Old Yeller by Fred Gipson Read Free Book Online

me to come back and look at all the yellow ants and centipedes and crickets and stinging scorpions that went scurrying away, hunting new hiding places.
    Once he got hung up in some briars and yelled till I came back to get him out. Another time he fell down and struck his elbow on a rock anddidn’t say a word about it for several minutes—until he saw blood seeping out of a cut on his arm. Then he stood and screamed like he was being burnt with a hot iron.
    With that much racket going on, I knew we’d scare all the game clear out of the country. Which, I guess we did. All but the squirrels. They took to the trees where they could hide from us. But I was lucky enough to see which tree one squirrel went up; so I put some of Little Arliss’s racket to use.
    I sent him in a circle around the tree, beating on the grass and bushes with a stick, while I stood waiting. Sure enough, the squirrel got to watching Little Arliss and forgot me. He kept turning around the tree limb to keep it between him and Little Arliss, till he was on my side in plain sight. I shot him out of the tree the first shot.
    After that, Old Yeller caught onto what game we were after. He went to work then, trailing and treeing the squirrels that Little Arliss was scaring up off the ground. From then on, with Yeller to tree the squirrels and Little Arliss to turn them on the tree limbs, we had pickings. Wasn’t but alittle bit till I’d shot five, more than enough to make us a good squirrel fry for supper.
     
    A week later, Old Yeller helped me catch a wild gobbler that I’d have lost without him. We had gone up to the corn patch to pick a bait of blackeyed peas. I was packing my gun. Just as we got up to the slabrock fence that Papa had built around the corn patch, I looked over and spotted this gobbler doing our pea-picking for us. The pea pods were still green yet, most of them no further along than snapping size. This made them hard for the gobbler to shell, but he was working away at it, pecking and scratching so hard that he was raising a big dust out in the field.
    “Why, that old rascal,” Mama said. “He’s just clawing those pea vines all to pieces.”
    “Hush, Mama,” I said. “Don’t scare him.” I lifted my gun and laid the barrel across the top of the rock fence. “I’ll have him ready for the pot in just a minute.”
    It wasn’t a long shot, and I had him sighted in, dead to rights. I aimed to stick a bullet right where his wings hinged to his back. I was holdingmy breath and already squeezing off when Little Arliss, who’d gotten behind, came running up.
    “Whatcha shootin’ at, Travis?” he yelled at the top of his voice. “Whatcha shootin’ at?”
    Well, that made me and the gobbler both jump. The gun fired, and I saw the gobbler go down. But a second later, he was up again, streaking through the tall corn, dragging a broken wing.
    For a second, I was so mad at Little Arliss I could have wrung his neck like a frying chicken’s. I said, “Arliss! Why can’t you keep your mouth shut? You’ve made me lose that gobbler!”
    Well, Little Arliss didn’t have sense enough to know what I was mad about. Right away, he puckered up and went to crying and leaking tears all over the place. Some of them splattered clear down on his bare feet, making dark splotches in the dust that covered them. I always did say that when Little Arliss cried he could shed more tears faster than any crier I ever saw.
    “Wait a minute!” Mama put in. “I don’t think you’ve lost your gobbler yet. Look yonder!”
    She pointed, and I looked, and there was OldYeller jumping the rock fence and racing toward the pea patch. He ran up to where I’d knocked the gobbler down. He circled the place one time, smelling the ground and wiggling his stub tail. Then he took off through the corn the same way the gobbler went, yelling like I was beating him with a stick.
    When he barked treed a couple of minutes later, it was in the woods the other side of the