Truly, who can say that they have seen wild birds feeding from a cat’s dish when its owner was at home, or pulling out pussy’s fur for a nest lining.
Among the fourfoots who shared the hospitality of the Waddles family table were coons, skunks, weasels, red and gray squirrels, chipmunks, and the various gnawers of meadow, wood, and wall, the least of these being the tawny-backed white-footed mice and tiny field mice, scarcely bigger than bumblebees.
There were few mornings that stories of one or more of these animals might not be read by the keen-eyed on or about the stone wall, or on near-by tree trunks, in footprints on the ground or damp stones, or by claw marks on bark, etc. As to the field mice, they made the wall their turnpike to which the various nooks between the stones were cross-roads, and all day long they came and feasted daintily upon the crumbs, sitting up and cleaning their whiskers and paws after each meal.
Of late Anne had found many “owl balls” about the wall and under the pine trees, but never an owl could she see; for though a few came about every winter, they generally went early to the deep woods, where they kept company with the jays. These balls, which, as the snow owl once told Tommy-Anne at his Xmas party, were the pieces of the things they ate but could not digest, and so rolled into little balls and spit out, seemed to be all made of the fur and bones of field mice; so really, as Anne told Tommy when they discovered them, “the Owls were the Waddles’s table boarders also, only in a sort of second-hand way because, you see, the mice eat the dog food, and then the owls wait until they are through and eat the mice.”
But where did the owls hide? Anne thought that she knew every nook and cranny where they could nest, and Tommy usually managed to wriggle himself into the places she could not reach.
One night there was a commotion in the orchard; the evening song broke up early, and birds darted to and fro, giving alarm cries. Happy and Jack started off together and in a moment Waddles followed, but instead of crying and going nose to the ground, they sniffed the air and were silent, tiptoeing about among the ferns that grew under the pine trees.
After Tommy had gone to bed Anne heard a strange quavering noise close to the house. It was pale moonlight, and stepping out Anne found that her father was walking down the wild path toward the orchard, so she joined him. As she was telling about the unusual sound, it came again quite close. It was a sort of crooning, ending in “shay-shay-shay,” as if dried peas were sharply shaken in a sieve. A moment later a dark object flapped across, brushing Anne’s face.