Bumper searched on every side for over an hour, but so artfully concealed was the entrance to the burrow that he was unsuccessful. There was no noise under the rock—nothing to indicate that there were rabbits there.
Discouraged and down-hearted, he was nearly ready to give up when he happened to poke his head in the hollow end of a tree whose roots were pinioned down by the huge rock. The small heart of the trunk had decayed, offering an entrance just large enough for a rabbit to squeeze through.
Bumper thought this would be a safe place for him to spend the night, and he began crawling through. The hole followed the trunk of the tree downward for some distance. Then suddenly it turned sharply to the right.
At this point Bumper met an unexpected challenge. A big, gray rabbit at the other end of the hollow trunk thumped hard with his two hind feet, and instantly there was an uproar. Bumper had accidentally found his way into the burrow through the hollow tree trunk!
"Stop where you are!" the rabbit guarding the hole shouted. "What do you want in here?"
"I want to greet my cousins. If you don't let me come in Mr. Fox will catch me after dark. I have no other home."
"You're not a rabbit!" replied the other. "We have no white cousins. There're no white rabbits in the world."
"But I'm one," returned Bumper, amused by the same cry that had been made by the crow and birds.
There was silence inside, followed by a buzz of many voices. Finally a weak, trembling voice said authoritatively:
"Admit him! It can't be Mr. Fox in disguise, for he could never crawl through that hole. Admit him so I can talk to him."