Читать книгу Four-Footed Americans and Their Kin - Mabel Osgood Wright - Страница 7
ОглавлениеWAFFLES AND A WALK
AMMY BUN cooked a delicious supper for the children that night, for the circus had put her in extra good humor.
As it was the first of the really cool evenings, she surprised them with hot cocoa in the place of their usual glasses of milk, and there was cream toast, and cold chicken and tongue sliced daintily together.
The children had famous appetites, and Mr. Blake said he expected by spring they would all be as fat as Sausage herself.
"Not if you carry out all the plans I have for making you work and keeping you out-of-doors," said the Doctor.
"What? What are we going to do? Is there a surprise?" asked Dodo eagerly, reluctantly setting down her teacup. "School takes so much time and the rest of it is nearly all dark. Oh! I smell waffles!"
"What is nearly all dark,—the school, or the time, or the waffles?" asked the Doctor, as soon as the laugh, caused by Dodo's mixed-up sentences, had stopped.
"I mean that night comes nowadays very soon after we come home from school. Why are the days so short in winter, Uncle Roy, just when we need the sun to warm us, and so long and hot in summer when we want to be cool?"
"Why, it's the other way round," said Rap; "it is because the sun stays up so long in spring and summer that the days are warm, and because it comes so late, and hurries to bed, that the days are cold."
"But why does the sun stay longer some times than others? Why need the days ever be so very short?"
"Your supper would grow cold if I stopped to explain," said the Doctor. "Some day we must make ourselves into a class in astronomy and learn how the sun, moon, and stars all go bowling about in the sky, and how the old earth looked when she was young."
"There is the moon now. Oh, how fat it is to-night," said Dodo, looking toward a window where the curtains had not been drawn.
"The hunter's moon," said Mr. Blake, "and many a good time I've had by the light of it."
"Why is it called hunter's moon, daddy," asked Dodo, "and what did you do with the light of it?"
"It is the moon that comes in October when all the game birds and wild food and fur beasts are through raising their families, and it is fair for House People who need fur or food to go and hunt them."
"Did you ever need food and fur, daddy?" persisted Dodo.
"Yes, sometimes I really did; and should have starved except for my gun and what it brought me; and sometimes perhaps I thought I did," said Mr. Blake, looking at the Doctor, who was shaking with laughter.
"Did you ever shoot anything just to see if you could hit it?" asked Nat.
"Yes; I'm afraid I did often, before I had travelled over the wild west country and learned for myself that shooting food and fur beasts to 'see what you can hit,' is making this wonderful land of ours as bare of four-footed things as it will be of birds."
"Say, Mis' Cherry, can de young uns hab a spoon o' jam 'long o' dere waffles?" asked Mammy Bun in what was meant to be a whisper, popping her head in at the door.
"I'm afraid not to-night, mammy," said Mrs. Blake, whose girlish name of Cherry, mammy still used. "We should have the children dreaming of Buffaloes and Indians and rolling out of bed. Waffles are quite enough."
"But Mammy Bun's waffles are such well-behaved things that they never hurt anybody," said Olive.
"Yes," echoed Dodo, "mammy says it's all in the beating up; if you beat waffles ever so hard when you're making them, they'll never talk back after you eat them. I know something that does talk back, though—it's turnips if you eat them raw like apples, and chew rather quick and then drink water. Oh, it was dreadful!"
"So, missy has been having indigestion, has she?" laughed the Doctor.
"Yes; if that name means that inside your chest is too big for your skin. What makes indigestion, Uncle Roy?"
"Indigestion comes when the food you eat is not of the right kind or quality for your stomach mill to turn into good flesh and blood. Then it stays in the mill, swelling up, growing stale and sour, choking up the little wheels, and souring the wheel grease that helps them move, causing pain and sickness, until it is turned out in some way. That is the reason why we should be careful what we put into the mill.
"To make sure that mammy's waffles do not grumble, suppose we all take a little walk down the road before we go into the wonder room to draw the animal tree. Come, Cherry," said the Doctor, drawing Mrs. Blake's hand through his arm, "you, too. I'm not going to have you stay in the house all the time. We need you, and you need the fresh air to give you back the red cheeks that gave you your pet name. Olive, dear, please get your aunt's warm wrap—never mind gloves; here is a coat-pocket for each hand," and the procession stepped out into the bright moon path.
"There will be no frost until this wind dies down," said Mr. Blake.
"What nice clean shadows the trees make," said Olive, after they had walked in silence down a lane that led from the turnpike toward the pastures and spring.
"Hush! what was that?"
"A bird, maybe, that was sleepy and fell off its perch."
"No, a Flying Squirrel," whispered the Doctor. "There it goes!" and on looking up they saw a dark object, a little larger than a Chipmunk, half spring, half drop from a birch tree on one side of the lane to a maple on the opposite side.
"Can Squirrels fly? I thought only birds could do that," whispered Dodo, awe-struck.
"Look yonder, but keep very still," said Mr. Blake, holding back some branches that hid the view of the spring.
"It is a little dog drinking," said Nat. "What a bushy tail he has. See, he is going over toward the barns; perhaps he is a friend of Quick, or Mr. Wolf."
"No, it is a Fox, and he is going to see where the chickens live."
"A Fox!" screamed Dodo, forgetting the need for silence. "A real wild animal! Oh, uncle, do let us catch it!"
"I very much wish you would," said the Doctor, as the Fox raised one paw, sniffed the air, and disappeared like magic between some low bushes.
"He is the most cunning of our beasts, and if the wind had been the other way, he would not have given us even this peep at him."
"What difference does the wind make?" asked Nat. "Is he afraid of it?"
"I know," said Rap; "for before my leg was hurt I went often with the miller and his dog to hunt Foxes that stole his turkeys. Little wild beasts look for food mostly at night, or late in the afternoon, or early in the morning, when it isn't so easy to see, so they use their smeller to tell them a great many things that they can't see with their eyes. They can smell so well that if the wind was blowing from us to them they would know we are here and would run away."
"That is right, my lad," said the Doctor. "The wild beasts have a much keener sense of smell and hearing than we House People, and you will do well when you wish to watch even a Squirrel to keep from stepping on a dry leaf and to see which way the wind blows."
"Only think, we've seen a real wild animal," chuckled Dodo to Nat.
"I've seen a Coon and a Muskrat and a Mink," said Rap, "besides Foxes and Squirrels."
"I know what Mink is," said Dodo; "it's nice brown fur, and I have some of it on my winter coat.
"Uncle Roy is going to take us to the old log camp in the Owl woods some day, and there are fur beasts up around there, he says."
"Daddy has been all about the wild west country on business, and he has seen dreadful fierce, wild animals, and he is going to tell us about them by and by. You know daddy goes round to find out about the country and look for mines that are hidden in the ground," explained Nat to Rap, "and that's why we haven't seen much of him for a long time. You see mines are often in very savage places, and now daddy is staying here this winter to write down all he has seen and draw plans for people to work by in the spring."
"Oh, then your father is a miner," said Rap; "I've read about them."
"No, a miner is the man that digs with a pick and shovel; daddy is the one who digs with his brain and tells the miner how to work so that the earth won't fall in on him, and how to cut away the rock and get to the treasure. Daddy is what they call a Mining Engineer!" and Nat stopped suddenly, as if the two big words were too much for him.
"Some day I suppose you will go with him and see all these things. It is nice to have two legs," said Rap, half sadly, looking at his crutch.
"Never mind; we will be partners. I will go out and hunt, and you shall write the book about it the way uncle does, for I don't like to write."
"I do," said Rap, cheering up; "that will be splendid."
"Don't try to walk through the fence," said Olive.
Then the children found that they had been so busy talking that they did not realize they were walking back toward the farm, until they had bumped into the front fence instead of opening the gate.
The log fire in the wonder room was not a bit too warm, and as they gathered around it Mr. Wolf and Quick came in from the kitchen licking their lips, as if they had been so busy with supper that they had not missed their friends.
Wolf settled himself at Mrs. Blake's feet with all the dignity of a St. Bernard, but Quick kept prancing and springing from one to another with Fox-Terrier nervousness.
"In the spring when we began to learn about birds, I told you a few facts about their bones and feathers, the way in which they were made and for what they were useful," said Dr. Roy, sitting at his desk and tipping back his chair. "We found the bird was a good American citizen, and I think you feel now as if you really had a bowing acquaintance with some of these feathered folk."
"Yes," said Dodo. "I forget some things you said about them for a while, and then I remember again. We saw a Screech Owl in the woods yesterday, and I remembered its name right off, and that it was one of the good Owls that mustn't be shot."
"Good girl, that encourages your old uncle to tell you more stories this winter about some of the other creatures that are branches of the wonderful animal tree."
Nat and Rap brightened up, and Olive said she could not imagine anything pleasanter for winter evenings.
"But we have to do our lessons in the evenings," said Nat, dolefully.
"Uncle Roy will manage it somehow," said Dodo, shaking her head confidently; "there is a surprise somewhere, I know. I've been expecting it." At this Mr. and Mrs. Blake and the Doctor smiled, but said nothing.
"Uncle Roy," persisted Dodo, after a pause, "won't you do as you did with the birds, and tell us about the wild American animals instead of about menagerie beasts, and then make us a book about them? There must be as many as fifty kinds of usual animals in America, counting all those in the west country. I'm so tired of menagerie beasts—
"'L is for Lion who roars in his rage,
T is for Tiger who snarls in his cage,'
that was on my picture blocks when I was a little child. I had picture books of Cockatoos and other strange birds, too, but they never seemed to mean anything until you told us about our American birds."
"You are right, Dodo," said the Doctor, "and you have given me some new ideas for my surprise. Yes, there is a surprise hiding somewhere near! We are to have a winter camp here at the farm, and the stories told at the campfire shall all be about four-footed Americans, with a few about some no-footed and wing-handed ones thrown in."
