Then sits down softly—and listens, listens.... Is there anything? No! Then forward, silently forward....
With crouching loins and curved tail, but with chest raised and neck stretched high, she writhes through the grass, as if treading on flames.
A sudden halt—a careful investigation! No; false alarm again! And Grey creeps along until she finds another mouse-hole....
The twilight falls, and the great black maybugs begin to wind their sound-threads round her. A horse has dropped some manure close to where she sits—the mice like making their holes under that!
The dike-chat flutters past with its young. The little grey birds are swallowed up in the darkness, leaving behind only a flicker from their white tails.
The slim young hare hops with supple grace across the field, stopping to sniff at each root and plant....
Grey sits patiently before her mouse-hole, listening to the faint scratching of its owner’s feet deep down in the earth. The minutes race; her mind is utterly absorbed with the one thrilling subject—mouse!
Presently a distant rumble rises to her ears; grains of sand are rolling down the tunnel. The sound, which no human ear could hope to distinguish, increases in volume until it culminates in a faint flap: a baby mouse with thin white legs and a tail three times as long as its body crouches curled up at the entrance!
Without straightening its body, it begins at once to propel itself forward through the grass-stems, looking for all the world like a living bullet on legs....
Now the noise of its running has stopped ... the mouse swarms up and down the straws, so that they whine like violin-strings in the cat’s ears. Her soul is a sound board on which each whine impinges, magnified and vibrating.... In the most approved fashion she creeps upon her prey, and, in spite of a clumsy spring, manages to nail it down under her paw....