That is the way rabbits call to one another when they are too far off to talk, for a rabbit does not have a very loud voice. And a rabbit does not need to put his ear to the ground to listen to the thumps of another rabbit. He can hear well enough without that.
“That’s what I’ll do,” thought Flop Ear. “I’ll give a pounding call, and papa or mamma may be near enough to hear. Oh, I hope they are, for I want to go home!”
Flop Ear raised himself on his hind feet, and then he thumped with his front feet two or three times, making a sound like a little drum. Then Flop Ear listened. He did not hear any other thumps in answer to his own.
“Well, I’ll go on a little way and try once more,” he said to himself. “Maybe they will hear this time.”
Once more Flop Ear thumped on the ground. But though he listened very sharply all he could hear was the wind blowing through the trees, and the dried leaves rustling as he scampered through them.
“Oh dear!” thought poor Flop Ear. “I don’t know what to do. I surely am lost worse than I ever was before.”
Once, when he was a little baby rabbit, Flop Ear had wandered a little way off from the burrow. His mother had been with him, but he ran on ahead. And, when he looked back, he could not see his mother, nor the burrow where he lived.
He had been very much frightened then, and he had started to cry, being only a baby, and much afraid of being lost. But then his mother suddenly came running around a stump, behind which she had gone to get some nice red wintergreen berries, and she dried the tears of Flop Ear on her soft fur, and showed him that the burrow was only about two jumps away, behind a big rock.
“I was only lost a little bit that time,” thought Flop Ear, “but this time I am lost a whole lot. I wish I had not run so far from home. Why, I am a regular runaway, like Don, the dog, and I’m lost, just as Blackie was. I told her I’d never run away from my home, but I did.
“But I did not mean to,” went on Flop Ear. “It was the hunter, with his dog and gun, who drove me away from home. I’d never run away from it myself. But what shall I do?”