Part 3

Sometimes as the children paddle up the stream they see a brown cloud in the water, darting up and up before them in swift swimming jerks. "Minnows!" they shout, and "Minnows, Ogre, look!" and watch the shoal of little fishes flashing through the water just out of reach of them. From moment to moment one of them turns half over in the water, with a flash of silver as he turns. And sometimes, when the Imp and the Elf are not paddling, and we are all three of us lying on the bank, we see the shoal swim slowly past us, and watch the minnows fling themselves right out of the water after the tiny flies that play over the surface of the stream. Then it is as if a clever juggler were hidden under the water and were throwing little curved knives up from the bottom of the stream to twist and sparkle in the air, and then fall plosh, plosh, into widening circles of ripples. Minnow after minnow leaps out of the water, turns and falls, and the ripples of the different splashes cross one another and cut the water into a thousand thousand glittering points of light.

Sometimes we hear a bigger splash than is made by a minnow, and looking up the stream we see something swimming strongly through the water, a double trail of ripples flowing out on either side of him. Just the nose of him is above water, and sometimes he goes under altogether. The thing swims to a flat stone in the middle of the stream that makes a kind of island, and suddenly we see it fling itself up out of the water and sit on its hindlegs on the stone, briskly washing its nose with its fore-paws. "Water-rat," whispers the Imp to the Elf, and we do not move so much as a hair, any of us. The brown, blunt-nosed rat sits up on the stone and pulls its paws over its head and throws them back again, like the neat-minded gentleman he is, Presently he thinks he hears a noise, an ominous something, and the paws are suddenly still for a moment, and the round head cocked on one side. His head is so blunt and so near his body that one would scarcely think he had a neck at all if he were not able to look this way and that way and this way again, in the smallest part of second. Ah, he sees us. For another instant he stays dead still, wondering perhaps if we have seen him, and then off he shoots again into the water, swimming now on the bottom of the stream and now once more driving his nose along the surface until suddenly he slips under the bank and we cannot see him at all. When we lean over the bank, just where he disappeared, we find a hole, which is the doorway of his home. Here he lives in the moist bank under the over-hanging ferns, close to the water which is as good as land to him. Here he lives and has a merry time to himself, doing nobody any harm, except the waterplants, from whom he takes his dinners.

A little farther down the stream a broad deep ditch crosses the meadows to join it. The ditch is deep, and the water in it moves so slowly that it is almost still. Weeds and grasses grow from the bottom of the stream, and are only just bent over by the current, and the moist edges of the ditch are full of sunken holes, where the cows have thrust their feet into the mud. The whole of the ground by the side of the ditch is rich with flowers, but so swampy that they are difficult to reach, except at a few places. But very often the Imp and the Elf, when their shoes and stockings are once off, make up their minds to despise mud, and wade through the grasses close to the edges of the ditch to look for sticklebacks. And really, when I think of sticklebacks, I agree with the children that it is worth more than muddy ankles to get a look at them. For the sticklebacks are very fine fellows indeed, the little soldiers of the water-people, tiny fishes, who carry spears set upright on their backs, spears that are strong and well pointed, too, as the Imp found when he took hold of a stickle between his finger and thumb.

The sticklebacks are like the newts of the duck-pond in quite a number of ways. Not to look at, of course, for one has legs while the other has fins; but in several of their habits. In the love-making times, when the he-newts show their gorgeous coats, the stickleback lords put on a brilliant uniform of glittering green and scarlet and gold. Like the he-newts, they battle between themselves, and more than once we have watched a noble skirmish in the deep water under a tussock of grass. We have seen the stickleback lords dash at each other again and again, trying to rip each other up with their sharp spears, and, at the last, we have seen the conqueror sailing proudly away, even more gorgeous than before.

The Imp loves the sticklebacks because they are so bold and jolly and move so quickly and so jerkily that it is hard to follow them. But the Elf loves them for quite another reason. She loves them because they are homely. Most of the water people, like the frogs and newts, take no bother at all about their eggs, but just leave them to themselves without ever caring whether they hatch or no. But the stickleback is as careful as a blackbird, and builds a little nest for the eggs down among the weeds on the bottom of the ditch, and stays there watching and guarding till they hatch out into little stickles. That is why the Elf loves sticklebacks. They do look after their children a little.

Later in the year we see the shoals of little sticklebacks, not so big as pen-nibs, who have left their nests in the ditch, and are swimming away to see the world for themselves. Often we lie on the bank and tell each other stories about them. And all these stories begin: "Once upon a time there was a little stickleback, one of a shoal," and all the stories end: "So the little stickleback drove his enemy away in a fright, and swam back to his nest glowing with colour and pride." For, of course, by the time the story is finished the little stickleback has grown into a big stickleback and has a nest of his own.

Besides the sticklebacks and minnows there are a great many other fishes among the water-folk, but we do not meet them so often, and most of them live in bigger places than the stream or the ditch, or even the duck-pond. Sometimes, though, in the pebbly part of the stream we meet a loach, a little brown speckled fish with a flat head and little suckers like the horns of a snail sticking out all round his mouth. We see him slip along in the water under the shadowy side of a stone. If he does not come out at the other end we know he is resting there, and then if we can make the stone move without muddying the water, we may see him flit from his hiding place, zig-zag among the pebbles, looking for a new stone where he may shelter.

And then, too, when the stream flows nearer to the sea, which is only four miles from our house, you know, we find some other water people who are very pleasant indeed. The sea spreads inland in a broad pale sandy bay, with marshland grown over with sparse reedy grass, and covered with pools of salty water, and channels full of sandy mud. The stream flows out into this bay, and at some times of the year, when we walk up from the bay along its banks, we see stones that look as if they were heads, with a waving mass of black hair flowing from them down the current. When we look closer, we see that the black hair is a mass of tiny eels. Little black wriggling water snakes they look like, though they are nothing of the sort, and we sometimes remind each other of the tale of the Gorgon's Head, with all its snaky crop. Sometimes we have caught a little eel or two, and kept them in a big jar; but they are not such adaptable guests as the tadpoles, and we do not think we make them very comfortable. The Imp loves to watch them, and finds it hard to believe that these are eels, really eels, like the big twisting creatures he sees when he leans over the side of the boat, when we go rowing on the lake. You shall hear about those eels in the next chapter.

But, do you know, I believe our dearest of all the water people, are not really water things at all, but birds? There are two of them, that belong to the stream, and I expect I shall be scolded by the Imp and the Elf for putting them at the end of the chapter. I shall have to explain that I meant it as an honour to them. They are birds; and one of them lives up the stream, where it is a wild little beck, falling from rock to rock in the wood on the moorland side, and the other hops from stone to stone in the shallows of the brook, where it flows more peacefully through the flat green meadows. The one is the dipper, and the other is the water wagtail.

The dipper is a little brown fellow, with a white front and throat, and a jovial little shout of his own. Very often, as we climb up through the wood, with the noise of the thousand tiny waterfalls swishing in our ears, we meet the dipper, perched on a stone by the side of one of the pools, looking as if he were making a careful map inside his head of everything he can see at the bottom of the water. As soon as he notices us, there is a brown flash in the air, and he is up, and over the next fall, and perched on a stone by the pool above. When we have climbed painfully up over the slippery rocks and the soft green earth with the help of hands and knees, and little trees, and clumps of heather, we find him sitting there, as gay and fresh as ever, and perfectly ready to dart up stream again. But sometimes we have been able to watch him, and see him dive into the pool; for he can swim under water as if he were fish and not a bird at all. He can swim round and round the bottom of the pools as easily as he can fly. The Imp thinks him a very fortunate person; for he can do everything. He can swim under water, he can hop about on land, and he can fly in the air. And when you can do all those three things, there is not much else left to want, is there?

The other bird is as dainty and spruce a little fellow as you can imagine. All dark and white he is, looking like a pale and tiny magpie, with a long tail. His tail gave him his name, and I have been told a story about that. Here it is:--Once upon a time there was an old wise man, and he set himself to write a huge book about all the birds that ever are. So he went out with a lot of pens and ink and paper, and lived in a hut at the edge of the meadows, just sheltered by a wood. He told all the birds he knew what he was about, and they told all the others. So that they all came--albatrosses, and sparrows, and thrushes, and penguins, and blackbirds, and guillemots, and seagulls, and flamingoes, and peewits, and ostriches, and kingfishers--and fluttered and chattered in a huge crowd in the meadows by the hut. One by one they perched on a log in front of the old man, and he wrote down what they were like, and what were their names, and all about them. And this all worked very well until he came to the wagtail, when he could not think of a name for it. He put his head on one side and looked at the little mottled bird, and he said, "Well, my life, I do not know what to call you," and the little bird wagged its tail. The old man scratched his head, and said, "Well, you little speckled thing, what am I to call you?" and the little bird wagged its tail. The old man grunted and groaned, and made all the noises we all make when we are stuck over a very simple thing. He could not think of what to write, and he kept dipping his pen in the ink, and scratching his head with the other end of the penholder; and all the time the little bird wagged its tail. Its wagging muddled the old man worse than before, and he said angrily, "You do nothing but wag your tail, wag your tail, wag--your--tail" and suddenly he found that he had written down wagtail without thinking. And the little bird has been called a wagtail ever since.

"And it does wag its tail all the time," says the Elf. It really does. We see it flit about the shores of the stream, first a little this way, and then a little that, and every time it perches its tail wags up and down, up and down, like a tiny see-saw that has lost its other end.

Sometimes late in the summer we see yellow wagtails by the stream, and they are even prettier than the grey ones, the very daintiest of little fairy birds. But in autumn, both the grey wagtails and the yellow ones fly away over seas like the swallows, and we do not meet them by the stream side till next year.

LAKE AND RIVER

One month in every year the Imp and the Elf and I go to stay in a farmhouse close by the shores of a lake, that is bigger than the biggest pond you have ever seen. Out of the lake flows a river, that is bigger than the biggest stream. But when we go there we always feel very much like we do when we go over the common to the duck pond, or follow the beck from the woodland to the valley. Only, now, instead of lying on the bank at the side of the water, we go in a boat, and row out with the water lapping round us. It is as if we were in an enormous ship of our own, and quite safe, for the boat is so broad in the beam that not even the Imp or the Elf could tumble out if they tried.

Of course we are pirates, and Sir Francis Drakes, and vikings, and other sea rovers, from time to time. I often find that I have been a villainous pirate mate, when, for all I knew, I had been peaceably reading a book in the stern, and we none of us know when we set out in the morning what manner of gay adventures we shall fashion for ourselves upon the water. But, if I were to tell you about all that, I should have no room left in which to write of the water folk, and that would never do.

This is a chapter mainly about the lake things, and they are very like the pond and stream people, only bigger. You remember the little eels we used to find in the stream, clustered like massing black hair below the stones in the running water? Often, when we are floating on the lake, where the bottom is sandy, and not so deep that we cannot see it from the boat, we look over the gunwale and see long brown slimy eels, with silver bellies, twisting along the ground below. Sometimes we drop a worm exactly over an eel, and watch it fall like a curling coral in the water until the eel shoots at it, and gulps it in. Eels are really very like water snakes, but they are fish, with fins just like the trout, and funny little snoutheads, that make us think of pike. Pike are the ugliest and wickedest-looking of all the fish. Big and hungry they are, with evil eyes and long snouts, and mouths set full of teeth that point back down their throats, so that if a little trout or a hand once got inside it has not much chance of escape. The pike lie under the thick weeds round the shores of the lake, and among those rushes that rise out of the water like a forest of green spears. Then when a shoal of big minnows or small perch float by the pike darts out, and there is one perch or one minnow the less in the frightened shoal of little fish. Pike do not like perch very much, because a swallowed perch means a sore pike. For those gay perch with their scarlet fins and golden bodies barred with olive green are not defenceless at all. The fin that runs down their backs is built on firm, sharp spikes that they can lift when they want, and no perch is mild enough to let himself be swallowed without lifting his spines and tearing the throat of the swallower.

As we row on down the lake, watching the reflection of the boat rocking in the ripples, and the reflections of the hills and the trees on the shore of the lake we sometimes hear a long whistling cry, and a curlew swings high over our heads from one side of the valley to the other, like a pendulum-bob without a string, his long curved beak stretched out far before him. And sometimes when the weather is going to be stormy we hear a shrill shriek repeated again and again, and see a white cloud of seagulls lift from the marshy shores and flap away and back and settle again. And more than once we have seen wild duck, and a drake in a gorgeous shimmer of colour fly across the marshland by the head of the river. Half-way down the lake there is a little rocky island, where we have often seen the yellow wagtails, and on a promontory opposite a kingfisher has his nest in a deep hole in the rock. We row the boat close up to the nest, and look at the pile of fishbones outside the hole. The Kingfisher is a fisher as well as a king, and lives on the fish that he catches. It is fine to see him fly across in the sunlight from the rock to island, from the island to the rock, "Just like a rainbow without any rain," as the Elf says, for he is the most gaily coloured of the birds. "Because he is the king," says the Imp. And indeed his kingly robes are very splendid--blue, and green, and red, and white, and orange--as fine a cloak for a monarch as you could wish to see.

There is another fishing bird whom we are always glad to see. He is bigger than I do not know how many Kingfishers put together, and though he is not brightly coloured he is very beautiful. He is a heron, and herons are like the storks of Hans Andersen's fairy stories. He is a grey bird, tall and thin, with a black crest lying back from the top of his head. His legs are long, and he is fond of standing on one leg by the edge of the water, or on a stone at the end of some little promontory, tucking the other leg up in the air, and watching the water with his head on one side, ready at any moment to dive his long beak into the lake and snatch a little fish out of it. When he flies he crooks his long neck back on his shoulders and hangs his legs straight out behind, so that it is impossible not to know him when you see him.

In the little harbour, where our boat is kept, there are often so many minnows that when we look into the water it seems as if the bottom were made of moving tiny fish. People who are going to fish for perch often catch the minnows dozens at a time in nets in their boathouses, when the water is shallow, and the minnows swim up into the shadows of the boats. And there are caddises there too, if we choose the right places to look for them.

As we walk down through the fields from the farm to the boathouse, the Imp and the Elf leaping for joy in themselves, and the sunshine, and the cool wind, and the blue hills, we plan what we shall do with the day, and where we shall go, and whom of the lake people we shall try to see. And one morning or other, as we leave the farmyard, the Imp cries out, "I say, Ogre, isn't to-day the day for a picnic down the lake?" And the Elf says, "Yes. Say yes, Ogre, do," and in three minutes we are all as happy as pioneers arranging an expedition. After lunch we start, and by that time the sandwiches are cut, and the bun-loaves, and the marmalade, and the tea (hot and corked up in a bottle), and the mugs, and everything else are all packed into two baskets by the jolly old farmer's wife, and we go off together, the Imp and the Elf carrying one basket between them, while I carry the other.

We run the boat out of the boathouse, and when we have settled down, the Elf and the baskets in the stern, and the Imp lying flat on his stomach in the bows, we slip away down the lake rippling the smooth waters, and leaving long wavelets behind us that make the hills and trees dance in their reflections. We glide quietly away down the lake, looking up to the purple heather on the moors, and the dark pinewoods that run right down to the water's edge, and watching the fishermen rowing up and down trailing their lines behind them, or casting again and again over the waters of the little rocky bays that break the margin of the lake. That is one way of being interested in the water people; to want to catch them on a hook at the end of a line, but it is not our way. We think of the water folk as we think of the fairies, as of a strange small people, whom we would like to know.

We row down the lake, lazily and slowly, past rocky bays and sharp-nosed promontories, and low points pinnacled with firs. The hills change as we row. At the head of the lake they are rugged and high, with black crags on them far away, but lower down the lake they are not so rough. There are fewer rocks and more heather, and the hills are gentler and less mountainous, until at last at the foot of the lake they open into a broad flat valley, where the river runs to the sea. A little more than half way down there is an island that we can see, a green dot in the distance, from our farmhouse windows, and here we have our tea.

We run the boat carefully aground in a pebbly inlet at one end of the island. We take the baskets ashore, and camp in the shadow of a little group of pines. There is no need to tell you what a picnic tea is like. You know quite well how jolly it is, and how the bun-loaf tastes better than the finest cake, and the sandwiches disappear as if by magic, and the tea seems to have vanished almost as soon as the cork is pulled from the bottle.

As soon as tea is over we prowl over the rockinesses of the little island, and creep among the hazels and pines and tiny oaks and undergrowth. Do you know trees never look so beautiful as when you get peeps of blue water between their fluttering leaves? When we have picked our way through to the other end, we climb upon a high rock with a flat top to it, and heather growing in its crevices; and here we lie, torpid after our tea, and pretend that we are viking-folk from the north who have forced our way here by land and sea, and are looking for the first time upon a lake that no one knew before us. The Imp tells us a story of how he fought with a red-haired warrior, and how they both fell backwards into the sea, and how he killed the other man dead, and then came home to change his wet clothes, long, long ago in the white north. And the Elf, not to be beaten, has her story, too, how she rode on a dragon one night and saw the lake--this very lake--far away beneath her, like a shining shield with a blue island boss in the middle of it. And how the fiery dragon flapped down so that she could pick a scrap of heather from the island, and how here was the very heather that she picked. And then I tell them stories, too, of the old times, when the great fires were lit on the crests of the hills, as warning signals to people far away. And so the time slips away, and we suddenly find that we are ready to row on again to have just one peep at the river.

All round the low end of the lake there are tall reeds growing and bulrushes, and there is soft marshy ground that make damp islets among the reeds. As we row down we are nearly sure to see one or two big white birds with proud necks swimming slowly along the reeds. Sometimes we have seen them rise into the air with a great whirring of wings and splashing of water, and then sink again on the surface of the lake, beating up a long mane of foam as they fall. These are the swans, and on one of the islets in the reeds they have a nest; more than once, when I have been here earlier in the year, I have seen the mother swan sitting white and stately on her home, and then the little grey cygnets break out of the eggs and swim with their parents, looking so fluffy and dirty and odd that the Imp and Elf can hardly believe that some day they will turn out to be tall swans like the big white birds they love, who swim through the water like the ships of a fairy queen.

The river flows away out of the lake through a broad opening in the reeds. We row in there, and then let ourselves drift, just guiding the boat with gentle strokes of the oar, until we leave the reeds behind us, and move on the running river between green banks, thick with bush and rough with rocks. Here on the banks we sometimes see the remains of a dead fish half pulled to pieces. We know what that means, "The otter," says the Imp, and we stare about with eyes wider than before, doing our best to imagine in very stir in the bushes or under the banks that we can see his dark body, like a beaver, for he can swim in the water and dive like a fish, and run along the bank as well. But we have never seen him, though we know that he is there. And otters are growing fewer and fewer. Every year men and women with dogs come to hunt them and kill them. Some day there will be no otters left at all.

We wait in the river till the evening, and then set out to row the long way back again. As we row up the river into the lake again we can see the trout rising in big circles of ripples, and hear the peewits screaming on the marshland. It is odd how we seem to notice sounds at evening that we should not at other times. Everything seems so quiet that little noises seem to matter. When we hear the frogs croaking we do not think how loud they are, but only how silent is everything-else. It is evening now, when we row round the promontory at the low end of the lake, and already we are wondering if we shall get home before the owls begin to call. Long ago the Imp and the Elf should have been asleep in bed.