“Danger! Come along!” he thumped with his little hind feet. “This way! It’s all clear ahead!” he flashed in rabbity signals from his puffy tail. And he dashed off down the Broad Field.
But Tommy Peele didn’t follow. You see he didn’t understand that sort of talk. He just turned and looked after Nibble, saying to himself, “I wish that little bunny wasn’t so skeery. Wonder if I couldn’t tame him?”
Nibble made a proper triangle and brought up under a thorn bush in the fence row before he dared to look behind him. And then his heart gave an awful bump. For there stood Tommy Peele in his red mittens, exactly where Nibble had left him. He had turned around so he could watch Nibble. And Silvertip was creeping up behind him! The wind was blowing straight from Silvertip to Tommy, warning him as plainly as it had warned Nibble two minutes before, but Tommy didn’t pay any attention. “Poor Man,” Nibble almost sobbed. “You won’t listen to the wind and you won’t listen to me— I wish your mother were here to take care of you.” He said that because he was still so lonely for his own mammy.
Silvertip sniffed about the first corn shock. Then he crept along, pretty carefully, to the one where the owls had found him, and Nibble had given his party. Suddenly he caught sight of Tommy Peele, red mittens, tall rubber boots, and all, standing with his back to him. And he leaped—but he leaped the other way as fast as ever he could. And Nibble wanted to kick up his heels with joy, because he knew something Silvertip was afraid of. But Tommy Peele never knew anything at all about it.
Nibble hid behind a fence post
Just about the time Silvertip’s tail dusted the middle rail of the fence, Tommy decided to follow the bunny and see where he had gone to. Nibble had been calling him to run away from Silvertip a minute or two before, but now he didn’t wait for Tommy Peele. “If that wicked fox is so frightened,” he said to himself, “I can’t be too careful. But I don’t see what he could do to me; he hasn’t any claws and he most certainly can’t run.”
Of course Tommy had to wade slowly through the snow while Nibble could go skimming and skipping over the top of it. So the little rabbit just went a short way farther and hid behind a fence post.
Tommy tramped and trudged until he had followed the bunny tracks to where Nibble had hidden in the bush. “Oh, ho!” said Nibble at last. “That Man doesn’t hunt like the Woodsfolk. Glider the Blacksnake could only smell, not see, where I had gone. This creature can see, and not smell. I’ve got to stop making tracks in this snow.”
He looked all around. Then he saw that he was in another field, farther from the Woods than he had ever dared to come. Cattle were walking about in it, dragging their feet the way they do, and ploughing away the snow with their broad black noses to get at the frosty grass. So Nibble danced down a sprawly cow track where his soft feet wouldn’t leave any trace. And then he jumped over to a small grey stone with a little peaked snow cap on it and snuggled up so close that he looked like a part of it. And Tommy Peele walked right by and never saw him.