Page:Wild folk - Samuel Scoville.djvu/167

Rh Ahead of him fled a young meadow-mouse, on his way to join other members of the family who were having a light lunch on what was left in the storehouse of their winter's supplies. Hearing the rapid pattering and sniffing behind him, the mouse made the fatal mistake of keeping on to the storeroom—a large chamber underground, where three grown mice were feasting. Confident in the fighting ability of his family, he had yet to learn that odds are nothing to a shrew. In spite of his speed, the mouse dashed into the round room only a little ahead of his pursuer. The storehouse was large enough to make a good battleground, but, unfortunately for the mice, contained only one entrance.

Then followed a battle great and grim. The mice were on their own ground, four against one and that one only a tiny blind beastling less than half the size and weight of any one of them. It did not seem as if the shrew had a chance against the burly, round-headed meadow-voles, who are the best fighters of all the mice-folk. Yet the issue was never in doubt. The shrew attacked with incredible swiftness. No one of his four foes could make a motion that his quick ear and uncanny sense of touch did not at once detect. Moreover, throughout the whole fight, he never for an instant left the exit-tunnel unguarded. Time and again, from out of the whirling mass of entangled bodies, a meadow-mouse would spring to the door to escape. Always it ran against the fell jaws of the little blind death, and bounded back from the latter's rigid steel-like body. Again and again the mice