Now the real reason why Star Nose happened to be occupying such a grand apartment alone was this. Last June he had chanced to meet and select for his mate a little silver-coated mole. But one of his plain, shrew mole cousins had upset all his well laid plans. Happening to meet Star Nose and his companion just outside their burrow, he actually tried to persuade her to go off with him. This was entirely too much for Star Nose to stand; it made him so furiously angry and jealous that he fell upon the impudent shrew, and right there under the home bush they had a dreadful battle. Long and hard they fought there; they scratched and tore and bit each other's beautiful fur coats until they were in tatters, uttering fierce squeaks of rage, rolling over and over in a deadly grip, each mole quite determined to win little Silver Coat, while she, poor thing, sat stupidly by, wondering what it all meant. As she sat there shaking gently, old Golden Eyes, the hawk, went sailing overhead, and making one swift lunge downward bore her away. Neither Star Nose nor his antagonist noticed that she was missing; they kept on with their awful fight, biting each other savagely, as they had in the beginning, until finally the shrew had to give up; he was getting the worst of it, and crawled miserably away. Then Star Nose, for the first time remembering what the fight had been about, searched vainly for his little companion. He peered anxiously everywhere, nosing the earth on all sides and searching; then, thinking perhaps she had gone down into the burrow, down he scurried, peering up and down the long roads and galleries, calling softly to her with little muffled squeaks; this because of the earth which sometimes filled his nostrils. In vain he searched. He did not find Silver Coat. Discouraged and worn out on account of his terrific struggles, he gave up, huddled himself in a soft little ball, covered his head with his flat claws, and took a long sleep in the main chamber of his home, hoping to forget his troubles. All that summer Star Nose lived alone, and so he became a kind of hermit mole. Of course he was not so very happy; in fact his disposition had become sadly changed. So upset was he by the loss of his little mate that he felt disagreeable with everything which happened to cross his path. Sometimes, so fiercely jealous and full of hate was he that he would enter the subways of the shrew family when they were away, and when he came across a nest full of baby shrews would bite and kill them viciously, in the meanest way. Finally all the shrews for miles about dreaded the approach of old Star Nose and avoided his trails. Even the sight of his star-tipped snout seen breaking through the earth, on a moonlight night, would put them in a panic and they would scurry away. Star Nose cared nothing for them. He now laid all his troubles to the shrew tribe and so planned in this unjust way to get even with them.