THE BIG RAIN PUTS AN END TO EVIL DOINGS FOR A TIME
I just tell you the wife of the Bad Little Owl was glad to get on her
wings. She flew so fast that her mate, flying along behind her, said:
“Hey! Killer can’t keep up with us at this rate. Where are you going?”
“I’m scared to death of that wicked weasel,” she answered. “I’m going
as fast and as far as ever I can.”
“What a way to talk!” he hooted indignantly. “The poor fellow was
hungry. No wonder he was cross. Just as soon as he gets a good meal
he’ll be friendly again. We can’t change our hunting ground with this
storm coming on. There won’t be any grasshoppers to speak of, and it
takes so many of them to make a meal. We mightn’t have the luck to
catch a sparrow, and we wouldn’t know a single mousehole. It’s too
dangerous.”
“It’s not nearly as dangerous as Killer!” snapped his wife. “He didn’t
make you come right down close to him, the way he made me. He could
have caught me. I won’t risk it again.”
“He made me give him that robin,” answered the little he-owl. “But I
don’t care a bit. I’m tired of eating robins. Think of all we had to
carry home from the Robins’ Roost. And we didn’t help him kill a
single one. Now, if we help him kill the mice we’ll get every other
one of them. Um-m!” And he smacked his beak. Wasn’t he just a greedy
little bird?
[Illustration: The Owl helps Killer find the stump where the mice
live]
His mate wheeled around to think it over. She certainly didn’t like
the looks of that storm. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to just show Killer
the stump. The minute he took his eye off her she’d hide and she
wouldn’t come back until after he had eaten and gone. She could hear
him calling. Her mate answered with the funny little yap owls use
between them when they are hunting together. Down she dropped, but she
gripped her claws good and tight into the branch of a tree near the
mouse’s stump before she called, “Here we are!”
“Huh-huh-huh,” panted the wicked beast. “I didn’t know where you
had gone. Snff, snff! Lots of tracks here, all right enough!” he
chuckled. It was inky dark, so of course he couldn’t see that the
footprints of the mice were all leading out and none leading back
in again; you remember Chaik Jay had sent every last tail
scuttling out of the Woods and Fields as fast as mice could run.
Scritch, scritch! If Great-grandfather Fieldmouse had heard
Killer’s claws tearing at the rotten wood he wouldn’t have boasted
that no one but a bear could break in and eat them. Then----
Boom! Crash-h-h! R-r-r-rip! Splash! Down in one blinding sheet came
the first rain of that storm. It was surely a bad one!
The hoptoad was right when he said there was going to be rain--“floods
of it.” There was. And there was wind and lightning and thunder and
terrible squeaking and squawking and rustling and pounding--all the
noises that make a storm such a scary thing. Of course it wasn’t as
bad as Chaik Jay told the mouse it was going to be, but the mice
didn’t know that. They were all hidden in the stone pile by the
cornfield fence, or in logs and stumps in the Deep Woods. Some of them
even went all the way up to Tommy Peele’s barn and hid in the
strawstack. They didn’t hide in the haystack because----
But first I want to tell you the rest of what happened down by Doctor
Muskrat’s Pond. The owls tried to fly home, but their wings got so
waterlogged with the rain they had to creep into the hollow oak that
was blown down in the terrible storm--the time Nibble Rabbit rescued
the Woodsfolk who were living in it and had a storm party in his
little cornstalk tent.
Killer tried to hide in his crack between two stones in the bank of
Doctor Muskrat’s Pond. But the water found him. First it trickled in
from the ground above, where Louie Thomson’s little blanket tent used
to stand, and most washed him out; and then the pond grew fuller and
fuller and higher and higher until it most drowned him. So he had to
go out in all that rain, gnashing his teeth and swearing.
“Those pesky owls!” he snarled (only he said something worse than just
“pesky”). “I’m going to drag them out of their snug hole by their
scrawny little necks and eat them and live in it myself till this
storm is gone.”
Up he climbed. His paw wasn’t hurt a bit--when he told the owl it was
he was only pretending, you know. Of course the owls weren’t in it. He
squeezed into it himself, but it was so small for him he had to double
all up inside and the mouse bones in the bottom of it were very
uncomfortable. Wasn’t he starved and squirmy and peevish, the wicked
thing!
But the Woodsfolk weren’t. Nibble Rabbit knew his way about Tommy
Peele’s barn quite as well as he knew his way about the Woods and
Fields. And that made Silk-ears think he was smarter than ever. Doctor
Muskrat learned from the white ducks, who aren’t nearly as stupid as
they look, all about the ponds the rain was making, so he was happy.
And Stripes Skunk had the finest hunting in the world in the haystack.
He stationed one of his kittens at each of the rat holes, so whenever
Ouphe’s sons or grandsons tried to dodge out of the stack to hunt a
meal someone was sure to catch him. He turned into a feast instead of
finding one. So they were all very comfortable and happy. Except the
bad rats!
Pretty clever of them, wasn’t it? But you forget that Killer was
clever, too. Though I don’t blame you for that--so did the Woodsfolk.
They never dreamed that Killer would find out where they’d run away
to. Or that he’d be bold enough to follow them. People always forget
that the old saying “He who fights and runs away may live to fight
another day,” doesn’t mean that he who runs away gets out of fighting
for good and all.
No, it was war to the tooth in the end. Fur and feathers fought
together on both sides, for the Bad Little Owls kept right on helping
Killer--they didn’t dare not to. And every decent bird was more than
willing to wear out his summer wings, if need be, to help good old
Doctor Muskrat and his friends. So it was pretty even.
But the Woodsfolk won in the end--’cause they had help that was
neither one nor tother--feathers or fur, or even skin or scales. It
was something Mother Nature herself had never dreamed of in the
First-Off Beginning of Things. It was----
Why, Great beef-bones! as Watch would say. Here I am at ’most the very
last line in this book. Well, you’d better copy that wise dog and
think about all the nicest things you know to keep from worrying while
you wait for the next story to find out just what it was.
THE END