|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 7
With the destruction of the old stub the thunder and lightning seemed
to have vented their malevolence. The thunder passed on into the south
and east like the rolling of ten thousand heavy cart wheels over the
roofs of the forest, and the lightning went with it. The rain fell
steadily. The hole in which he had taken shelter was partly filled with
water. He was drenched. His teeth chattered as he waited for the next
thing to happen.
It was a long wait. When the rain finally stopped, and the sky cleared,
it was night. Through the tops of the trees Baree could have seen the
stars if he had poked out his head and looked upward. But he clung to
his hole. Hour after hour passed. Exhausted, half drowned, footsore,
and hungry, he did not move. At last he fell into a troubled sleep, a
sleep in which every now and then he cried softly and forlornly for his
mother. When he ventured out from under the root it was morning, and
the sun was shining.
At first Baree could hardly stand. His legs were cramped. Every bone in
his body seemed out of joint. His ear was stiff where the blood had
oozed out of it and hardened, and when he tried to wrinkle his wounded
nose, he gave a sharp little yap of pain. If such a thing were
possible, he looked even worse than he felt. His hair had dried in
muddy patches; he was dirt-stained from end to end; and where yesterday
he had been plump and shiny, he was now as thin and wretched as
misfortune could possibly make him. And he was hungry. He had never
before known what it meant to be really hungry.
When he went on, continuing in the direction he had been following
yesterday, he slunk along in a disheartened sort of way. His head and
ears were no longer alert, and his curiosity was gone. He was not only
stomach hungry: mother hunger rose above his physical yearning for
something to eat. He wanted his mother as he had never wanted her
before in his life. He wanted to snuggle his shivering little body
close up to her and feel the warm caressing of her tongue and listen to
the mothering whine of her voice. And he wanted Kazan, and the old
windfall, and that big blue spot that was in the sky right over it. As
he followed again along the edge of the creek, he whimpered for them as
a child might grieve.
The forest grew more open after a time, and this cheered him up a
little. Also the warmth of the sun was taking the ache out of his body.
But he grew hungrier and hungrier. He always had depended entirely on
Kazan and Gray Wolf for food. His parents had, in some ways, made a
great baby of him. Gray Wolf's blindness accounted for this, for since
his birth she had not taken up her hunting with Kazan, and it was quite
natural that Baree should stick close to her, though more than once he
had been filled with a great yearning to follow his father. Nature was
hard at work trying to overcome its handicap now. It was struggling to
impress on Baree that the time had now come when he must seek his own
food. The fact impinged itself upon him slowly but steadily, and he
began to think of the three or four shellfish he had caught and
devoured on the stony creek bar near the windfall. He also remembered
the open clamshell he had found, and the lusciousness of the tender
morsel inside it. A new excitement began to possess him. He became, all
at once, a hunter.
With the thinning out of the forest the creek grew more shallow. It ran
again over bars of sand and stones, and Baree began to nose along the
edge of the shallows. For a long time he had no success. The few
crayfish that he saw were exceedingly lively and elusive, and all the
clamshells were shut so tight that even Kazan's powerful jaws would
have had difficulty in smashing them. It was almost noon when he caught
his first crayfish, about as big as a man's forefinger. He devoured it
ravenously. The taste of food gave him fresh courage. He caught two
more crayfish during the afternoon. It was almost dusk when he stirred
a young rabbit out from under a cover of grass. If he had been a month
older, he could have caught it. He was still very hungry, for three
crayfish--scattered through the day--had not done much to fill the
emptiness that was growing steadily in him.
With the approach of night Baree's fears and great loneliness returned.
Before the day had quite gone he found soft bed of sand. Since his
fight with Papayuchisew, he had traveled a long distance, and the rock
under which he made his bed this night was at least eight or nine miles
from the windfall. It was in the open of the creek bottom, with and
when the moon rose, and the stars filled the sky, Baree could look out
and see the water of the stream shimmering in a glow almost as bright
as day. Directly in front of him, running to the water's edge, was a
broad carpet of white sand. Across this sand, half an hour later, came
a huge black bear.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|