“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.