WHAT DOCTOR MUSKRAT THOUGHT ABOUT TRAPS
Quite a long while ago I promised to tell what Tommy Peele was doing
in the Broad Field when he let Nibble Rabbit’s storm party out of the
little cornstalk tent. Well, to begin with, he was looking for the
tracks of the woodsfolk. But as long as the snow lay deep on the
ground he didn’t find many.
For Doctor Muskrat and the fieldmice and Nibble Rabbit were about the
only ones who stayed there. Doctor Muskrat was too clever to leave
tracks where any one would see them. And the fieldmice had their
tunnels far below the crust, so you never saw anything of them. And
you’d have to creep around among the Pickery Things before you’d see
many signs of Nibble Rabbit.
But the birds called very often to get a drink from the warm spring
hidden among the bulrushes that was Doctor Muskrat’s front door. It
was Chewee the Chickadee who brought news of the quail. “They have to
go a long way in the deep woods every day to find enough seeds for so
large a flock,” he said. “And they told me that I must leave every
last weed head that pricked up above the snow in their thicket for
Nibble Rabbit.”
Now that was very nice of the quail because there were very few seeds
left, and Nibble was eating the dried grasses that the Pickery Things
kept from him and the delicate bark from the sunny side of the
willows.
[Illustration: Snoof Woodchuck comes out of his hole.]
Chaik, the Jay, perked his crest thoughtfully. “It must be horrid to
live in big flocks like that where you can never find a full crop for
everyone at once. The partridge are perching in some evergreens. They
say it’s safer than sleeping in the snow where they might be frozen in
again. Only they can’t find anything to eat but birch and poplar buds,
and they’re awfully hungry. But not so hungry as Hooter the Owl and
his wife. I wonder why they flew away right in the middle of the
terrible storm.”
“Silvertip the Fox left then, too,” said Gimlet the Woodpecker, who
had been working in the orchard back of Tommy Peele’s barn. “There
must be something in that.”
“There is,” said Nibble. “I was the game Mrs. Hooter chased into the
cornstalk tent, but Silvertip was the one who came out of it. He
mussed their feathers and they tweaked his ears, and now they’re
afraid to meet each other!”
Chaik laughed. “The owls are still quarrelling,” he told Nibble.
“Well, Silvertip has learned to get into the chicken-coop,” Gimlet
reported, “and Chirp Sparrow says that’s climbing into a peck of
trouble.”
“Who cares?” Nibble rejoiced. “Now that Slyfoot’s gone to find a
better hunting ground we have no one to look out for.”
But Doctor Muskrat spoke up very thoughtfully. “Yes, Nibble. Sooner or
later we’ll have to look out for Man.”
“Shucks!” sniffed Nibble, carelessly flopping his ears. “No Man ever
comes here unless it’s Tommy Peele. And he’s such a little one, who’s
afraid of him?”
“I am.” And Doctor Muskrat stroked his whiskers with his paw. “You
can’t judge the size of his jaw by the size of his trail, nor know how
far he’ll reach out to bite you!”
But Nibble merely twiddled his tail to show how little he cared for a
whole flock of Tommy Peeles. While Tommy had him in a cage up by the
barn Tommy had been good to him. And none of the tame beasts were
afraid of Tommy Peele. “He hasn’t any teeth to speak of,” Nibble
protested, “and he hasn’t any claws. He couldn’t hurt any one. I’ve
been right in his very paws, so I know.”
“Yes, you have,” agreed Doctor Muskrat. “And how did you get there?
Didn’t he reach out and catch you when he was the whole length of the
pasture away?”
And this time Nibble didn’t feel like twiddling his tail. It was
perfectly true. He knew that somehow Tommy had been the one who made
that dreadful wire snatch him into the air. And he hadn’t quite
forgotten how it all but squeezed the life right out of him when he
swung there. It hadn’t felt in the least like the soft touch of
Tommy’s hand. So he asked with a little shiver, “What are those jaws
like, Doctor Muskrat?”
“They’re harder than bone, and colder than stone. They never miss, and
they never let go,” said the wise old Muskrat very earnestly. And
that’s the truth about a muskrat trap. It’s just a pair of steel jaws,
harder than bone and colder than stone, exactly as he said. And
they’re worked by a terrible spring. They never miss because the
spring won’t snap unless a beast steps right between them. And they
won’t let go again until the Man opens the spring again. No beast can
ever learn that. Because no beast has ever imagined that they weren’t
a part of the Man.
“And a Man can have a whole pack of those jaws,” the old doctor went
on. “They’ll hide out in the leaves where you can’t see or hear them;
sometimes you just sniff the faintest chilly smell on them. They’re
worse than a whole pack of Silvertips because you can see and hear and
SMELL him.”
“How awful!” breathed Nibble. “It isn’t fair!”
“Well, Mother Nature wasn’t fair to Man in the First-Off Beginning,”
argued the wise old beast. “The cows complained and got their horns,
and so did a lot of others, but Man wouldn’t complain. It’s a law that
when a beast invents anything for himself he has a right to use it. So
you can’t blame Man for using anything.”
“Well,” said Nibble thankfully, “I’m glad Tommy Peele doesn’t use
those jaws.”
But up behind the barn Tommy Peele had his first pair of the awful
things. He wouldn’t have dreamed of using them on the chickens or
Watch the Dog, or even on Nibble Rabbit, because they were friends of
his. But he didn’t think any more of using them on a muskrat, that he
didn’t know, than the muskrat would have thought of using his sharp
teeth on Tommy Peele. And he wanted the muskrat’s skin. Which was
perfectly natural because every man has had to use some other
creature’s fur since the First-Off Beginning of things—until he got to
be friends with them.