From the place where he was sitting he could look down on the green fields of the farm, and he thought of what his mother had said about such places.
“Now, why did mamma say that? Why shouldn’t I go looking for eggs down along those fences on the farm?”
And just as he was saying this all to himself, what should he hear but the song of a strange bird: “Cock-a-doodle-doo-oo-oo”; coming from far, far away and from the direction of the farmhouse.
“My, did you ever hear a bird sing so loud?” said the cublet to himself. “What a big bird it must be! And its eggs must be the size of a cocoanut!”
“Cock-a-doodle-doo-oo-oo,” came the bird’s song again. The hungry little raccoon just couldn’t do without one of those eggs the size of a cocoanut. The bird was singing somewhere off to the right. So he made a short cut through the woods toward the field on the other side.
The sun was setting, but the raccoon cub ran with his tail in the air. At last he came to the edge of the woods, and looked down again into the fields.
“Cock-a-doodle-doo-oo-oo!”
Not far away now he could see the farmhouse. There was a man in the yard. The man was wearing long boots, and leading a horse by the bridle into a barn. On the fence in the barnyard, the little raccoon saw his bird.
“What a silly little ’coon I am,” he said to himself. “That isn’t a bird! That’s a rooster! Mamma showed him to me one day, when we were on top of a big tree up in the woods. Roosters have a fine song; and they have a great many hens that lay sweet eggs. I think I could eat a dozen of those eggs, right now!”
For some time the little raccoon sat looking at the rooster and the barn and the farmhouse, and thinking of what his mother had said. But at last he thought: “Mamma is far away! She will never know”; and he made up his mind that as soon as it was dark he would run down to that hen coop and see what he could find.