CHAPTER XIII
WISE WORDS FROM A WISE BEAST
Neither Nibble Rabbit, nor Chaik Jay, nor Chewee the Chickadee, nor all of them together could make Doctor Muskrat say what he thought of Tommy Peele.
“No,” he insisted, “I haven’t made up my mind. It’s a safe rule for any beast to do as his kind have done before him, and I never knew any muskrats who made friends with a man.”
“Nor any man who wanted to be friends with a muskrat, either,” pleaded Nibble. “Tommy Peele’s different.”
“That’s the way with men,” said the doctor. “They’re always changing. Only the wild things stay the same.”
“What is Man, anyway?” Nibble asked. “He isn’t a bird and he isn’t a fish, and of course he isn’t a snake. But the bats, who came to my storm party in the cornstalk tent, said he couldn’t be a beast because he hadn’t any tail.”
“Nonsense!” snorted the doctor. “Tad Coon’s cousin, the bear, hasn’t any more tail than that. What did the bats think he was?”
“A kind of a frog,” said Nibble promptly. “But Chatter Squirrel didn’t agree with them.”
“A frog! A frog! Had those bats ever seen a man, then? Or a frog, either? Eh?” And the doctor made such a face of disdain that his whiskers bristled up like a lot of long darning needles on Granny’s fat pin cushion. “Why, a frog is less than a beast and a man—well, there used to be a tale going around when I wasn’t much bigger than Chewee there that Man was kin to Mother Nature herself in the very First-Off Beginning.” The old muskrat sank his head back between his shoulders and half closed his eyes.
“Go on,” said Nibble breathlessly.
“Eh? What?” The doctor came back with a start as though the shadow of an owl had passed near him. “I was just thinking about that winter. There was a big family of us the year I was born, for food was very plentiful. So were minks. And when my mother thought she heard one sniffing close by she’d tell us stories to keep us quiet. Otherwise we wriggled around in that dark old house like a lot of tadpoles, popping in and out of the water until you could almost swim on the very floor, it was so wet from our dripping. And when we got to romping we’d squeal more than a whole stump full of fieldmice.” Nibble couldn’t imagine the dignified, portly old fellow scuttling and squeaking. A rabbit hole is always very quiet. Because it’s on the ground and so many hunters might hear it if it weren’t.
“I just remember,” finished the doctor, “that one of our favourite tales was about how Man quarrelled with Mother Nature in the First-Off Beginning. She was used to the wild things. And most of them, excepting the ones who came up from under the earth, are very obedient. But Man just wouldn’t obey her. And she wouldn’t stand that, because it would be unfair to the rest of us, and because he was kin to her. So she said he could try getting along without her help and see how he liked that. And he certainly surprised her. He——”
But that’s as far as the wise old fellow ever got. For right then there came a most startling interruption. And so many brand-new happenings began that I’ll have to write a whole brand-new book to tell about them all.