or.

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 now had 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 fields were those of a thoroughly bad and
unscrupulous fox that lived only too near.

The chief indwellers of the swamp were Molly and Rag. Their nearest
neighbors were far away, and their nearest kin were dead. This was their
home, and here they lived together, and here Rag received the training
that made his success in life.

Molly was a good little mother and gave him a careful bringing up. The
first thing he learned was to lie low and say nothing. His adventure
with the snake taught him the wisdom of this. Rag never forgot that
lesson; afterward he did as he was told, and it made the other things
come more easily.

The second lesson he learned was 'freeze.' It grows out of the first,
and Rag was taught it as soon as he could run.

'Freezing' is simply doing nothing, turning into a statue. As soon as he
finds a foe near, no matter what he is doing, a well-trained Cottontail
keeps just as he is and stops all movement, for the creatures of the
woods are of the same color as the things in the woods and catch the eye
only whi