“The fox!” Tommy exclaimed. “Old chicken thief; he ought to be hunted with a gun!”
“That’s all right,” Watch wagged his tail. “Now Tommy’ll find the gun and a man to shoot it, but we’ll have to find Silvertip so they can shoot him. I’ll sleep in the haystack and watch the barn, and you see if he’s hidden in the woods.”
So Nibble cocked his own little puffy tail and laid back his ears and scuttled through the cornfield. Because the first one he meant to ask was Doctor Muskrat. And it didn’t take much thumping to wake the doctor.
“My whiskers, but I’m glad to see you,” said the nice old beast as soon as he got his nose out of the water. “I was afraid that fox had really caught you. He came down here for a drink early this morning. He was feeling pretty sick, but he said he wasn’t going to do another thing until he’d pulled your long ears out by the roots and made a meal of you.”
“Well, he doesn’t want to find me any more than I want to find him,” said Nibble. And he told how Silvertip had followed him into the barn and jumped smash through the window, and what trouble that made for the cows, and the way he’d killed Tommy’s chickens, and how angry Tommy was about it.
“Shoot him? I wish they would.” Doctor Muskrat agreed. “He’s the worst beast in all the woods and fields, and we’ve plenty more to look out for—Slyfoot the Mink and the Marsh Hawk are back, and Grandpop Snapping Turtle is out again—but you’ll have to be mighty careful. You dig yourself a root and stay hidden while I see what the birds know about him.”
So Doctor Muskrat asked every bird who came down to drink if he’d keep an eye out for Silvertip. That was a great many, too, for whole clouds of them were coming north on every south wind. But they were all so busy about courting and nesting it was three days before Doctor Muskrat had any news. Late in the evening a whippoorwill came dipping down like a great feathery moth and called softly: “Doctor Muskrat!” Then he perched on the doctor’s house and whispered: “Silvertip’s living in the hollow log that shadows my last year’s nest. He’s still too sick to hunt anything but frogs and tadpoles and the eggs of us poor ground birds, but the minute he can gallop he’s going to get that rabbit. He lies there growling and swearing about him.”
Nibble couldn’t hear what the whippoorwill said. And that was lucky, because he was lying very still in the Quail’s Thicket with those screech owls perched right above him.
CHAPTER X
THE WICKED PLOT OF THE BAD LITTLE OWLS
As soon as the whippoorwill had finished whispering the news, about where Silvertip was hiding, he flew off so quietly that even the doctor couldn’t hear him. Then the wise old beast raised his queer, thin call, almost like a whistle, to tell Nibble Rabbit he was wanted, and swam quite as quietly to the place in the bulrushes by the pond where they always met.