A countryside mystery for young readers

By Gareth M. Parkes

The harvest had been in for three days and the Cotswold field looked entirely different.

Where the barley had stood head-high all summer — green, then gold, then the deep amber of a field nearly ready — there was now pale stubble stretching to the horizon in every direction, open and quiet in the September morning. The limestone walls along the field margins caught the low sun and glowed the colour of old honey. And the hawthorn hedge between this field and the next, which had been hidden on both sides by barley since May, stood exposed now in the bright air — every detail of it visible, its base a tangle of bramble and herb robert and the last traveller's joy, its middle layers dense with hawthorn and hazel, its berries already turning from green to the first faint red of autumn.

Benji had been walking the field path when he heard the rustling.

Not the startled kind. Not the fleeing kind. The busy kind — the purposeful rustling of something with a plan and a deadline.

He pushed through the longer grass at the hedge base and looked down.

A field mouse was working at extraordinary speed.

She was tiny — the size of a walnut, practically — with enormous dark eyes, round pink ears and a tail longer than her body. She was moving between a small pile of gathered materials at the foot of the hedge and a hollow between two hawthorn roots, carrying, sorting, weaving, all at a pace that made watching her feel like trying to follow a spinning top.

"Hello," said Benji.

"One moment," said the mouse, without looking up.

She completed three more trips — a knot of sheep's wool from where it had caught on the old hedge wire, two dried hawthorn bark curls, a trailing stem of traveller's joy with its soft feathery head intact — then stopped, looked up at Benji with those enormous eyes, and said:

"You're the Sheltie from the valley path. I've seen you from the hedge bottom."

She stuck out a tiny paw. "Mab."

"Benji Booboos," said Benji — his red collar catching the Cotswold morning light — and he touched her paw very carefully with his nose. "What are you building?"

"Rebuilding," she said, already moving again. "Nest was in the old site — in the bank on the far side, where the field meets the wall. The tractor worked right up to the boundary at dawn. Driver didn't know, it's not his fault, but the vibration brought the bank down and the nest is gone." She glanced west at the sky with a quick, practised eye. "Rain coming in from the Severn. The clouds are already stacking over the edge of the escarpment."

Benji looked west. She was right — the sky over the far Cotswold ridge had that particular pressed-down quality, the limestone hills creating their own weather where the valley air met the higher ground.

"How long?" he said.

Mab was already assessing her materials. "You've got a better nose for it than I have."