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He drew it out swiftly and drove it twice into the fieldmouse’s unprotected body.

Why, having become mountain lions, should they continue to practise what upheld them when they were fieldmice?

Not a sound broke the silence, for the sea-gulls had vanished with the sunshine, and not even a fieldmouse stirred in the bracken.

In "Tinsel", Robertson urges us to "Tune to the frequency of the wood and you'll hear / the deer, breathing; a muscle, tensing; the sigh / of a fieldmouse under an owl".

Even the grasshopper in the ditch, and a fieldmouse scurrying in alarm through the tall blades of corn, hardly broke the stillness.