So I ran forward but stopped when I got within a dozen or fifteen
yards of the hole, thinking it might perhaps be more interesting to
wait and see what would naturally happen without my interference.
While I stood there looking and listening, I heard a great disturbance
going on in the burrow, a mixed lot of keen squeaking, shrieking,
distressful cries, telling that down in the dark something terrible
was being done. Then suddenly out popped a half-grown gopher, four and
a half or five inches long, and, without stopping a single moment to
choose a way of escape, ran screaming through the stubble straight
away from its home, quickly followed by another and another, until
some half-dozen were driven out, all of them crying and running in
different directions as if at this dreadful time home, sweet home, was
the most dangerous and least desirable of any place in the wide world.
Then out came the shrike, flew above the run-away gopher children,
and, diving on them, killed them one after another with blows at the
back of the skull.
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