Dot woke up, which was a mistake.
She was a dormouse, and it was December, and a dormouse in December has no business being awake at all. She had gone to bed in October, properly, in the nest she had made at the foot of the hazel, under the leaf litter, with the last of the nuts eaten and her tail round her face, and she had meant to stay there until the primroses. That was the arrangement. That was what dormice did.
But something had changed, and it had changed enough to reach her, all the way down where she was, and she surfaced, slowly, the way you come up through deep water, and lay in the dark with her eyes shut and tried to work out what it was.
It was the quiet.