the ice and by the water, seemed to follow him with terrifying concussions. Hiding himself in a remote air-chamber, he waited for the noises to cease. Then, with mingled trepidation and caution, he swam upstream again.