The low rasping went past close at hand, then to the right, then back, and seemed going away.  Rag felt he knew what he was about, he wasn’t a baby; it was his duty to learn what it was.  He slowly raised his roly-poly body on his short, fluffy legs, lifted his little round head above the covering of his nest and peeped out into the woods.  The sound had ceased as soon as he moved.  He saw nothing, so took one step forward to a clear view, and instantly found himself face to face with an enormous Black Serpent.

“Mammy,” he screamed in mortal terror as the monster darted at him.  With all the strength of his tiny limbs he tried to run.  But in a flash the Snake had him by one ear and whipped around him with his coils to 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.