of
them showed the faintest sign of fatigue, the mother dived quietly and
lifted the tired nursling to the surface.

Late one evening, while the parent voles were busy with their work of
family training, the old cannibal trout suddenly appeared, rose quickly
at one of the youngsters swimming near the edge of the current, but,
through a slight miscalculation, failed to clutch his prize. The mother
vole, ever on the alert, plunged down, and, heedless of danger, darted
towards her enemy. For a second or two she manoeuvred to obtain a grip,
then, as she turned to avoid attack, the jaws of the trout opened wide,
and, like a steel trap, closed firmly on her tail. Maddened with rage
and pain, she raised herself quickly, clutched at the back of her
assailant, and buried her sharp, adze-shaped teeth--that could strip a
piece of willow-bark as neatly as could a highly tempered tool of
steel--in the flesh behind his gills. So sure and speedy was her action,
that she showed no sign of fatigue when she reached the surface of the
water, and the trout, his spinal column severed just behind his gills,
drifted lifelessly away.

Though the young voles, in the tunnelled buttress of the river-bank,
lived under the care of experienced parents ever ready and resolute in
their defence, and became as shy and furtive as the wood-mice dwelling
in the hollows of the hedge beside the pond, they were not always
favoured by fortune. The weakling of the family died of disease; another
of the youngsters, foraging alone in the wood, was killed by a
bloodthirsty weasel; while a third, diving to pick up a root of
water-weed, was caught by the neck in the fork of a submerged branch,
and drowned.

During the autumn and the winter the survivors remained with their
parents; the burrow was enlarged and improved by the addition of new
granaries for winter supplies, new water-entrances to facilitate escape
in times of panic, and a new, commodious sleeping chamber, strewn with
hay and withered reeds, at the end of a long tunnel extending almost
directly beneath the river-path. The supplies in the granaries were,
however, hardly needed: the winter was exceptionally mild, and the voles
were generally able to obtain duckweed and watercress for food. Often,
on my way to the ruined garden, I noticed their footprints--indistinctly
outlined on the gravel, but deep and triangular where the creatures
climbed through soft and yielding soil--along the path leading to t