“Tried to ride the red heifer,” answered Chirp Sparrow.
“But I didn’t! Indeed I didn’t!” cried the little rabbit. “Silvertip was chasing me, so I jumped back from my trail on to a log. I was going to slip down behind it and run away as soon as he had gone past, so he wouldn’t smell me on the ground. That’s what we always do. But something happened.”
“So it seems,” replied Chirp Sparrow in an amused voice. “Don’t you know what it was?”
“Not yet,” said Nibble, “My head’s still whirling.”
“I should think it might be,” laughed Chirp. And the other sparrows seemed to think it was so funny they all started to giggle and talk at once, which made Nibble’s head whirl harder than ever.
“Hush!” Chirp ordered. “I want to tell him myself. Well, that log you hopped up on was a cow. She was taking a nap and you woke her up. When she started to get up you dug your claws into her so she switched her tail—I wish you could have seen yourself. You went tumbling over and over like a curly thorn leaf in a west wind.” And he stopped to laugh again.
“But Silvertip?” asked Nibble anxiously.
“Yes, Silvertip was the funniest of all.” Chirp shook himself so he could sober up to tell the rest of it. “The cow looked all around to see who had been disturbing her and there was Silvertip. So she must have blamed it on him. You ought to have seen her chase him. Silly thing. He just tumbled through the fence, any old way, and made off, but she thinks she’s still after him.”
Sure enough, Nibble could see the red heifer with her swishy tail stuck straight up in the air, waving the tasselly tip of it, leaping and mooing and snorting at the other end of the field.
“I thought that was a queer log,” he said thoughtfully. “It made my toes all warm and there wasn’t any snow on top of it. But it had such a nice safe, warm-hole sort of a smell, with little clovery whiffs mixed in with it. Cows must be awfully dangerous!”