he
had been dreaming. But catch a bank-vole dreaming! Besides, how about
the squirrel overhead? He was hanging over a branch where the flicker
had been, swearing fit to slit his lungs, and old squirrel wasn't much
given to make mistakes, as a rule.

The bank vole turned back into his hole, knowing the law against taking
chances in the wild, and the first stride fetched him up short in
violent collision with another bank-vole--otherwise red-backed
field-mouse, if you like--coming the other way.

The blow, full on the forehead, did not break his neck; but it ought to
have done. It cast him clean over backwards out of his own front-door,
where he fell down the bank, and was received, all his little short
paws scrambling for a hold, by a thistle, and would have told all the
world, with a thin, high squeak, what he had sat on, if the squeak had
not frozen between his chisel teeth.

There had shot out of the hole, and back, a Thing. It might have been
the thick end of a whip-lash or a spring, and, like a spring, as it
recoiled it coiled, and was still.

The bank-vole saw. Most entirely did he see, and felt no joy in the
seeing, either. Indeed, there was no room for mistake in the zigzag
black chain down the back, in the unspeakably cruel, fixed stare of the
glassy, lidless eyes, in the short head and flat cranium of the true
viper--viper, adder, or whatever you like to call the calamity without
legs, whose other name is death.

Now, bank-voles know all about vipers. They have to; they die, else.
They die anyway; but no matter, for they are small and very many.
Also, vipers know all about voles, field and bank; they specialize in
'em!

But our bank-vole knew all about the "freezing" game, too, and he
"froze." My word, how that little beggar was still, so utterly bereft
of movement that a fly settled upon him--about the first and the last
that would, I should judge! And if a learned native had come along the
road at that moment--on tiptoe, of course--he would have said the viper
had hypnotized friend vole with fear. Hypnotize your grandmother! But
you may take it from me that serpent thing was playing his game, too.
He was "freezing" to induce the quarry to move and give himself away,
because, since the vole was motionless, he had no idea where the little
fellow was, although he seemed to be looking straight at him--in that
execrable way snakes have of seeming to look straight at everything.

You think it w