“I’ll get one here, as sure as shooting,” said Tommy.
Then he found a little grassy tussock, and he knew by the matted-down grass that it was a favorite resting place for muskrats. Here he set another trap and left some slices of carrot as bait.
By the merest accident, he found a hole in the bank and, from the look of it, he felt sure that it had been made by one of the furry little animals he wanted to catch. Right at the very entrance he set another trap, and artfully covered it with water-soaked leaves from the bottom of the Smiling Pool so that it could not be seen.
“I’d like to see anything go in or out of that hole without getting caught,” said he, with an air of being mightily tickled with himself and his own smartness.
So he went on until he had set all his traps, and all the time he was very happy. Spring had come, and it is everybody’s right to be happy in the spring. He heard the joyous notes of the first birds who had come on the lagging heels of winter from the warm southland, and they made him want to sing, himself. Everything about him proclaimed new life and the joy of living. He could feel it in the very air. It was good to be alive.
After the last trap had been put in place, he sat down on an old log to rest for a few minutes and enjoy the scene. The Smiling Pool was as smooth as polished glass. Presently, as Tommy sat there without moving, two little silver lines, which met and formed a V, started on the farther side of the Smiling Pool and came straight toward him. Tommy knew what those silver lines were. They were the wake made by a swimming muskrat.
“My! I wish I’d brought my gun!” thought Tommy. “It’s queer how a fellow always sees things when he hasn’t a gun, and never sees them when he has.”
He could perceive the little brown head very plainly now, and, as it drew nearer, he could distinguish the outline of the body just under the surface, and back of that the queer, rubbery, flattened tail set edge-wise in the water and moving rapidly from side to side.
“It’s a regular propeller,” thought Tommy, “and he certainly knows how to use it. It sculls him right along. If he should lose that, he sure would be up against it!”
Tommy moved ever so little, so as to get a better view. Instantly there was a sharp slap of the tail on the water, a plunge, and only a ripple to show that a second before there had been a swimmer there. Two other slaps and plunges sounded from distant parts of the Smiling Pool and Tommy knew that he would see no more muskrats unless he sat very still for a long time. Slowly he got to his feet, stretched, and then started for home. All the way across the Green Meadows he kept thinking of that little glimpse of muskrat life he had had, and for the first time in his life he began to think that there might be something more interesting about a muskrat than his fur coat. Always before, he had thought of a muskrat as simply a rat, a big, overgrown cousin of the pests that stole the grain in the hen-house, and against whom every man’s hand is turned, as it should be.