John Breck

“ A fieldmouse never changes. Let me remind you, Doctor Muskrat, that we lived as we do to-day before any of you were made. This earth belongs to us fieldmice.”
“Perhaps,” said Nibble Rabbit, “but let me point out to you that if you fieldmice tried to run it there wouldn’t be a green thing left to grow out of the earth. We’d all starve, down to the very last mouse.”
“Impossible! Idiotic!” gasped the mice. “We will never change. Never!”
“If that is your answer, I shall put the matter to a vote. Does Stripes Skunk go or stay?” asked Doctor Muskrat. ”

“ 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 hopped up and down on Doctor Muskrat’s flat stone and lashed their tails and chattered. “That vote doesn’t mean anything,” shouted Great-Grandfather Fieldmouse. “We’ve all voted against him and there are more fieldmice here than all of you put together.”
“That isn’t the way we usually vote in the Woods and Fields,” said Doctor Muskrat. “We vote by families. Here are the night birds and the day birds (you know some of the birds can fly by moonlight and they liked Stripes well enough to come) and Nibble Rabbit and Watch the Dog who votes for Tommy Peele. ”

“ And half of the hives don’t even know them. They come to my waterlily patch for the same thing the wasps do. A wasp once told me that the yellow dust you got on your nose when you went to smell for the honey was the best food in the world for growing youngsters.”
“That’s so,” agreed Stripes Skunk with his funny little three-cornered ears pricked right straight up. “I find it on their legs most every time I catch them. Just the same, I do taste honey in most every bee I eat.”
“Eat bees!” sniffed Doctor Muskrat, turning up his whiskery nose. “Eat bees? You’re as poor a story teller as Tad Coon.” ”

“ He’s very fat and old; so fat that his tummy drags on the earth like Miner the Mole’s; so old that his ears are all crinkled. He makes as much fuss getting over the ground as a mud turtle and lots more noise with his grunting and sniffling. And of course he had a bodyguard of his family. He has a tremendous one, you know—a great big stump simply alive with them. Watch escorted him to the flat stone where Doctor Muskrat was sitting.
Doctor Muskrat greeted him. “We ’re all ready to listen,” he said, “except Tad Coon. ”

“ But the potato bug isn’t pretty and he isn’t nice. He’s mustard-yellow, with three stripes, which mean that some folks can eat him, and a pair of dots which mean that most folks can’t. Just before the first frost in the fall he burrows down under the Earth-that-is common-to-all and makes himself a little house, snugly waterproofed with varnish against the rains. There he learns all sorts of tricks from the Bad Ones who are always making Mother Nature so much trouble. ”

“ They’re always hiding and pouncing out on some one. But birds are such fools, you know, lots of them never learn the difference.”
“Well, you wear such awful claws,” Stripes began.
“At your service,” said the hawk.
“Any time you need them. Just send word by a kingbird. But you don’t need me any longer just now.” And off she flew.
All the birds had been still as death while the hawk was talking to Stripes Skunk. Even the kingbirds and Coquillicot the Thrasher stayed hidden. But before the hawk was twenty wing-beats away, they came bursting from every bush and tree, calling and singing to him. ”

“ He’s ruffling about like a kingbird, and he says he’ll peck the eyes out of any bird who refuses to try one. You just ought to see what’s going on and who he’s got to help him! But I must be flitting.”
“Where to?” asked Stripes. By now he was taking an interest in things.
“To send over everything I can find that has feathers in its wings,” said Bobby Robin. “Bob White needs ’em.”
And before he’d flown past Tad Coon’s tree, along came Miau the Catbird and told them exactly the same tale. ”

“ Great-Grandfather Fieldmouse’s crinkly ears began twitching. “We fieldmice have had many grievances in times past,” he sniffled in his high, squeaky voice. “But we have never spoken of them. As long as these woods and fields were run in the sensible way Mother Nature started them in the First-Off Beginning we took our chances like sensible mice. But things are changing. Some of you have made friends with Man—a thing we have never done. Man makes no difference to a fieldmouse, so even of that we will not complain. ”

“ But Great-Grandfather Fieldmouse was afraid that all Stripes Skunk’s friends would use that chance to eat all the mice they could hold and reduce the vote. He turned to Watch. “This matter really only concerns Tommy Peele,” said he. “Can he afford to fight the fieldmice?”
“He can afford to stand by his friends,” Watch answered.
Then Great-Grandfather Fieldmouse spoke to Stripes himself. “Will you force us to fight?” he asked, “or will you go? Remember, Tad Coon has already vanished. Will you risk the same fate from the fieldmice? I warn you!” ”

“ And that’s just about what Tommy said when Tad Coon wanted to take the shiny thing in his handy-paws to look at it. And when Stripes Skunk saw that none of the others was afraid, he came closer, too, and crinkled up his nose at it.
That made Tommy laugh. “He’s friends,” shouted Nibble. “A man always makes friends when he laughs at you.” And Watch knew that, because it’s how the first dog made friends with the man and his wife and his baby in the First-Off Beginning.
Tommy looked at the bass and then he looked at Stripes Skunk again. ”

“ If Watch the Dog isn’t executioner of these woods and fields, neither are you their hen, to brood over them. You’re getting as bad as Jenny Wren in nesting season.” He said that because Jenny Wren is the fussiest thing in feathers, and she’s always scolding other people for not doing what she thinks is the proper way to do things. She nearly drives the meadowlarks wild by saying, “I told you so” every time someone finds their eggs that they hide in the long grass, just because she can’t make them take to nesting in her little squinchy dark knotholes. ”

“ Tommy takes off his “skin” to dry
You ought to have seen Nibble Rabbit and Stripes Skunk and Tad Coon all stare at him. Even Doctor Muskrat was s’prised. “Here, Watch,” he said to Tommy’s dog, “don’t let him skin himself—he’ll die!”
“Ho, that isn’t his skin,” laughed Watch; “that’s just his fur. He does it every night. I know, because I sleep in his room—that’s a kind of a cage he sleeps in—so I see him.”
“Good gracious!” exclaimed Doctor Muskrat. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” put in Nibble Rabbit. “Chatter Squirrel said he’d seen men this way. ”

“ And by this time their furry skins were feeling pretty tight. “There’s this about honey,” Stripes drawled, “you never know when you’ve had enough until you’ve had too much. Seems like we’d better stop off awhile.”
“Uh-huh,” mumbled Tad Coon, just a little bit doubtfully, because he’d never had enough to find out. The most he ever dares to do is to snoop out a mouthful and run. But he followed Stripes down to Doctor Muskrat’s pond, and they took a good drink and cleaned up their paws and their whiskers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That little brown one is the loudest of all.”
“She’s Jenny Wren,” Chaik called back—you couldn’t talk low and hear even yourself. Besides, he thought no one was looking at anything but the fighting. He didn’t see the slim brown mate of Coquillicot the Thrasher slip out of the grass beside them. “Jenny left Johnny to watch her eggs while she got a drink—hours ago,” he went on. “She just loves to boss things. But poor Johnny thinks the hawk has got her.”
“It’s a wonder the hawk hasn’t caught someone, isn’t it?” ”

“ They’ll tell you most any kind of a tale to keep you from learning the truth about their secret. They’re so afraid someone will listen that they never sing the words of their honey song. They only hum it. ”

“ Sure enough, Tommy Peele looked at his watch and whistled. “Hey,” said he, “I didn’t know it was so late. We ought to go up and do our milking.”
He was just slipping it back into his pocket when Louie Thomson called out, “Please, Tommy, let me come over and see your animals. Honest, I won’t hurt ’em.”
Splash went Doctor Muskrat into his pond. Flick went Nibble into the Pickery Things. Scratchy-scramble went Tad Coon up into a tree. Te-flap, te-flap went Stripes Skunk for his hollow oak, his pigeon-toed feet just slapping the ground and his long draggly tail trailing between them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was eggs Chewee was hunting. Every once in a while a whole cloud of birds would go winging off to feed in the woods and the grain-fields, and another cloud would come in and settle down to eating the potato-bug army again. ”

“ He’s the fellow who can keep their nests cleaned up for them.”
That made Stripes pretty angry. He turned half-way round and stamped his feet. “You’re mighty worried about them all of a sudden,” he snarled. “But I notice when the folks found those little dead chicks, they knew who to lay it to.” ”

“ He said they had skin like a frog, only tan, like my throat, or pink, like the inside of my mouth. Tommy’s a little of both.”
So he was. He was getting a fine spotty sunburn. But he wasn’t nearly as pink as he would have been if he’d gone swimming, like the boys Chatter Squirrel had seen. ”