see it clearly

Jerry Muskrat's Winter Home

By Thornton W. Burgess

All the time that Peter Rabbit and Jumper the Hare and Reddy Fox and old Granny Fox and other little forest people were running about on the beautiful white snow when it was frozen, and through it when it was soft, and all the time that Johnny Chuck and Striped Chipmunk and Grandfather Frog and old Mr. Toad were sleeping the long winter away, Jerry Muskrat was living in a little world of his own. Where was he? Oh, he was right at home in the Smiling Pool.

Jerry thought it was a very nice little world. Perhaps that was because he had done so much himself to make that little world what it was. You know we always enjoy things most when we have done our share to get them. There was his house which he had built in the fall. Jerry was very proud of that house. He spent a great deal of his time curled up in the warm bed in the snug upper bedroom. He didn't care how cold it was outside or how snowy it was or how rough Brother North Wind might blow. He just didn't know anything about it. So he would lie there and dream dreams until he grew hungry, and then he would yawn and stretch and slip down to his doorway and out into the Smiling Pool to dig up a stout lily root.

It was a queer, dim world down there under the ice of the frozen Smiling Pool, but Jerry liked it. In the first place it wasn't very, very cold one day and ever so much warmer the next day. It was always just the same. Peter Rabbit would have thought it dreadfully cold because, you know, Peter's coat would have wet through. But Jerry Muskrat's coat was waterproof and very, very warm, so Jerry enjoyed swimming almost as much as he did in summer. Close up under the banks were places where he could get air when he needed it. Best of all he had a secret home way up under the roots of the Big Hickory Tree on the bank of the Smiling Pool. It was warm and snug and dry and no one knew anything about it, no even sharp eyed Billy Mink. A long tunnel led up to it and Jerry had so carefully hidden the entrance to this that no one had found it yet. He had many tunnels, had Jerry Muskrat, and the opening to this one was so far away from the snug home high in the bank that if you had found it you never, never would have thought that the tunnel could possibly run way, way over to the Big Hickory Tree.

Jerry called that home in the bank his castle. He had food stored there, and if anything should happen to his home in the Smiling Pool he had a place where he could feel perfectly safe.

Let winds blow high or winds blow low. Come old Jack Frost with ice and snow. No little bug within a rug was every warmer or more snug than Jerry Muskrat, for, you know, he'd everything to make him so.

Yes, Sir, it seemed as if Jerry Muskrat really didn't have a thing to worry about. But everybody has troubles, even Jerry Muskrat. They came to him just when he least expected them and then he was glad, oh, so glad that he had been shrewd enough to build his castle.