“Who knows?” said the Hop-toad. He knew, himself, but he didn’t want to say so. “If he is, neither fur, scale, nor feather did the killing.” That’s true. You know it was Grandpop Snappingturtle, and he isn’t a beast or a fish or a bird.
The weasel thought a minute. Then he remembered that Louie Thomson had been living by the pond and those same lying little owls, who told him Silvertip was still alive, said he couldn’t hurt any one. “Ho,” he said, “I know! It was a man?”
“Certainly not!” snapped the hop-toad as though he were cross over such a foolish question. “How could those toothless, clawless man-tadpoles hurt any one?”
“Oh-h-h!” exclaimed Killer in a long shivery breath. “I know what you mean. He’s a ghost Owl. Eh?” But the Hop-toad never answered a word.
The beautiful Duck had told Nibble Rabbit, the day before the Terrible Storm, that everything was afraid of something. Killer the Weasel was afraid of two things—Silvertip the Fox and the Ghost Owl.
Now the Ghost Owl is a real bird. It is a big white Owl who comes down from far-away north where the storms grow. At night it hunts Killer, and the minks and the bad skunks, and all the wicked folk who prowl around trying to catch Mother Nature’s own children while they’re asleep. In the daytime it goes off to some river and catches fish. Nobody knows when or where it sleeps.
Whenever a weasel disappears you can be pretty sure the fox or the owl has caught him. So the weasel-folk got the two so mixed up in their minds at last they decided they were the same. They thought the Ghost Owl was a fox who turned into an owl because it was better hunting. If a fox died and they saw his bones they knew that was the end of him. If he just disappeared—well, they couldn’t be sure he did turn into an owl, but they couldn’t be sure he didn’t.
So Killer the Weasel thought if Silvertip just disappeared and the ants didn’t gnaw his bones, as the Hop-toad said, Tommy Peele’s Woods and Fields were no place for him.
“Hop-toad,” he whined, “I know what you mean. You mean that Silvertip isn’t dead at all. He’s hunting these Woods and Fields in a Ghost Owl’s skin.”
“What an idea!” croaked the hidden Hop-toad. “Who ever told you that?”