Nibble Rabbit didn’t say much. He had friends among them so, of course, they came to him. “I know they kill you,” he said, “but you treat the plants just the same. You ruin everything you set a tooth into. If you want them to know how important they are, all of you move away and let them see how it is to get along without you.”
Now that was sensible. But they wouldn’t listen. They said: “But if you fight us we’ll do away with you—just like we did with Tad Coon. You’ll be sorry.”
On the third day after Great-Grandfather Fieldmouse declared war, the mice began to fight. They felt sure they would have an easy victory. How do you suppose they meant to do it? They were going to spoil Tommy Peele’s potato patch!
This was really a bright idea. I don’t believe for a minute that they thought of it themselves—they must have heard it from somebody. I don’t mean that any one was a traitor to Stripes Skunk, but the fieldmice are always creeping about and listening to what people say when nobody imagines they’re near. They learned that Stripes was going to take care of the potato patch to pay back for those chickens he’d killed. If he didn’t, they thought of course Tommy Peele would send him away.
My, but Doctor Muskrat laughed when he heard the news! “It’s all over now,” said he. “We won’t even have to go out and fight them.” But he wouldn’t tell why.
So at dusk the fieldmice began to gather. If you think there were a lot of them out the day they went down into Nibble Rabbit’s hole to steal a mouthful of fur from the woodchuck for a charm against owls, you ought to have seen them now. For they’d all raised families since the spring had come. The grasses fairly shook with them; the earth was covered with them. At dark they began to scuttle into the potato patch.
“Ho, ho!” laughed the little owls. Those woodchuck charms didn’t bother them a bit. They feasted on fieldmice. But the angry mice wouldn’t pay any attention to them.
“Ca—caa,” chuckled the hawk.
“Just the minute the moon comes up so I can see to hunt, I’ll be with you.”
But when the moon did come up, there wasn’t a single tail stirring!