SURE REFUGE." (_See_ p. 105).]

Lutra had almost caught him after his adventure with the owl. He had,
however, eluded the otter by diving, in the nick of time, from the stone
to which he clung before the entrance, and then seeking the land. If he
had been an instant later, she would have picked him off, as a bat picks
a moth from a lighted window-pane, and he would never have reached the
down-stream shallow. At that time the water, clearing after a summer
freshet, was fairly low. Brighteye's danger in some wild winter flood
would, therefore, be far greater; so, timorous from his recent
experiences, and sufficiently intelligent to devise and carry out plans
by which he would secure greater safety, he occupied his spare time in
the lengthening nights with driving a second shaft straight inward
from the chamber to a roomy natural hollow among the willow-roots, and
thence in devious course, to avoid embedded stones, downward to a tiny
haven in the angle of the buttress far inside the archway of the bank,
where the space was so confined that the otter could not possibly follow
him. Even the big trout, in his torpedo-like rush to cut off Brighteye
from sure refuge, utterly failed to turn, and then enter the narrow
archway, in time to catch the artful vole.

The task of digging out the second tunnel was exceedingly arduous; yet,
on its completion, Brighteye, taught by the changes going on around him
that months of scarcity were impending, set to work again about half-way
between his sleeping chamber and the upper entrance of the burrow. Here
he scratched out a small, semicircular "pocket," which he filled with
miscellaneous supplies--seeds of many kinds, a few beech-nuts,
hazel-nuts, and acorns, as well as roots of horse-tail grass and fibrous
river-weed.

He was careful, like his small relative the field-vole, and like the
squirrel in the woods above the river-bank, to harvest only ripe,
undamaged seeds and nuts; and in making his choice he was helped by his
exquisite sense of smell. He found some potatoes and carrots--so small
that they had been dropped as worthless by a passing labourer on the
river-path--and selected the best, leaving the others to rot among the
autumn leaves. As the "pocket" was inadequate to contain his various
stores, the vole used the chamber also as a granary, and slept in the
warm, dry hollow by the willow-roots.

In the depth of winter, when the mist-wreaths on the stream were icy
cold and brou