“Hail, Sharptooth!” began the hop-toad in his deep scary croak that rumbled like thunder in the back of his stony cave. “Have you come to hear your fortune? You have come in time. There were signs and omens brewing in the battle between the frost and the rain this morning.”
Now the weasel didn’t know what an omen was—it’s a sort of bad news, like the dark clouds that foretold the Big Rain and the Terrible Storm. He doesn’t sit by the week like the Hop-toad does, just thinking and remembering things. He hasn’t any more education than a pollywog, in spite of all his experiences. All the same the weasel knew more than to own up that he wanted to eat the Hop-toad. So he thought, “I’ll pretend that’s just what I came for, to hear my fortune, and he’ll never guess.”
“No one can follow a wet trail on a cloudy night so truly as the Hop-toad,” Killer said. The Hop-toad never follows a trail at all. That was only the silly weasel’s way of pretending he thought the Hop-toad was smarter than he.
Of course the Hop-toad knew Killer was just making it up. “Two can play at that game,” he blinked to himself. “I’ll scare him away and then my good friends will come back again.” Then he said out loud: “Oh, me, that sounds just like my wise friend Silvertip the Fox. He used to say, ‘The bones of yesterday lie where even the blind ants can find them, but the bones of tomorrow—only the Hop-toad knows whose skins they run in.’ He knew I could foretell what was coming. But he listened to the owls instead of listening to me—see what happened to him!”
“What did happen?” demanded Killer. You remember the Owl’s Wife lied to him. She said Silvertip was hunting in the Big Marsh, the other side of the Deep Woods!
Killer wasn’t enjoying his visit to the Woods and Fields a bit.
“He went where no ant ever gnawed his bones,” answered the wise hop-toad. “That’s why no tooth hunts by Doctor Muskrat’s pond.”
When the Hop-toad croaked these words in the dark cave under the big stone, every little crack seemed to have a scary little echo hidden in it to whisper them after him. Killer the Weasel shook to the tip ends of his fur.
“Is he dead?” asked the wicked thing in a husky voice.