“He’s gone,” Watch explained. “Tommy let him go. I expect that was because he was a friend of yours.” Of course there was still too much wolf in Watch for him to understand that Tommy had just been sorry for hunting the doctor. But Watch was sure anything that small boy did was wonderful, and reflected forever to his credit.
“But why did he bite him if he didn’t mean to eat him?” Nibble asked in a trembly voice. That was something he never did understand. And Watch didn’t try to. He was cocking his ears to see what next Tommy was going to do.
Tommy yanked the trap loose from the reed clump. And he wasn’t proud of owning it any more. He hated it— quite as much as Nibble or even Doctor Muskrat did. He swung it about his head and threw it splash into the hole Watch had made when he fell through the ice chasing Nibble.
Then he looked at a hole the doctor’s long teeth had slashed in his tall rubber boot. “I don’t care,” he said defiantly. “I don’t care a bit! I hurt him awfully. He had a perfect right to hurt me if he wanted to.”
The teeth hadn’t gone in deep enough really to bite Tommy’s toe, but of course neither Nibble nor Doctor Muskrat ever guessed that. Their hides belong to them and they couldn’t ever imagine that his tall rubber boots weren’t any more a part of Tommy than those steel jaws of his traps were. Watch could, because he sometimes wore a collar, and on very cold nights Tommy covered him up with a blanket, but he never thought of explaining it.
“Clang!” That ugly trap had Dr. Muskrat by the paw.
Then Tommy marched all the way up to the house and got his cap full of the same delicious meal he had given Nibble and the White Cow the day the Red Cow chased him. It was “Thank you” to them for helping him get away from her. He set out two little piles. Then he called: “Here Bunny, Bunny, Bunny!” And that showed Nibble that one of those piles was for him. So Watch was right. It was nice to be Tommy’s rabbit.
And Watch explained: “The other is for your friend the Muskrat. Don’t you eat it.”
As though Nibble would!