“How many families have you raised, anyway?” Nibble wanted to know.
“This is the first,” smiled Silk-ears. “Aren’t they lovely bunnies for the first ones? But I’ve had a wise old mother rabbit, who’s raised ever and ever so many, to show me how. That was one reason I stayed here. And the other reason is that you couldn’t have helped me. We’re not like the birds. I don’t need your help to feed them and you leave a trail that’s ever so much plainer than mine. You’d have insisted on coming to see them and then Slyfoot the Mink would have followed you and found them. That’s why we mother rabbits always hide them away, even from you, until they’re big enough to run.”
Then wasn’t Nibble sorry he’d been cross! “I might have known you had a good reason,” he said. “You’re so clever.” He said it just as though she’d thought of it all by herself. And the minute those bunny babies heard he wasn’t angry any more they began to come closer and closer. One of them patted his white tail that was so much bigger than its own little puffy wisp, and another cuddled right up to him.
CHAPTER II
NEW HOUSEHOLDS IN THE WOODS AND FIELDS
My, but Nibble was proud of his little bunnies! He wanted to take them back to the pond, right away quick, and show them to Doctor Muskrat. But Silk-ears, his mate, was quite stubborn about going. “No,” she said. “The old mother rabbit who told me how to raise them said that pond wasn’t a good place at all. She was there last year. Every one of her bunnies disappeared the minute they left the nest. Hooter the Owl got one, and Glider the Blacksnake got another, and Silvertip the Fox caught the third, and the last one just disappeared. She thinks Slyfoot the Mink found him while she was digging a new hole. She meant to leave him the old hole to live in. He was a very scary little bunny.”
Nibble pricked up his ears. “She went to dig a new hole, did she?” he asked. “Why was that?”
“Why, because she was going to raise a new family, of course, and she couldn’t have him tracking out and in.”
“How silly I was,” said Nibble. “Now I see why the stars said in my Fortune that Doctor Muskrat told me: ‘By dawn and by dusk you shall travel alone.’ I was plenty old enough to begin without any telling. And ‘All troubles are yours excepting your own.’ I was so busy getting rid of other people’s troubles that my own went with them. Now the Hooters have gone, and Silvertip, and Glider, and even Slyfoot doesn’t live there.” Nibble never thought that maybe wise old Doctor Muskrat had something to do with that fortune.
Of course his mate didn’t understand what he was talking about; she didn’t know any of the things he’d done. But she did know that he just insisted on talking to that wise old mother rabbit.
Of course you’ve guessed it before this--that wise old rabbit was Nibble’s own Mammy Bunny. He was down by the pond when she came back to see how he was getting along. She’d never think of going to ask Doctor Muskrat about him. He told her all the stories he hadn’t told Silk-ears and she shook her head when he told her that Tommy Peele was his special friend. She didn’t like boys a bit. I don’t think she really believed when he told her about Tommy’s dog, Watch, and Trailer the Hound. But then, mothers don’t know all about everything. They now what’s best for little bunnies, but you can’t expect them to know more than a great big grown-up rabbit like Nibble.