Читать книгу Roy Blakeley, Pathfinder - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 11

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Now that it was too late, I could see that if I had only landed that meat inside the house, it would have been easy to get away. And the animal would have been a prisoner, too, because he could never have got out of that house. The windows were boarded on the inside and the door was good and heavy. But what was the good of thinking about that when it was too late?

I have to admit that for about half a minute I wasn’t a good scout. I was just scared and excited and I didn’t do anything. Then I saw the animal prowling around the tree and looking up and heard him making that noise. Oh boy, it was terrible!

Then, bang, just like that, I remembered about him wiping the leaf off his paw by rubbing it on his face. It was lucky for me he did that, because it put into my head something I had read, about the way the natives in India catch tigers. I read it in a natural history book. There’s a kind of a tree in India named the prauss tree; anyway, it’s something like that. And it has big flat leaves. So the natives spread gum on those leaves. They get the gum from the trees, too. Then they put the leaves in the path and when the tiger comes along he steps on them and rubs his paws over his face, so as to get the leaves off. But that only makes it worse for him, because they stick to his face and over his eyes and everywhere. He gets just plastered up with them. Then he gets excited—gee whiz, you can’t blame him. And he rolls around on the ground and can’t see and just rolls and rolls and bangs against trees and gets all played out and then he lies still just like a horse does when he falls down. And that’s when the natives come and get him. And it’s easy, too, because he can’t see and all the fight is knocked out of him.

Oh boy, wasn’t I glad I remembered that! I just tore out that box of fly paper and pulled the sheets apart and dropped them on the ground. Some of them fell upside down. I should worry. I tried to drop them so they’d fall around the foot of the tree and a lot of them did. More than half of them fell right side up. A couple of them stuck to the trunk, but I didn’t care. Maybe that would be good, I thought. Believe me, in about ten seconds I had the ground around the tree covered with fly paper. He’d have to do a fancy two-step if he wanted to get between them.

All the while he was crouching and watching me with those two eyes that were just like fire. Pretty soon a sheet of fly paper drifted down right near him and he pawed it. Maybe he thought it was a chop, hey? It just caught his paw and he tried to wipe it off against his face. Good night! There he was with one of his eyes and the whole top of his head plastered flat. He looked as if he had been in a fight.

Then he came closer to the trunk, pawing at his head all the time and stepped, kerflop, right on another sheet—plunked his foot right down in the middle of it. Oh bibbie, then you should have seen him! He tried to rub it off against his head and it stuck there and then there was a circus. He rolled over on the ground and caught another sheet against his side. In another second he had one flopping on the end of his tail and he kept going around after it until pretty soon it got stuck to one of his legs. Jiminetty! But you should have heard him howl. I bet he was mad clean through.

But safety first—oh boy! I dropped another one and it landed right on his nose; lucky shot.

By now he was acting just like a cat having a fit and howling like mad. I guess he couldn’t see at all, because he went, kerplunk, up against a tree and then rolled away and went banging against the spring house. He had two sheets on his face and another one on his paw and the whole front of him was all mucked up with gum and the grass and dirt were sticking to him. Believe me, he was a sight. He didn’t look much like a lord of the jungle; he looked more as if he was on his way home from the hospital.

You can talk about tanks and machine guns and poison gas and hand grenades, and all the other new fangled weapons, but tanglefoot for mine; that’s what I say. If the Allies had used tanglefoot, the war would have been over three years ago. And if they had spread it all along the banks of the Marne, the Germans would never have gotten across, that’s one sure thing.