“Children,” quavered Mammy Cottontail, “That was a lynx! Now, I want to tell you something, and I want you to listen with all your ears, because it is very, very serious! “Old man Lynx and his family live up on that mountain top, and while they don’t come down this far once in a coon’s age, we’ve got to be prepared! Because it would be a terrible thing if they did! Terrible for us, and terrible for everyone we know! “I’ll tell you why he screeched that way! It was to scare timid folks like us, so that we’d jump and betray our whereabouts. Yes’m, that’s exactly what he screeched for! To make us jump! “Because, you see, when Mother Nature invented little brown bunnies and grouse hens and muskrats and all the rest of us forest folk, she knew exactly what she was about. And she gave us our brown coats so that we’d match the ground, and couldn’t be seen by the big prowling creatures that are always trying to have rabbit and grouse for dinner. And just so long as we keep as still as field mice, we stand a fighting chance of not being seen. “But Old Man Lynx knows this as well as we do. He knows that when he goes hunting o’nights, none but the foolish will be stirring a hair’s breadth from their own warm beds. And if there are no foolish ones that he can sneak up on, with his great padded paws that tip-toe so silently through the underbrush, he screams in the hope that it will startle some of us so dreadfully that we will forget to keep still, and jump.” “It’s enough to make any one jump out of his skin,” said Daddy. “But that’s exactly what the Old Man figures on. And if you can’t control your nerves any better than to jump when he screeches, he can see exactly where you are! If he’s anywhere near, that is! Well, you children had better go to sleep now. But just you remember this: Lie still when you hear him scream, and ten to one he’ll never know where you are.” “Yes, Mammy,” whispered six timid little voices. XXIII INTRODUCING BOBBY LYNX It was not often that Old Man Lynx gave voice to the pangs of hunger. For he knew that for every grouse or hare or baby fox he startled into betraying its whereabouts, he scared a dozen so far away that it made hunting harder next time. But tonight he was teaching some one else the trick. At the very time that Father Red Fox was viewing his own red-brown pups with such mingled pride and amusement, and Mother Douglas was driving Father Douglas out of the old oak tree, lest he should step on one of the squirrel babies, and Mammy and Daddy Cottontail were taking turn and turn about guarding the six brown bunnies on the edge of the cornfield, Madam Lynx—away up on the top of Mt. Olaf—was just as proud as any one of two great, scraggly kittens, as heavy-pawed and bob-tailed and fierce-looking as anything that could be imagined.