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Updated: June 26, 2025
"Why, as to old Tom's human natur', it is not much like other men's human natur', but more like a muskrat's human natar', seeing that he takes more to the ways of that animal than to the ways of any other fellow-creatur'. Some think he was a free liver on the salt water, in his youth, and a companion of a sartain Kidd, who was hanged for piracy, long afore you and I were born or acquainted, and that he came up into these regions, thinking that the king's cruisers could never cross the mountains, and that he might enjoy the plunder peaceably in the woods."
"Everybody on the raft was anxious now, and they were all crowding about OLD-man; but he told them to stand back, and they did. Then he blew his breath in Muskrat's mouth a third time, and a third time he lived and joined his wife. "OLD-man then dried the dirt in his hands, rubbing it slowly and singing a queer song.
The white owl spread his wings and balanced himself on tiptoe, as the ice-cake on which he was perching lurched and rolled. Through all the clamour his ears, miraculously keen beyond those of other birds, caught an agonized squeak from below. The jostling ice had nipped the muskrat's hind quarters.
The muskrat began to feel awkward before such lack of hospitality and wished himself under water. After many heart throbs Iktomi stopped drumming with his horn ladle, and looking upward into the muskrat's face, he said: "My friend, let us run a race to see who shall win this pot of fish. If I win, I shall not need to share it with you. If you win, you shall have half of it."
Grandfather Frog put a hand behind one ear and listened and listened, but not a sound could he hear. "Chugarum! It must be me," said Grandfather Frog. "It must be that I am growing old and deaf. I'll go over and ask Jerry Muskrat." So Grandfather Frog dove into the water and swam out to the middle of the Smiling Pool, on his way to Jerry Muskrat's house.
Another way he had of setting traps was to cut a hole in the side of a muskrat's house, so that he could thrust in his arm and feel for the entrance to the tunnel, then he would set a trap there and close up the hole. One day when he was passing a muskrat house that he had previously opened for that purpose and closed again, he discovered that the hole was again open.
The first place Farmer Brown's boy visited was Jerry Muskrat's old log. Very cautiously he peeped over the edge of the bank. The trap was gone! "Hurrah!" shouted Farmer Brown's boy. He was very much excited, as he caught hold of the end of the chain, which fastened it to the old log. He was sure that at last he had caught Jerry Muskrat. When he pulled the trap up, it was empty.
Under the first rail near the same gate Mercy would find: a dead frog with its eyes torn out, and across the road in the hollow of a stump Apollo was to look for a muskrat's tail and a weasel's paw.
He swam as well as the muskrat, perhaps faster, indeed, with a darting, eel-like, deadly swiftness. But the stream at this point had widened to a breadth of twelve or fifteen yards, and this was the little muskrat's salvation. The mink was afraid to follow her to such a distance from the air-space.
First my wife, then my two sons, last of all, at the time the chestnuts were in blossom, my daughter Mimi, the Master of Life called them one by one. I have washed my face, and I have combed my hair, yet who can say I have not mourned? My life has been as dead as the dried grass that thatches the muskrat's lodges. When have any of you seen Onanguissé smile?
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