The Way of the Wild eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 330 pages of information about The Way of the Wild.

The Way of the Wild eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 330 pages of information about The Way of the Wild.

The bank-vole had already fled; but it was in the direction that the fight finally veered that he had gone, and so, peeping from between the weed-stems at the mouth of a hole, he saw all.  He saw the viper, his head swaying to and fro, come sliding along, making for that very hole; he heard the sudden quick rustle in the grass behind that followed, beheld the dusky, squat form that it heralded pounce.  He watched the snake’s head whip round, and drive with all its power in one last desperate stroke; watched it straighten out suddenly, and recoil in an awful quivering spasm, like a severed telegraph-wire, as the hedgehog’s razor-sharp teeth cut through skin and flesh and backbone; and, trembling from head to foot, he witnessed, half-fascinated, I think, the awful last threshing flurry of the viper that followed.

Later, when the moon peeped out of a hole in the clouds, and the bank-vole peeped out of one in the bank, together—­and his beady eyes were not much behind the moon for brightness—­when the tiny, long-eared bats were imitating black lightning overhead, and a single owl was hooting like a lost soul seeking a home, away in the black heart of the woods, the bank-vole witnessed the burial of that hated viper.  It was not a big affair.  Only one person—­the hedgehog—­took part in it, and he was singularly unhurried, for he ate that poisonous fiend all up, beginning at the tail, and thoughtfully chewing on from side to side to the head—­twenty inches of snake—­as if he, the hedgehog, had been inoculated in infancy, and was poison-proof.

Then, still grunting, he went away, slowly, nosing here and there, rustling loudly in that stillness, an odd, squat figure in the moonlight; and the bank-vole thought he had seen the last of him, and came out to pass about his “lawful occasions,” as per custom.

Now, if you or I had taken our meals after the fashion of that “wee, timorous beastie,” we should probably have departed this life from indigestion or nervous prostration inside a month.

He came very cautiously from his hole, and the first thing his fine long whiskers telegraphed him the presence of was an oak-gall—­one of those round knobs that grow upon twigs like nuts, you know, but have a fat grub inside instead of a kernel.  At the same instant a leaf rustled, and—­flp!—­there was no bank-vole.

Allowing one minute for the passing of whoever rustled that leaf, and a cloud-shadow, and there he was again, back at the gall, his shining eyes, that mirrored the moon, being the only visible part of him.  He rolled the gall over and sniffed, and—­that was quite enough, thank you.  No nut there, and he knew it—­by scent, I fancy.  In that moment something trod softly, ever so softly, somewhere, and a spray of laced bracken swayed one quarter of an inch, and—­the bank-vole was not.

Again about a minute’s pause, and three bank-voles came out together.  Our friend was the last, and another was the first, to discover a little hoard of seeds that some other tiny beastie—­not a bank-vole—­must have collected and forgotten all about, or been killed in the interval.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Way of the Wild from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.