And he was a pretty trembly little rabbit. He hopped very carefully, gliding from shadow to shadow like a fieldmouse. And the doctor never moved when Nibble Rabbit slipped in beside him; he was listening to the stars as they danced in the pool just exactly the way he had done the night they told him Nibble’s fortune. He was muttering:
“Let him who is both young and wise
Beware the killer with lidless eyes.
“Yes, that’s all I can make out of it,” said the old doctor slowly. “Now what does that mean, I wonder?”
“I know,” gasped Nibble, “I know—it’s Foul Fang the Rattlesnake. The little owls don’t want us to catch that fox, Silvertip, because he catches chickens and leaves their bones for the owls to pick. They heard Chaik and Jay and Chewee the Chickadee talking about it. So the he-owl has gone out to hire Foul Fang to help them. They’re going to pay him a mouse a day to do it. And his wife has gone up to the house to bargain with the grandson of Ouphe the Rat who lives in the walls. He’s to keep watch on Tommy and warn them what he means to do about Silvertip. But they don’t know where Silvertip is.”
“That’s one good thing,” the doctor nodded. “And another is that Silvertip has no friends—nor the owls, either. They only work for him because of what he gives them, and they have to hire their own helpers. Now all the woods know how you help any one who’s in trouble, and Tommy Peele has quite a few friends. I can’t see whether this warning is for you or for Tommy.”
“Tommy, of course. Watch the Dog says he’s the cleverest boy in all the world, and Watch is his dog, so he ought to know about him,” said Nibble promptly.
“Hm,” laughed Doctor Muskrat into his whiskers. “Well, for a rabbit, you know a thing or two. What cheers me up is this. The stars never warn about something that’s surely going to happen. They warn so you can be careful and escape your enemies. Now I’ll set every bird who drinks here at the pool to keep watching for Foul Fang. And I’m going over to the stump right now to send out word to all the fieldmice.”
“And I’ll go back to the Brushpile,” said Nibble, “and listen to the Bad Little Owls when they come to their hole in the morning.”
Off set the rabbit, lipity-lipity, scudding under the brush and over the shadows and through the grasses, until he snuggled down in a nice little pocket where only a mouse could have found him. And about dawn he heard the screech owls.
“It’s all fixed,” said the he-owl. “I found Foul Fang, and he knew where Silvertip was because he’d already smelled him (snakes say they smell any one instead of seeing him), and when I squawk the signal he’ll rattle and Silvertip will hear it and run. I didn’t find Silvertip because he stayed out hunting too long.”