A big green caterpillar! Jenny Wren screeched. The other birds fluttered with fear. But Stripes Skunk just sat down and laughed at it. This was too silly—to have all those foolish flyers making a fuss like that over what was just a nice juicy mouthful! He forgot that it really was a monster to Jenny—it was quite as big as she is and its mother, the moth, is bigger.
It lay on its back and wiggled all its sucker-feet in a most insulting way. It squirmed, and the eye-shaped stripes on its sides just squinted and made faces at Stripes Skunk. It even spat a mouthful of chewed leaves at him! A lot he cared. He swallowed it.
And all the birds watched him with their eyes just popping. Now was his time to make friends, when they were all listening. He began very politely: “Thank you for calling me, Mrs. Wren. Now, if——”
He was just going to add if they’d only believe he wasn’t eating eggs and give him a chance to show them he’d——
But right then a meadowlark began to shout, “My nest! He’s robbed it! Egg-eater! Egg-eater!” And if it hadn’t been for those fighting kingbirds there’s no knowing what would have happened. They gathered around and hustled Stripes back into the bushes, and kept him a prisoner.
Bob White Quail and the quail-folk were flying about like mad trying to make somebody listen, and Coquillicot was shouting at the top of his lungs from the highest tree he could find, and poor Chaik the Bluejay was shivering in a bush because he used to eat eggs himself—and the birds have not forgotten it.
“But I didn’t do it!” Stripes protested. “Honest, I didn’t.”
“We know you didn’t,” said the captain of the Kingbird Guard. “We’ve had a watch on you for a week and this has happened since you were talking with the mate of Coquillicot. That’s why we’re guarding you. When it gets dark those larks will go back home and you can run away.”
“But I don’t want to run away,” Stripes insisted. “I want to stay right here. I want to be friends—can’t you tell them so?”
But the kingbird captain didn’t even have time to answer him, for a cloud of screeching meadowlarks flew up and tried to get past the guard. And for a minute it even seemed as though they might succeed—though what they’d have done if they did we’ll never know. I have my doubts how brave they’d have been against a skunk after they were so afraid of a caterpillar. But that was the very moment when a cry of “Snake! Snake!” came from the pretty brown mate of Coquillicot.