“Oh dear!” whimpered the fox. “This is terrible! Here I am caught in a trap again, and I said I’d be careful! I wonder how I can get out of here!”
Sharp Eyes looked about him. He saw that, surely enough, he was in a trap, though a different kind from the one that had hurt his foot, and had made him walk lame. This one did not pinch him. Then the fox looked at the rooster, whose crowing had brought him to the trap.
The rooster was not crowing now. I suppose he was too badly frightened at having the fox so near him. But when Sharp Eyes looked again he saw that he could not get the rooster, even though they were both in the trap.
For the rooster was in the back part, behind a screen of wire netting, and though Sharp Eyes had very keen teeth, they could not gnaw through wire.
“Anyhow, I don’t feel like eating a rooster now,” said the fox to himself. “I want to get out of here.”
Once more he looked around the trap in which he was caught. The fox did not know much about traps, but he could easily see that this one was not going to be easy to get out from. It was like a big box, open at one end, and it was through this open end that Sharp Eyes had walked in.
As soon as he was inside, the open end of the box closed with a wooden door, which snapped shut, just as might the door of a closet in which you had gone to play hide-and-go-seek.
Sharp Eyes pushed hard against this end door. He pushed against the sides of the box, and he pushed against the wire screen behind which the rooster stood. But the fox could not get out. Neither could the rooster, and the fowl fluttered about every time the fox moved, thinking, I suppose, that something dreadful was going to happen.
But nothing did happen, at least for a while. The fox was shut up in the trap, and all his trying could not get him out.
“Maybe if I call for my father and mother, or for Don, the nice dog who helped me before, they will come and save me,” thought Sharp Eyes.