Somebody’s always falling into Doctor Muskrat’s pond. Nibble Rabbit did it the very first time he saw Doctor Muskrat. So did Tommy Peele, as I have just told you—but Tommy didn’t care a bit. Only he didn’t want to go home with his clothes all drippy, because his mother would make him drink some yarrow tea, to keep him from catching cold, you know. And it’s every bit as bad as the dose the old doctor gave Nibble. It doesn’t “taste like more”; it tastes like “never again!” So he took off his wettest things and hung them out in the sun to dry.
Tommy takes off his “skin” to dry
You ought to have seen Nibble Rabbit and Stripes Skunk and Tad Coon all stare at him. Even Doctor Muskrat was s’prised. “Here, Watch,” he said to Tommy’s dog, “don’t let him skin himself—he’ll die!”
“Ho, that isn’t his skin,” laughed Watch; “that’s just his fur. He does it every night. I know, because I sleep in his room—that’s a kind of a cage he sleeps in—so I see him.”
“Good gracious!” exclaimed Doctor Muskrat. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” put in Nibble Rabbit. “Chatter Squirrel said he’d seen men this way. He told me about them the night we were all in my little cornstalk tent, hiding from the terrible storm. He said they had skin like a frog, only tan, like my throat, or pink, like the inside of my mouth. Tommy’s a little of both.”
So he was. He was getting a fine spotty sunburn. But he wasn’t nearly as pink as he would have been if he’d gone swimming, like the boys Chatter Squirrel had seen. Only you can’t swim and catch fish at the same time. You scare them.
And Tommy was having such fun fishing, he wasn’t thinking about swimming or anything else. He even forgot all about the big shiny watch he had in his pants pocket. You know the kind—a big, cheap, noisy thing that took much more than a ducking to stop it. And it was fastened to them with a jingly chain.
Well, it was Nibble Rabbit’s long stick-up ears that heard it. My, but that was a funny sound! It was Tad Coon’s handy-paw that went after it. My, but that was a queer shaped, slippery-feeling thing! And it was Stripes Skunk who guessed what it really was.