Orchard Dormice

Overview

Orchard dormice live in the orchards and terrace walls of the Leeward Folds and in the store-rooms of the fold towns when they can get in. They eat fruit on the tree in summer and dried fruit off the shelf in autumn, and a household that finds their droppings among its stores knows its count is already wrong. They are also fattened for the autumn table, and the Halflings see nothing odd in either.

Appearance

An orchard dormouse is about the size of a rat in the body, with a bushy, squirrel-like tail as long again. Its fur is soft and thick, silver-grey above and white below, with a dark ring round each large black eye. Its ears are small and round, its paws pink and nimble, and it climbs with great skill, running up bark and stone and hanging by its hind feet to reach fruit. It is mostly silent, but squeaks and churrs when quarrelling, and it rattles and scrabbles in a store-room roof at night loudly enough to wake a household.

Habitat and Range

They live through the warm orchard slopes of the Folds, nesting in hollow trees, the gaps of the dry-stone retaining walls, and the roofs and walls of store-rooms and drying sheds. They are fewest in the windward folds and the Dry Folds, where there is little fruit.

Behaviour and Temperament

Dormice come out at dusk and feed through the night on fruit, nuts, seeds, buds, and insects. In late summer and autumn they eat until they are nearly round, and then, when the nights grow cold, they curl up in a nest deep in a wall or a hollow tree and sleep the winter through, cold and still, waking only in late spring. They are timid with people and quick to run, but they are bold and persistent with a store-room: they will gnaw through a shutter, squeeze through a crack, and come back to a store they found once.

Life Cycle

Dormice breed in high summer, when fruit is plentiful, and raise one litter of four to six. In a poor fruit year they may not breed at all. They live five or six years, a long life for so small a beast, most of it asleep.

Uses and Dangers

In autumn, as the fold counts its stores, dormice are its worst enemy: a family in a store-room can spoil a shelf of dried fruit and nuts in a few nights, fouling far more than they eat, and the loss shows in the reserve count. Households stop up their store-rooms with stone and clay, keep cats, and set traps along the beams.

The same dormice are a delicacy. Caught in autumn at their fattest, they are kept in clay jars with air holes and fed on nuts and fruit for a few weeks, then roasted with honey or stuffed. A dish of dormice is a feast-table dish, and a fold that serves too many is talked about.

Lore and Belief

Halflings call a dormouse a count-thief, and children are told that a dormouse in the store-room is counting the household's shelves in its sleep and will tell the next fold how much is there. A household that finds dormice in the common reserve at the cistern hall is said to owe the hall a dish of them. The long winter sleep is taken as a sign of a well-kept life: a Halfling who rests deeply after a full harvest is said to sleep like a dormouse, which is praise.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Animals