His mate wheeled around to think it over. She certainly didn’t like the looks of that storm. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to just show the . The minute he took his eye off her she’d hide and she wouldn’t come back until after he had eaten and gone. She could hear him calling. Her mate answered with the funny little yap use between them when they are hunting together. Down she dropped, but she gripped her claws good and tight into the branch of a tree near the mouse’s stump before she called, “Here we are!”
 
“Huh-huh-huh,” panted the wicked beast. “I didn’t know where you had gone. Snff, snff! Lots of tracks here, all right enough!” he . It was inky dark, so of course he couldn’t see that the footprints of the mice were all leading out and none leading back in again; you remember Chaik Jay had sent every last tail out of the Woods and Fields as fast as mice could run. Scritch, scritch! If Great-grandfather Fieldmouse had heard Killer’s claws tearing at the rotten wood he wouldn’t have boasted that no one but a bear could break in and eat them. Then——
 
Boom! Crash-h-h! R-r-r-rip! Splash! Down in one blinding sheet came the first rain of that storm. It was surely a bad one!
 
The hoptoad was right when he said there was going to be rain—“floods of it.” There was. And there was wind and lightning and thunder and terrible and squawking and and pounding—all the noises that make a storm such a scary thing. Of course it wasn’t as bad as Chaik Jay told the mouse it was going to be, but the mice didn’t know that. They were all hidden in the stone pile by the cornfield fence, or in logs and in the Deep Woods. Some of them even went all the way up to Tommy Peele’s barn and hid in the strawstack. They didn’t hide in the haystack because——
 
But first I want to tell you the rest of what happened down by Doctor ’s Pond. The owls tried to fly home, but their wings got so waterlogged with the rain they had to creep into the hollow oak that was blown down in the terrible storm—the time Rabbit rescued the Woodsfolk who were living in it and had a storm party in his little cornstalk tent.
 
Killer tried to hide in his crack between two stones in the bank of Doctor Muskrat’s Pond. But the water found him. First it in from the ground above, where Louie Thomson’s little blanket tent used to stand, and most washed him out; and then the pond grew fuller and fuller and higher and higher until it most drowned him. So he had to go out in all that rain, gnashing his teeth and swearing.
 
&l............