One day Chee-Wee had a dreadful adventure. He was in the woods near my cabin and Jenny was out foraging. She had put him in a crèche under the roots of a pine and told him not to move a muscle until she came. A terrible serpent, with a very bright head, was close to Chee-Wee; a peculiar, striped serpent that made him stiff with fright. He had read in his little primer about garter snakes, and in his childish ignorance supposed this was one. He was scared almost to death, but he had enough presence of mind to thump for his mother, who instantly left her shopping tour and hastened to his side.
He was partially right, though it was not a Snake at all and had been dropped by the lady book agent in her mad flight through the forest, but, none the less, Chee-Wee was soundly spanked for turning in a 4:11 alarm for nothing more than a smoking chimney, while his mother was engaged in chasing up a bargain sale.
Those who have not lived near enough to the animals to know what they are talking about will think I have made Chee-Wee and his mother too human, but that little band of choice spirits who study the encyclopedias all Winter and get out a Nature Book apiece every Spring, will know that I have not so abased my high calling as to be inaccurate in even the smallest detail.
A Rabbits best friend is his brier patch and he is seldom more than eight and one half hops away from it. Jenny Ragtail used to carry a copy of that beautiful poem, Brier Rose, in her reticule, so that she would always have a place of refuge in time of trouble. I know this, because I wrote the piece out for her myself from my book of Parlour Elocution.
Jenny was devoted to Chee-Wee. She loved him nineteen times as hard as she could have done if his eighteen little brothers and sisters, who were published simultaneously, had not died of a fever before they were a week old. This was an epidemic which raged fiercely among the Squirrels and nearly spoiled all the Rabbit stew. He got nineteen times as much schooling and learned nineteen times as much as he could otherwise have done. This accounts for anything that may seem unusually intelligent in the future conduct of Chee-Wee.
First, she taught him geography. With a toothpick I gave her, she drew out a singularly accurate relief map of the surrounding country in the sand at my door. I still have the toothpick and a small bottle of the sand, which I kept to convince the doubting ones. She was a week or more in making it, and I fear that Chee-Wee would have been very restless, had it not been for the little silvery minnow in a glass of water at Jenny’s elbow, which interested him greatly. She kept it there in order that her map might be drawn to scale.
When the map was finished, I was allowed to inspect it, and it was really wonderful, though it was not at all the kind of a map that I should have drawn. She had marked the brier patches, the dens of Woodchucks and Weasels, the kennel of a distant farmer’s Hound, and a log in the middle of a pond. This latter place was marked by a small piece of flag-root which bore the picture of a Rabbit’s hind foot, and meant “Last Stand.” It was well named, for no animal but a loan shark could have found them there.
She taught him to comb his hair, brush his teeth, wash his face, paying special attention to his ears, and to curl his tail up over his back, like a Squirrel. It was the merest stub of a tail and Chee-Wee got vertigo once from chasing it round and round trying to get a good view of it. Their comb was an ordinary curry comb, which presumably had dropped from the vest pocket of some canine pursuer.
Jenny saved her own combings, putting them carefully away in a box made of Squirrel bark. I noted afterward that she had stuck little bits of fur on some of the thorns in the brier patch where she and Chee-Wee lived, after the manner of Hop o’ My Thumb, who dropped pebbles in the wood that he might find his way home again. This was to guide Chee-Wee to the family residence in time of need.
It is not generally known that Rabbits make a blanket to cover their babies out of tufts of fur which they pick from themselves. Jenny’s blanket was a beauty and exemplified the arts and crafts movement among the Rabbits in a particularly striking way.