THE MICE DEFEAT THEMSELVES
Stripes wasn’t a bit afraid, but he didn’t want every one else to suffer
on his account. “I’ll go away willingly,” he told Doctor Muskrat, “if
you think I ought to.”
“I don’t,” snapped the old doctor. “I think we might as well fight it
out now. If we give in to them there’s no knowing what they’ll demand
next. You’d think this world belonged to the fieldmice!” he snorted.
(That’s one of the things Great-Grandfather Fieldmouse had said at the
meeting, you know.) “A pretty place this world would be if they tried to
run it. Next thing they’ll be saying they made it themselves, instead of
Mother Nature.”
“But there are a great many fieldmice,” argued Stripes. “They may do a
lot of harm.”
“They can’t do much more than they always have,” the angry old muskrat
snorted harder than ever. “If they haven’t enough sense to see that,
what more can you expect of them? The whole tail-and-whiskers of them,
taken together, hasn’t the brains of a bullfrog.”
Nibble Rabbit didn’t say much. He had friends among them so, of course,
they came to him. “I know they kill you,” he said, “but you treat the
plants just the same. You ruin everything you set a tooth into. If you
want them to know how important they are, all of you move away and let
them see how it is to get along without you.”
Now that was sensible. But they wouldn’t listen. They said: “But if you
fight us we’ll do away with you—just like we did with Tad Coon. You’ll
be sorry.”
On the third day after Great-Grandfather Fieldmouse declared war, the
mice began to fight. They felt sure they would have an easy victory. How
do you suppose they meant to do it? They were going to spoil Tommy
Peele’s potato patch!
This was really a bright idea. I don’t believe for a minute that they
thought of it themselves—they must have heard it from somebody. I don’t
mean that any one was a traitor to Stripes Skunk, but the fieldmice are
always creeping about and listening to what people say when nobody
imagines they’re near. They learned that Stripes was going to take care
of the potato patch to pay back for those chickens he’d killed. If he
didn’t, they thought of course Tommy Peele would send him away.
My, but Doctor Muskrat laughed when he heard the news! “It’s all over
now,” said he. “We won’t even have to go out and fight them.” But he
wouldn’t tell why.
So at dusk the fieldmice began to gather. If you think there were a lot
of them out the day they went down into Nibble Rabbit’s hole to steal a
mouthful of fur from the woodchuck for a charm against owls, you ought
to have seen them now. For they’d all raised families since the spring
had come. The grasses fairly shook with them; the earth was covered with
them. At dark they began to scuttle into the potato patch.
“Ho, ho!” laughed the little owls. Those woodchuck charms didn’t bother
them a bit. They feasted on fieldmice. But the angry mice wouldn’t pay
any attention to them.
“Ca—caa,” chuckled the hawk.
“Just the minute the moon comes up so I can see to hunt, I’ll be with
you.”
But when the moon did come up, there wasn’t a single tail stirring!
You see, those mice didn’t know about potatoes. They never ate them
because they didn’t like the taste, but they never knew other people
did. Now potato plants don’t intend to be eaten. They hide the potatoes
that they make to feed themselves—the ones we steal from them—down under
the ground. But they fill their green parts, that the mice saw above the
ground, with a juice that makes folks mighty sorry if they try to eat
them, excepting those bugs who never eat anything else. That’s why the
bugs made Stripes sick. Any one can eat their eggs, or the bugs who hide
under the ground, like the good potatoes, but the bugs and the green
leaves above the ground—ugh! You know what Bobby Robin said about them.
Crunch, crunch, went the busy teeth of the cross little mice. Ow! In
just seven whisks of a tail they turned and ran as fast as their scurry
skippy feet could carry them. My, but they were sorry they’d tried to be
so naughty!