But up behind the barn Tommy Peele had his first pair of the awful things. He wouldn’t have dreamed of using them on the chickens or Watch the Dog, or even on Nibble Rabbit, because they were friends of his. But he didn’t think any more of using them on a muskrat, that he didn’t know, than the muskrat would have thought of using his sharp teeth on Tommy Peele. And he wanted the muskrat’s skin. Which was perfectly natural because every man has had to use some other creature’s fur since the First-Off Beginning of things—until he got to be friends with them.
CHAPTER XI
THE SINGULAR MISHAP OF DOCTOR MUSKRAT
Don’t you ever believe that a small boy who grows up in the open air like Tommy Peele doesn’t know just as much about the ways of the wild things as any of the wild things know about the ways of men. Only he doesn’t know he knows it. Because he doesn’t have to hunt for every meal as he used to in the First-Off Beginning. And the only way you find out what you really do know, deep down inside you, is to use it. All the same, the very day Tommy Peele got out his trap was the day the muskrats began their spring running. He hadn’t seen their footprints, even yet, but that something deep down inside him told him it was time to expect them.
That trap wasn’t a very good one. He got it from Louis Thomson, who had a lot that he set out all through other people’s woods where he thought the other people wouldn’t catch him, because he wasn’t quite satisfied to hunt just on his own. And he knew this particular trap was slow because it was all rusty, and it hadn’t a good spring. But he made Tommy give him a two-bladed knife and his big glass shooter and twenty cents to boot. For the Red Cow wasn’t the only one who was greedy.
But Tommy oiled it and cleaned it and got it to work. And he specially showed it to Watch the Dog and told him to be very careful not to sniff around and get his nose in it. And Watch spread himself out beside Tommy while Tommy worked. Watch snoozed contentedly in the sun and flopped his tail whenever Tommy talked to him. For the weather was beginning to grow warmer. The thaw that the poor partridge had wanted so badly had come.
Down by the pond the ice was getting so soft that Nibble didn’t dare thump on it to call Doctor Muskrat. And he wanted to call him a great deal of the time. For he knew the wise old doctor was very careful about making tracks near his warm spring. But all sorts of careless young muskrats were wandering up and down the stream. They said it was mating time, and they were trying to find some lady muskrat who would be foolish enough to start housekeeping then. They ran in and out among the willows, gnawing and digging and making the plainest sort of trail, and then they would flop with their muddy feet right into the drinking hole.
I can tell you it made Nibble angry enough. He didn’t fancy drinking after them, but they didn’t pay any attention to him. And Chaik the Jay got into such a rage that he forgot he should have kept quiet there. He perched on the tallest bulrush and cursed and squalled at them. But when Doctor Muskrat heard the rumpus and lifted his head up through the ice, with his long teeth showing between his gray whiskers, they scuttled off as though Silvertip himself were after them.
And then the old doctor would fume. “The Mink take them and their love-making, the silly young things! What’s the sense of disturbing the whole marsh just because they want everyone to know they’re old enough to dig a nursery? Eh?” He forgot that he’d done the very same thing in his own first spring.
But Nibble thought they were having a mighty good time over it all. Only he wished they wouldn’t leave quite so many tracks for Tommy Peele to find.
And the very next day there came Tommy, splashing through the big puddles in his tall rubber boots, sloshing through the last of the snowdrifts, and whistling a lively tune. And Nibble pricked up his ears to listen. Because he thought that maybe Tommy was on a spring wandering of his own, and this was his mating song. For he never dreamed that whole generations of bunnies and muskrats and piping birds would grow old and die before Tommy even thought of such a thing.