With that good dinner in their stomachs, Reddy and Granny Fox felt so
much better that the Great World no longer seemed such a cold and cruel
place. Funny how differently things look when your stomach is full from
the way those same things look when it is empty. Best of all they knew
they could play the same sharp trick again and steal another dinner
from Bowser if need be. It is a comforting feeling, a very comforting
feeling, to know for a certainty where you can get another meal. It is
a feeling that Granny and Reddy Fox and many other little people of the
Green Meadows and the Green Forest seldom have in winter. As a rule,
when they have eaten one meal, they haven’t the least idea where the
next one is coming from. How would you like to live that way?
The very next day Granny and Reddy went up to Farmer Brown’s at
Bowser’s dinner hour. But this time Farmer Brown’s boy was at work near
the barn, and Bowser was not chained. Granny and Reddy stole away as
silently as they had come. On the day following they found Bowser
chained and stole another dinner from him; then they went away laughing
until their sides ached as they heard Bowser’s whines of surprise and
disappointment when he discovered that his dinner had vanished. They
knew by the sound of his voice that he hadn’t the least idea what had
become of that dinner.
Now there was some one else roaming over the snow-covered meadows and
through the Green Forest and the Old Pasture these days with a stomach
so lean and empty that he couldn’t think of anything else. It was Old
Man Coyote. You know he is very clever, is Old Man Coyote, and he
managed to find enough food of one kind and another to keep him alive,
but never enough to give him that comfortable feeling of a full
stomach. While he wasn’t actually starving, he was always hungry. So he
spent all the time when he wasn’t sleeping in hunting for something to
eat.
Of course he often ran across the tracks of Granny and Reddy Fox, and
once in a while he would meet them. It struck Old Man Coyote that they
didn’t seem as thin as he was. That set him to thinking. Neither of
them was a smarter hunter than he. In fact, he prided himself on being
smarter than either of them. Yet when he met them, they seemed to be in
the best of spirits and not at all worried because food was so scarce.
Why? There must be a reason. They must be getting food of which he knew
nothing.
“I’ll just keep an eye on them,” muttered Old Man Coyote.
So very slyly and cleverly Old Man Coyote followed Granny and Reddy
Fox, taking the greatest care that they should not suspect that he was
doing it. All one night he followed them through the Green Forest and
over the Green Meadows, and when at last he saw them go home, appearing
not at all worried because they had caught nothing, he trotted off to
his own home to do some more thinking.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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