“Cooking?” echoed Nibble and Doctor Muskrat.
“Bare bones and broken biscuits!” sniffed Watch. “I can’t explain that to you any more than I can explain about the buzzers to Tommy Peele. But I can show them to him—and I’d better.” So off he set with his tail drooping because he was puzzled.
“It isn’t so very queer that Tommy Peele’s own dog can’t tell him that Grandpop Snapping Turtle ate Silvertip, when you really come to think about it,” observed Nibble Rabbit thoughtfully. “Tommy can’t even talk to the tame beasts. That’s why Watch has to take him all the way down here to the pond to show him these striped buzzers before he’ll understand who bit Trailer. But I don’t see why Watch can’t tell us what Tommy did to Grandpop Snapping Turtle. They certainly didn’t put an ugly thing like that in any cage.”
“There!” exclaimed Doctor Muskrat. “He can’t make us understand what he’s talking about because we Woodsfolk haven’t the words for things we’ve never seen. Those man-words Watch uses don’t mean anything to us. You talk about a cage. I don’t know what you mean and you can’t even tell me.”
“Why, a cage,” Nibble began—“a cage is a sort of a cave, only it isn’t in the ground. It bites like wood, but it doesn’t look like any tree I ever saw, and it has something in front of it that you can see through and the wind can blow through, but you can’t jump through it.” Now we might guess that was a packing-box with a big open front of chicken-wire. But even Nibble couldn’t be sure of wood when its bark was off.
“Um-hm!” grinned Doctor Muskrat. “A cave that isn’t in the ground? Wood that isn’t in a tree? What does that mean?”
Nibble laughed at himself. To one of the Woodsfolk it did sound foolish.
“Now if a cage is like a barn, only little,” said the doctor, “I can think about it. I’ve seen a barn from the outside, and if it’s hollow like a tree I can guess what the inside is like.”
“It is! It is!” Nibble cried. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Then Grandpop Snapping Turtle can’t live in one. He can’t eat unless he’s under water. Watch says Tommy’s cooking him. I don’t know what that means, either, but I can guess. Tommy eats him. There isn’t anything that hasn’t someone who eats it and no one else can eat Grandpop unless Tommy Peele does.”