ffle, a sigh; but they all
passed by on the other side, so to say, and gave the silver tabby room
to think. Apparently cats are not considered good company in the wild;
lonely creatures, they are best left alone.

No mother-rabbit came to the "stop"--which the cat knew to be there--to
feed her babies, which the cat, thanks to her nose, knew to be there,
too. No baby-rabbits came out to be fed--or to feed the cat either.
"Stops" are secrets, kept from the rest of rabbitdom by the wise
mothers, and, they hope, from other inquisitive people also. The
little short holes in the middle of the field are plugged up by the old
does with grass and fur when they are away, which is pretty often.

Then the silver tabby heard a thump come out of the night--a thud,
hollow, resounding, and noticeable. It was repeated after an interval,
and again repeated. There was a certain note of insistence about
it--like a signal. And if the cat had been a wild creature she would
have thrown up the sponge, or gone away, and returned secretly later,
or, anyway, not persisted in crouching there; for those thuds were a
signal, and they meant that the game was up. In other words, some wily
old mother circling the approach, or some wandering back-eddy of wind,
had given the cat away; she had been scented, and rabbit after rabbit,
squatting invisible in the night, was thumping the ground with its feet
to say so and warn all off whom it might concern. The silver tabby,
however, neither wild nor satisfied to be tame, did not know. She sat
on, and in doing so wondered, perhaps, at the scarcity of rabbits
thereabouts.

She sat, or hunched, or crouched, or couched, or whatever you call that
precise position of cats, which is neither lying down nor sitting up,
for some time longer--for another twenty minutes, to be precise; and
all the while the thuds of mystery serenaded her from nowhere in
particular out of the dark--and from down-wind.

Then she must have come to the conclusion that she was being made a
fool of, for she got up, stretched herself lazily, with arched back and
bared claws, and yawned a bored feline yawn. And even as she did so
she was aware of a sudden final flourish of thuds, and then
dead-silence. Next moment, in that same dead-silence, she distinctly
heard something coming towards her, and that something was taking no
pains to conceal the fact.

Now, in the wild it is not the custom to go towards anything and take
no pains