The Junior Classics, Volume 8: Animal and Nature Stories
General
The Junior Classics, Volume 8: Animal and Nature Stories
Children's literature
He paid not the slightest heed to boy or cow, but rolled and
threshed, biting at the fragment of spear-handle, giving vent to
his rage and pain in a hoarse, distressful roar.
Perry might easily have scrambled to his feet and escaped, but he
also was flung at full length on the floor, and instantly Solomon,
in distress, rolled over him, crushing the breath from his lungs.
The terrified Rufe, looking down upon his brother's blackened face
and the bear's wicked claws waving above it, leaped to his feet and
started to run to the barn-loft door, to scream for help.
At less than half the distance, his feet caught in the meshes of
the unrolled net, and he measured his length on the floor.
As he quickly untangled a foot, the thought flashed into his mind,
"Throw this net upon the bear's legs!" In a flash he was at the
edge of the open floor and hauling the big seine in coils at his
feet.
When he had a heap to the height of his knees he gathered it in his
arms and dropped the coils upon Solomon's waving legs.
The bear's claws took instant hold of the stout meshes, and bruin,
feeling his feet entangled, wrenched at their fastenings, rolling
himself over on his side and off the body of the prostrate boy.
Perry, well-nigh smothered, had barely strength enough to crawl out
of reach of the whirlwind fight which now took place.
Even the cow was awed to silence by the uproar of Solomon's rage as
he fought with the entangling folds of the salmon net.
The seine needed no attendance. It did its own work once the
grizzly's legs had been thrust through its meshes.
Coil after coil, the hundred and fifty feet of seine came down out
of the loft as the bear rolled and pitched and tumbled. The more he
tore and threshed, the more meshes there were to enwrap and
entangle him.
In five minutes from the time its first meshes dropped upon him,
the net had Solomon so wound and bound that his legs were
immovable, and he could barely wriggle his neck.
Perry soon recovered his breath, and before they ran to the field
to tell of Solomon's plight, the two boys had the presence of mind
to pen the cow up where she could not, should she take a notion,
gore the helpless grizzly.
Amid both laughter and commiseration, blended with comments on the
pluck of the two youngsters, the ranchmen performed a surgical
operation on the helpless Solomon, extracting the spear from his
flesh. With much greater difficulty they freed him from the seine
and got him back into his lair.
A DROLL FOX-TRAP
By C. A. Stephens
When I was a boy I lived in one of those rustic neighborhoods on
the outskirts of the great "Maine woods." Foxes were plenty, for
about all those sunny pioneer clearings birch-partridges breed by
thousands, as also field-mice and squirrels, making plenty of game
for Reynard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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