"If you don't wipe that sneer off your face," Andy threatened, "I'll turn you into a genuine muskrat-hide glove!"
He picked up a pebble and was about to plunk it into the water near Four-Leaf when Clover's head broke water. Behind her, in formation so precise that they seemed to have drilled for it, came an even dozen small copies of herself. Andy dropped the pebble and a broad smile lighted his face.
"Glory be! Darned if we'uns haven't got ourselves some babies!"
His dejection melted like mist before the rising sun. Happily he pulled on his boots and went into the swamp. He'd lost half his original stock and still had six more muskrats than he'd started with. Reaching the slough where the cautious pair lived, Andy crouched quietly in the grass beside it.
A half hour later, they appeared with ten babies, and when Andy passed the sloughs inhabited by lone muskrats whose mates had been killed, he was amazed to find each of them with eight young. Obviously, both females had survived.
Jubilantly, Andy threw his hat into the air, and when he reached home he went carefully over his plans for the future. If he forgot about the new rifle he had intended to give himself for Christmas and made his old clothes last a while longer, he could buy twenty more mated pairs. The next morning he walked into town and mailed his order.
A week later, while patrolling the swamp to inspect his various colonies of muskrats, Andy saw a great horned owl flying low over the grass with what appeared to be a black muskrat in its talons. Suddenly the victim twisted about to attack its captor.
When they came nearer, Andy saw, to his vast astonishment, that the supposed muskrat was a black kitten!