o gloat
over the helpless little baby bunny he had secured for dinner.

"Mammy--Mammy," gasped poor little Raggylug as the cruel monster began
slowly choking him to death. Very soon the little one's cry would have
ceased, but bounding through the woods straight as an arrow came Mammy.
No longer a shy, helpless little Molly Cottontail, ready to fly from a
shadow: the mother's love was strong in her. The cry of her baby had
filled her with the courage of a hero, and-hop, she went over that
horrible reptile. Whack, she struck down at him with her sharp hind
claws as she passed, giving him such a stinging blow that he squirmed
with pain and hissed with anger.

"M-a-m-m-y," came feebly from the little one. And Mammy came leaping
again and again and struck harder and fiercer until the loathsome
reptile let go the little one's ear and tried to bite the old one as she
leaped over. But all he got was a mouthful of wool each time, and
Molly's fierce blows began to tell, as long bloody rips were torn in the
Black Snake's scaly armor.

Things were now looking bad for the Snake; and bracing himself for the
next charge, he lost his tight hold on Baby Bunny, who at once wriggled
out of the coils and away into the underbrush, breathless and terribly
frightened, but unhurt save that his left ear was much torn by the
teeth of that dreadful Serpent.

Molly had now gained all she wanted. She had no notion of fighting for
glory or revenge. Away she went into the woods and the little one
followed the shining beacon of her snow-white tail until she led him to
a safe corner of the Swamp.

II

Old Olifant's Swamp was a rough, brambly tract of second-growth woods,
with a marshy pond and a stream through the middle. A few ragged
remnants of the old forest still stood in it and a few of the still
older trunks were lying about as dead logs in the brushwood. The land
about the pond was of that willow-grown, sedgy kind that cats and horses
avoid, but that cattle do not fear. The drier zones were overgrown with
briars and young trees. The outermost belt of all, that next the fields,
was of thrifty, gummy-trunked young pines whose living needles in air
and dead ones on earth offer so delicious an odor to the nostrils of the
passer-by, and so deadly a breath to those seedlings that would compete
with them for the worthless waste they grow on.

All around for a long way were smooth fields, and the only wild tracks
that ever crossed these