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Updated: June 26, 2025
This peculiar construction of the muskrat's dwelling, with its water-passage, would afford all the means of escape from its ordinary enemies the beasts of prey and, perhaps, against these alone nature has instructed it to provide. But with all its cunning it is, of course, outwitted by the superior ingenuity of its enemy man. The food of the muskrat is varied.
Over at one side stood Jerry Muskrat's house, wholly out of water. Somehow, it seemed to Farmer Brown's boy that he must be dreaming. He never, never had seen anything like this before, not even in the very driest weather of the hottest part of the summer. He looked this way and looked that way. The Green Meadows looked just as usual. The Green Forest looked just as usual. The Laughing Brook ha!
On one he placed Mercy's frog, on another Wash's corn, and on the third the muskrat's tail and weasel's paw taken from Apollo's shoe. Then we all waited in silence while with his hands behind him he strode solemnly back and forth in front of the three plates.
Sun went down behind the Purple Hills to his home and Old Mother West Wind with all her Merry Little Breezes went after him, and the little stars came out to twinkle and twinkle, the Smiling Pool lay all quiet and still, but smiling and smiling to think what a good time every one had had at Jerry Muskrat's party. It was night. All the little stars were looking down and twinkling and twinkling.
Now and then a rabbit, looking like an animated snowball in its white winter coat, drifted past the muskrat's hiding-place, but most of the wilderness folk had denned up, waiting for the storm to pass. The muskrat now bestirred himself and began a leisurely journey downstream, stopping when an unusually succulent root showed itself above the oozy bed.
When inside the house, and eating the Muskrat's bread, and laughing and talking with his pretty darters, I might put his eyes into so thick a fog, that he couldn't even see the door, much less the land." "Good! Hawkeye should have been born a Huron! His blood is not more than half white!" "There you're out, Huron; yes, there you're as much out, as if you mistook a wolf for a catamount.
And a mink must be very ravenous, or quite mad with the blood-lust, to dare the deep water-gate and the long subaqueous passage to the muskrat's citadel, at seasons of average high water.
He knew all the deadliness of the peril. He could easily have escaped, turning back and fleeing by the other passage while the foe went on to her bloody work in the chambers. There was no time to warn the rest. But flight was far from the big muskrat's mind in that crucial moment. Not panic, but a fierce hate blazed in his usually good-natured eyes.
Then it was all right, and presently returned the most laughable procession that was ever seen Wash with his arms at right angles, bearing his grains of moulding grain on a burdock leaf which he held at as great a distance as the size of the leaf and the length of his arms would admit, his neck craned out and his eyes so glued to the uncanny corn that he stumbled over every stick and stone that lay in his path; Mercy next, with ludicrous solemnity, bearing her unsightly burden on the end of a corn-stalk; Apollo last, his weasel's paw and muskrat's tail deposited in the toe of an old brogan which he had found by the roadside, brown and wrinkled and stiff, with a hole in the side and the ears curled back, and which he had hung by the heel to a long crooked stick.
Nanahboozoo then took the earth which he found in the muskrat's paws and mouth, and having rubbed it with his hands to fine dust he placed it on the waters and blew upon it. Very soon it began to grow larger and larger, until it was beyond the reach of his eye. Thus was spread out the new world after the great flood.
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