Forgetting brotherly love and fear of the fox pup, they then flew at each other in a fury and had a good fight. At last, exhausted, they sat on their tails and held hands while hissing defiance at each other in a comical way.
Red Ben was very much interested in the strange pair, and made a practice of taking a look at them every night. The devoted old mother fed them regularly, often leaving beside them several more mice than their stomachs had room for. These, however, they ate during the day, swallowing fur, tails, feet and everything, but later spitting up in neat balls all the bones and undigestible parts.
At last a day came when they were not to be found near the tree. Overhead, however, sounded a rasping call. Red Ben looked up and saw two monkey faces, rimmed in white, looking down at him from a high limb. Their wings had grown long and they had learned to fly. Soon four big barn owls, instead of two, would be quartering the meadows in moonlit nights.
The pangs of hunger soon drove Red Ben to begin to hunt along Goose Creek. In daytime, rows of mud turtles, coiled water snakes and greenish black bull frogs were usually to be found there on floating logs, warming themselves in the sunshine. At night, some of these ventured to come ashore after insects.
“Muskrat was busy pulling up grass”
Picking his way cautiously along the water’s edge, Red Ben noticed a muskrat swimming in the middle of the sluggish stream. Hoping it would land near him, he hid, but the wily rat went ashore on the far bank where he was safe from the fox, but not from a brown mink whose fierce eyes were also watching.
Mink was a swift swimmer whose thick fur shed water quite as well as that of Muskrat. He dove into the stream as noiselessly as a snake, swam under the surface until at a point below Muskrat, who just then was busy pulling up grass which he expected to carry to the stream and wash before eating.
Red Ben, in his excitement, leaped out on a bar of sand where he could see the chase more easily. Screech Owl, too, having caught a glimpse from a distant cedar, flew to a limb over the stream. All the creatures within that angle of the creek except poor old Muskrat seemed to know that something was going to happen. Even the bats flitted about without their usual dips and rushes after low flying bugs.
Muskrat, with mouth full of grass and roots, turned back just as Mink’s head came above the steep bank. For one breathless second the two furry creatures looked at each other, then the rat plunged headlong for the stream. Like a football player he charged down the bank, throwing the small but fierce Mink head over heels into the water. Muskrat dove and vanished so quickly among the stems of the spatterdocks and golden clubs that Mink was confused, and actually lost him.