“All that night the dog was lonely because he’d lost the little soft thing that laughed and trusted him. And he told the Moon about it. Dogs always tell things to the Moon. And he was the most unhappy dog in the Forest because he’d only learned half of the secret about being trusted.”
Here Watch paused to rush at the haystack with a terrible bark because he thought Ouphe was sticking his nose out again. “Wurff!” he cleared his throat. “I’ll catch that fellow some day,” he remarked as he came back to Nibble Rabbit’s cage and sat down again.
Nibble was waiting for him with his little feet pressed close to the wires. He wasn’t afraid of any one while that dog was there to talk to him. “Go on, please,” he demanded. “You said its Father and Mother took away the little soft cub who had trusted him. And the poor dog felt lonely.”
“Cub? I didn’t say ‘cub,’ Bunny. It was a Baby. My, but you are a green little wild thing.” He smiled again, but this time Nibble wasn’t afraid of the long teeth he showed.
“You said it was like a little bear,” Nibble insisted, and he wrinkled up his own nose.
“Well, Cub or Puppy or Baby,” the dog went on. “That first dog wanted it the worst way. So he just trailed its people back to where they lived in a cave, and he hid up on top of the cave, where the gray smoke came creeping up through a crack. And sometimes he’d hear it laugh. And nobody thought of looking there for him.
“The dog would see the Man go out to hunt, and the Woman go down for water, and he could hear the Baby pattering around inside the cave. And then it would sit down, ‘plump!’ the way it did in the Forest. And then it would laugh again. And the dog’s tongue would just itch to tickle the Baby.
“So on the third day, when the Man went out to hunt and the Woman went down for water, he sneaked around to the cave door and first thing he knew he had his tickly tongue on the little soft thing. And his ears were so full of the noises it made that he didn’t hear its mother’s bare feet when she came back. And she threw the first thing that she had in her hand—which was the water—all over him.
“Of course that didn’t hurt him. He didn’t exactly like it any more than he liked the Baby’s fingers when they pulled his whiskers, but he never imagined she was fighting. He thought she was playing with him. So he trusted her—which is the whole secret about being trusted.