Again came that long-drawn cricket sound, echoing from somewhere underneath the rocks. Madly he started digging into the slide-rock, near where the bunny-like creature had disappeared. He might as well have tried to dig a hole through the mountain for all the results he got. The pika was not there.
Pausing to get his breath and cool off, he suddenly espied, sitting calmly watching him, the same gray shadow on the same gray stone.
This time he made an even swifter dash, but again the pika was not there. When Fuzzy became quite worn out, and had curled up in a furry ball to take a nap, the little dweller of the mountain peaks went calmly to work getting in his winter food supply.
Nibbling through the stems of as many flowers and grasses as he could carry in his mouth, he would lay the little bundle neatly on a rock in the sunshine and spread it out to dry. After awhile, when the sun no longer shone on those rocks, he carried his hay to one where it did.
That way, he worked steadily on, all alone on the mountain top. Soon, he knew, would come the biting cold and the banking snow, and he would need enough hay to keep him fat and warm in his den in the rocks.
Once a hawk spied him out as he worked, and made a swoop for him. Yesterday it had been a lion, the day before coyotes. But Pika only slipped in between two rocks where nothing could get at him, and waited till the danger was gone.
When at last the sun grew cool and the little bear awoke, and stretched, Pika was sitting watching him like a gray shadow on a gray rock, but so still he sat, and so silently, that Fuzzy-Wuzz never even dreamed how near he was, but went shambling off down the mountain side in the gathering dusk, while Pika once more sang his cricket song.
CHAPTER XXXI
FUZZY AND THE WEASEL
OF all the curious furry folk that Fuzzy saw that summer, the weasel was the most curious looking little beast.