I guess Louie’s father would have been pretty s’prised to know Tad thought he was trying to kill his very own little son. He didn’t mean to hurt Louie--he just thought that Louie ought to obey him like Watch the Dog obeyed Tommy Peele. Watch wanted awfully to fight with Tad Coon because of what Tad did to Trailer the Hound, but Tommy just wouldn’t let him. Louie wanted to take some corn for his coon, and he just went ahead and took it anyway, even if his father forbade him. Watch knew you ought to obey, but even he couldn’t have explained to Tad Coon about it. Louie knew, deep down inside, but he didn’t want to believe it. He was still angry.
Tad Coon thought and thought. By and by he said, “Maybe our boy’s mother knows what’s best for him. They mostly do. Maybe he couldn’t go wild. He hasn’t a lick of fur to his skin. What would he do in the winter time? Bury himself in the mud like a frog? Eh?”
“Find himself one of those little trees of skin, like the red men Stripes Skunk told us about,” answered the doctor. “Stripes might remember where they got them.” He meant the skin tents the Indians used and he didn’t know that they had to kill great big buffaloes and tan their skins; he thought they just hunted for them like Tad hunts for a hollow tree to sleep in.
“I’m afraid they’re all gone, like those red men,” said Tad. “None of us have ever seen one.” And he was sort of lonesome till the middle of the afternoon, when who should come trotting back to the pond but Louie! And Tad was just as glad to see him as Louie had been to find Tad had come back to his old cage again.
CHAPTER X
THE RULES OF TENTS
No one in all the Woods and Fields could understand how Louie Thomson came to be back with them again. But here he was, and you ought to have seen what he brought with him! He brought some carrots out of his mother’s very own garden, and some corn bread out of her kitchen, and some sugar in a little bitty paper bag for the birds because he couldn’t bring them any grain, and he brought a blanket. His mother just must have given those things to him. Maybe Tad Coon was right when he said mothers know what is best for their little ones. Maybe his mother thought it was good for little boys to go wild if they wanted to in the summer-time--quite as good for them as hoeing corn in the hot sun.
Of course they had a feast. Doctor Muskrat was awfully taken up with that corn bread. He couldn’t imagine where it was grown. He kind of thought maybe housefolk made it out of pollen. You remember the wasps told him that the yellow dust you get on your nose when you smell a water lily was the bread they fed their little grubby young ones.
But didn’t Stripes Skunk just love that blanket! Louie knew it would be hot if he tried to sleep inside it. He didn’t want to be rolled up tight like a bug in a cocoon. A cocoon is the little silky blanket a caterpillar makes himself to go to sleep in. That may be nice for caterpillars, even in the summer time, but Louie made himself a tent instead. He slanted a long stick from the crotch of Tad Coon’s tree to the ground and hung the blanket over that. Then he spread out the corners and held them down with big flat stones. That was tent enough for him. But the woodsfolk just wouldn’t let it alone; they are so curious!
Stripes was perfectly delighted. He hadn’t ever seen a real skin tent like the Indians made, he’d only heard about them. This wasn’t much like any skin he knew about, but it smelled kind of furry, and he could see Louie meant to live in it. So he called his three kittens, because he wanted to explain the rule of tents to them. And of course curious old Tad Coon and Nibble Rabbit’s bunnies came, too, and sniffed and burrowed and poked their noses into all the wrinkly places and nibbled the fuzz till it set them sneezing.
“The rule of tents is that every night at sundown we skunks must look into every corner and see that there’s no one inside to disturb our man when he’s sleeping,” said Stripes. He meant snakes and mice and beetles--creepy-crawly things.