e neighbouring thicket. And now,
their nursery complete, four tiny, hairless voles, with disproportionate
heads, round black eyes beneath unopened lids, wrinkled muzzles, and
abbreviated tails--helpless midgets in form suggestive of diminutive
bull-dog puppies--lay huddled in their tight, warm bed. It was a time of
great anxiety for Kweek. While his mate with maternal pride went
leisurely about her duties, doing all things in order, as if she had
nursed much larger families and foes were never known, he moved fussily
hither and thither, visiting his offspring at frequent intervals during
the night, creeping into the wood and back along his bowered path,
scampering noisily down the shaft if the brown owl but happened to hoot
far up in the glen, and doing a hundred things for which there was not
the slightest need, and which only served to irritate and alarm the
careful mother-vole.
Kweek inherited his timorous disposition from countless generations of
voles that by their ceaseless watchfulness, had survived when others had
been killed by birds and beasts of prey; and though, in his zeal for the
welfare of his family, he often gave a false alarm, it was far better
that he should be at all times prepared for the worst than that, in some
unguarded instant, death should drop swiftly from the sky or crawl
stealthily into his hidden home.
During spring, more frequently than at any other season, death waited
for him and his kindred--in the grass, in the air, in the trees along
the hedge-banks, and on the summit of the rock that towered above the
glen. Vermin had become unusually numerous in the valley, partly because
in the mild winter their food had been sufficient, and partly because
the keeper, feeble with old age, could no longer shoot and trap them
with the deadly certainty that had made him famous in his younger days.
Bold in the care of their young, the vermin ravaged the countryside,
preying everywhere on the weak and ailing little children of Nature. But
fate was indulgent to Kweek; though his kindred in the colony beyond the
wood, and the bank-voles in the sheltered hollow near the pines,
suffered greatly from all kinds of enemies, he and his mate still
managed to escape unhurt.
One night a fox, prowling across the pasture, caught sight of Kweek as
he hurried to his lair. Suspicious and crafty, Reynard paused at one of
the entrances to the burrow, thrust his sharp nose as far as possible
down the shaft, drew a l
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