“Shucks!” sniffed Nibble, carelessly flopping his ears. “No Man ever comes here unless it’s Tommy Peele. And he’s such a little one, who’s afraid of him?”
“I am.” And Doctor Muskrat stroked his whiskers with his paw. “You can’t judge the size of his jaw by the size of his trail, nor know how far he’ll reach out to bite you!”
But Nibble merely twiddled his tail to show how little he cared for a whole flock of Tommy Peeles. While Tommy had him in a cage up by the barn Tommy had been good to him. And none of the tame beasts were afraid of Tommy Peele. “He hasn’t any teeth to speak of,” Nibble protested, “and he hasn’t any claws. He couldn’t hurt any one. I’ve been right in his very paws, so I know.”
“Yes, you have,” agreed Doctor Muskrat. “And how did you get there? Didn’t he reach out and catch you when he was the whole length of the pasture away?”
And this time Nibble didn’t feel like twiddling his tail. It was perfectly true. He knew that somehow Tommy had been the one who made that dreadful wire snatch him into the air. And he hadn’t quite forgotten how it all but squeezed the life right out of him when he swung there. It hadn’t felt in the least like the soft touch of Tommy’s hand. So he asked with a little shiver, “What are those jaws like, Doctor Muskrat?”
“They’re harder than bone, and colder than stone. They never miss, and they never let go,” said the wise old Muskrat very earnestly. And that’s the truth about a muskrat trap. It’s just a pair of steel jaws, harder than bone and colder than stone, exactly as he said. And they’re worked by a terrible spring. They never miss because the spring won’t snap unless a beast steps right between them. And they won’t let go again until the Man opens the spring again. No beast can ever learn that. Because no beast has ever imagined that they weren’t a part of the Man.
“And a Man can have a whole pack of those jaws,” the old doctor went on. “They’ll hide out in the leaves where you can’t see or hear them; sometimes you just sniff the faintest chilly smell on them. They’re worse than a whole pack of Silvertips because you can see and hear and SMELL him.”
“How awful!” breathed Nibble. “It isn’t fair!”
“Well, Mother Nature wasn’t fair to Man in the First-Off Beginning,” argued the wise old beast. “The cows complained and got their horns, and so did a lot of others, but Man wouldn’t complain. It’s a law that when a beast invents anything for himself he has a right to use it. So you can’t blame Man for using anything.”
“Well,” said Nibble thankfully, “I’m glad Tommy Peele doesn’t use those jaws.”