easels, finding provender scarce, had followed in their footsteps;
and Brighteye and his kindred, with the water-shrews, the moorhens, and
the coots, were unmolested in their wanderings both by night and day.

The vole's favourite reed-bed was now seldom visited. Besides being
inundated, it was silted so completely with gravel that to cut through
the submerged stems would have been an arduous and almost impossible
task. Luckily, in his journeys along the edge of the shallows during the
flood, Brighteye had found a sequestered pond, near an old hedgerow
dividing the wood, where tender duckweed was plentiful, and, with
delicious roots of watercress, promised him abundant food. Every evening
he stole through the shadows, climbed the leaf-strewn rabbit-track by
the hedge, and swam across the pond from a dark spot beneath some
brambles to the shelter of a gorse-bush overhanging the weeds. There he
was well protected from the owl by an impenetrable prickly roof, while
he could readily elude, by diving, any stray creature attacking him from
land.

Winter dragged slowly on its course, and, just as the first prophecy of
spring was breathed by the awakening woodlands, the warm west breezes
ceased to blow, and the bleak north wind moaned drearily among the
trees. Night after night a sheet of ice spread and thickened from the
shallows to the edge of the current, the wild ducks came down to the
river from the frost-bound moors, and great flocks of geese, whistling
loudly in the starlit sky, passed on their southward journey to the
coast.

For the first few nights Brighteye left his chamber only when acute
hunger drove him to his storehouse in the wood. Directly he had fed, he
returned home, and settled once more to sleep. At last his supplies were
exhausted, and he was forced to subsist almost entirely on the pith
beneath the bark of the willows. The pond by the hedgerow was sealed
with ice, and he suffered much from the lack of his customary food.
Half-way between his sleeping chamber and its water-entrance, a floor of
ice prevented ready access to the river; and, under this floor, a
hollow, filled with air, was gradually formed as the river receded from
the level it had reached on the first night of frost. Brighteye's only
approach to the outer world was, therefore, through the upper doorway.
All along the margin of the pool, as far as the swift water beyond the
stakes, the ice-shelf was now so high above the river that even to