Mother West Wind "Where" StoriesBurgess, Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo)
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Mother West Wind "Where" Stories
Burgess, Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo)
Animals -- Juvenile fiction
"So Little Chief made his home in the rock-slide high up on the mountain
and was happy, for it was just as he thought it would be--no one
thought of looking in that bare place for him. For food he ate the pea
vines and grasses and other green things that grew just at the edge of
the rock-slide and was perfectly happy. One day he decided he would take
some of his dinner into his little cave and eat it there. So he cut a
little bundle of pea vine and other green things. He left his little
bundle on a flat rock in the sun while he went to look for something
else and then forgot all about it. It didn't enter his head again until
a few days later he happened along by that flat rock and discovered that
little bundle. The pea vines and grasses were quite dry, just like the
hay Farmer Brown's boy helps his father store away in the barn every
summer.
"'I guess I don't want to eat that,' said Little Chief, 'but it will
make me a very nice bed.' So he carried it home and made a bed of it.
There wasn't quite enough, so the next day he cut some more and carried
it home at once. But this, being green, soon soured and smelled so badly
that he was forced to take it out and throw it away. That set him to
thinking. Why was the first he had brought in so dry and sweet and
pleasant? Why didn't it spoil as the other had done? He cut some more
and spread it out on the big flat rock and once again he forgot. When he
remembered and went to look at it two or three days later, he found it
just like the first, dry and sweet and very pleasant to smell. This he
took home to add to his bed. Then he took home some more that was green,
and this spoiled just as the other had done.
"Little Chief was puzzling over this as he squatted on a rock taking a
sun-bath. The sun was very warm and comforting. After a while the rock
on which he sat grew almost hot. Little Chief had brought along a couple
of pieces of pea vine on which to lunch, but not being hungry he left
them beside him on the rock. By and by he happened to glance at them.
They had wilted and already they were beginning to dry. An idea popped
into his funny little head.
"'It's the sun that does it!' he cried.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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