“Don’t flutter yourself,” Chirp assured him. “Tommy never takes sides between his friends. Though why he’s friends with that cat, when he knows the things she does, is more than I can tell you. You’ll have to ask Watch the Dog about it.”
Sure enough, when Tommy came back to the barn, he put out a handful of feed for his rabbit, just as though there hadn’t been the least bit of trouble. And his eyes didn’t open so very wide when Silk-ears and all her bunnies began to pop out from under the mangers and inside the hay and beneath the box he used for a milking-stool. And he didn’t have to look at the dust on their whiskers to know they’d been dipping into the cows’ breakfast. Some of the cows were telling him so.
But it doesn’t take much to start some folks sniffing and moaning. A nice clean bunny-paw never spoiled the Red Cow’s appetite. And the White Cow gave Tommy a nudge while he was milking her that said plain as words: “Isn’t it fun to have Nibble with us again?”
Now Doctor Muskrat and Nibble Rabbit weren’t having any livelier time than Stripes Skunk and his kittens were in the bottom of the haystack, hunting the rats they found there.
A rat is pretty dangerous for a skunk kitten to hunt—as dangerous as though a small boy went hunting bobcats—but it’s the skunk kitten’s business to take chances, and it isn’t the small boy’s.
There aren’t very many rats in the woods; sometimes one goes sneaking down the high grass beside a fence or snoops into a twiggy bush after baby birds in nesting time; sometimes one picks up tadpoles when the muddy ponds they hatched in begin to dry up; but mostly rats live very close to men. (Why they do is a special secret I’ll tell you some winter night.) So you see Stripes Skunk’s kittens hadn’t much chance to deal with such big game. They were awfully proud and excited about it.
It didn’t take the rats in the haystack very long to find it was a very poor place to be. They can eat hay—if they have to—but they can’t live on it like a fieldmouse can. They got hungry. But every time one ventured its whiskers out of a hole, Stripes Skunk’s kittens would pounce on it. It didn’t matter how creepy-crawly quiet they were—a kitten was sure to hear them. At last the wisest of them thought of a plan.
“Greywhisker,” said he, “you take one hole, Brokentooth the next, Scarfoot the next, and Eggeater the last. Each of you will scrabble about inside his burrow as though he meant to run, the minute he is quiet the one to the windy side of him must take his turn. That will keep those striped beasts running round and round the stack. Every third turn, run to the centre and all squeak as though you were fighting. That will keep them interested. They won’t hear me make a brand-new hole, and then we’ll plan how we can sneak out while they aren’t looking.”
Now do you know what that rat (his name was Snatch) meant to do? He meant to keep them all busy while he dug that new hole for himself and then sneak out without telling them. That’s rat for you! They cheat each other just as much as they do anybody else! But the others couldn’t think of any better plan, so they trusted him.
Only they made one mistake. The skunks weren’t running round and round that haystack. They were sitting perfectly still, each one with his nose at a hole. But one after another pricked up his ears as the rat pretended to come out, and dropped them when he scuttled back again. Wise old Papa Stripes was tiptoeing around finding all their trails so if one did get by a kitten he’d know where it was likely to go. “Hm!” he sniffed. “They’re playing a game, are they? We’ll just see who’s IT.”