Anne saw that Happy was working out some plan of her own, so she waited and the next day discovered it.
In the morning when she went to look at the pups they were nowhere to be seen, the gate of the yard was closed, and for a moment Anne feared they might have been stolen, but baby barks from under the tool house reassured her. Going to the outside opening of the burrow and lying flat in the grass she peered in. At first she could see nothing, but in a minute the light from between the stone chinks revealed Happy and the twins stretched flat on their stomachs in the fresh earth, Mamma dozing comfortably, the youngsters yap-yapping to themselves; for having a deaf parent they were quite safe in saying anything that they chose.
“It’s a cool house, a regular summer day-nursery, the dear clever mother to think of it!” exclaimed Anne in delight, quite forgetful of the fact that her own chin was resting in the dirt.
“Of course if it’s the earth cooling down at night that makes the dew collect, it must cool their fat little stomachs somehow the same way, and puppy stomachs always seem to be boiling warm. Here we’ve been and pounded the dirt in the kennel yard as hard as rock to keep it from being dug up, just as if digging was only mischief instead of a ‘must be.’ Of course all dogs aren’t as wise about it as Happy and it was rather mean of Lumberlegs last summer to make a cooler out of mother’s mignonette bed when it was in full bloom.”
It would never do for puppies to stay still all day even in so delightful a place as their mother had made. Its best use was as a retreat after exercising, of which they had plenty.
If their food supply had been uncertain, “food burying” would have undoubtedly been their next lesson, and as it was, instinct whispered in Jill’s beautiful brown ears one day when she was eight weeks old, and when Jack was being vigorously flead by his mother she took his portion of puppy biscuit and laid it, piece by piece, in the deep hoof tracks of the barn road, where a few shoves from her nose quickly covered it.
Jack, on the other hand, did not begin to bury food until he was fully ten weeks old and had become quite accustomed to seeing his mother, father, and sister perform the task. Even then he did not use any judgment in the selection of a place or dig proper holes, but made very conspicuous mounds in the middle of the walks where the cache could be seen by the first passer-by.
It was at this time that Anne discovered that Happy had two different ways of burying extra food. Meat or bones she invariably put in the earth, digging deep and covering carefully that the morsel might keep cool and not ripen too fast. She usually chose soft spots in the vegetable garden for this. Often having more food in storage than she needed, it stayed so long that the Sexton Beetles gut away with a good deal of it, much to Happy’s surprise; for as they bore it to their lairs underground, there was no surface trail to tell her keen nose whence it had been carried or by whom.
If the morsel she wished to hide was dog biscuit, oatmeal cake, or corn-bread, Happy worked quite differently. After finding a thick tuft of grass, she pushed the scrap well into the centre of it and then pulled the grass blades together over the top, weaving them loosely as if her nose and upper front teeth had been a crochet needle.