Louie watched him for quite a while before he thought about it himself. Then he said: “You poor old rat. Never mind, I’ll pay you back.” And he waded right in among the cattails, scaring ’bout a dozen turtles who were sitting on a log, and grubbed up another root that had the same kind of leaves on it. He put that one on the stone where he’d found the one he ate.
Doctor Muskrat just blinked in surprise. He came out and sniffed it. He tasted it. “Why, that boy’s awfully clever. He’s found the right one first thing,” said he to himself. “Wonder if he could do it again?” So this time he went after another kind of a root.
Louie came up close and looked at it. Then he hunted and hunted until he found the kind of a plant it grew on. It was a big juicy mallow, the kind the doctor gave Nibble Rabbit that very first day when he found the little bunny in his cattails. You know how good that was! He laid it out on the flat stone and waited for Doctor Muskrat to taste it so he’d be sure it was the right one.
Wasn’t Doctor Muskrat pleased? Just wasn’t he! He called: “Tad, Tad Coon. This is the smartest boy I ever saw. He’s learning faster than any youngster I ever taught. If he doesn’t take to hunting us, these woods and fields will be just like Mother Nature made the world in the First-Off Beginning of Things.”
“O-ho!” said Tad, waddling over to see what was going on. “We’ll just have to show him what’s right and what isn’t--like we showed Stripes Skunk. I don’t believe he knows a bit more about it. I don’t guess he ever meant to be bad.”
“Yes,” agreed Doctor Muskrat, “but we mustn’t show him all our secrets right away; he might get caught again. I don’t want him carrying any tales back to that man he lived with. He knows enough already.”
Just then they pricked up their ears. Clump, clump, clump, came Louie’s father down the lane. Louie pricked up his ears, too. He knew his father would be angry because he had to drive up the cows himself. He knew what his father would do if he caught his little runaway son. Down he dropped on his hands and knees and crawled up the widest tunnel where Tad Coon creeps into Nibble Rabbit’s Pickery Things. He hid right in the very spot where Nibble hid the Red Cow’s bad baby. And his father couldn’t find hide nor hair of any one.
Tad chuckled to Doctor Muskrat: “He isn’t going to get caught again.”
And Louie didn’t, either. It was fun down by Doctor Muskrat’s pond, even if you were only a little boy instead of a furry wild thing--or a feathery one. When the sun grew warm, all the furry folk found themselves nice cool nests and went back to snooze again. Even the birds were quiet.
Louie wasn’t quite as comfortable as the rest because he didn’t have any fur--his legs were bare, and the mosquitoes bothered him--and he didn’t have any dark hole where he could crawl in and hide from them. But he was pretty smart, all the same. He didn’t try to hide in the bushes because all the little bugs who were taking their naps on the under side of the leaves woke up and buzzed around him. He lay out under Tad Coon’s tree, where the wind blew them right past, and covered himself with some nice flat branches after he’d shaken the bugs out of them. That certainly amused Tad Coon.