“But when he woke up he began to think again. And by this time he could think of several things he wanted. So he started out to find how he’d get them. And it didn’t take him long to discover that he got his fur because Mother Nature gave it to him; or to learn not to hunt her up where she was busy trying to put things in order in this half of the world again.
“She was fairly discouraged at the way the sun and the wind and the rain had spoiled it and disgusted at the way some of her creatures had been behaving—’specially the wolves, for eating the poor cows, you know. So the First Skunk didn’t dare to trouble her; he just sat there listening. And he thought and thought, until his head was tired, for the Things-from-under-the-Earth aren’t used to thinking. Perhaps that’s why they always stay Bad Ones——”
“It is!” Stripes interrupted. “It certainly is.” And his little low ears were so pricked up over the idea that he didn’t look snaky and sneaky any more, but just nice and pert and interested.
“Well, anyway,” continued Doctor Muskrat, “at last the First Skunk crept up close and whined, ‘Won’t you have the earth fixed up the way it was before very long? I want to ask something before you’re all done.’
“‘I can’t do that,’ she answered sadly, ‘because it’s been lived, so it can’t be done over again. I’ll have to do the best I can with things as they are. But who are you?’ She didn’t know him at all because he was so different from the last time she’d seen him. But she knew right off from his ears that she’d never made him.
“‘I’m the skunk,’ he answered. ‘This is my new fur you gave me this morning!’ And then wasn’t she angry—angry with herself and angry with him! It was hard enough to have the sun and the rain and the wind be so careless that they let winter come, without having some of the Bad Ones stay up from under the earth to hunt her poor beasts all through it. If they had only scales on they couldn’t, but here was one with fur. Just because she was so hurried and flustered she hadn’t stopped to think what she’d been saying when she said ‘any one’ could have it.
“But the First Skunk didn’t know how she felt about it. He was so pert and proud because he’d been thinking a little. He said, ‘I like the way you want things. I want to be good and live up here in the sun with your own creatures instead of going back down under the Earth-that-is-common-to-all.’
“‘Well, be good, then,’ she snapped. She really didn’t believe him.
“‘But,’ he argued, ‘someone will have to show me how.’ You see her own creatures were all made good, and they had to learn how to be bad from the Bad Ones. A Bad One may want ever so much to be good, but he hasn’t any idea where to begin.
“She didn’t stop to think of that. She thought he was just making excuses, so she said, ‘You can stay up all winter now that you’ve got fur. I don’t see why you need anything else.’