Unicorns by Lucille Recht Penner Read Free Book Online Page A

thought his
karkadann
helped him win. They all wanted one. But nothing was harder than catching a unicorn.

People were always trying to capture unicorns. Most were caught when they were young and small. Alexander tamed his
karkadann
when it was still a baby.
    If a unicorn was attacked, it fought back. A unicorn was a good fighter. It was smart and quick. It ran faster than the fastest horses and hunting dogs.
    Sometimes hunters could trap a unicorn if a young girl helped them.
    The huntsmen and their dogs wait in a garden filled with flowers. They see a unicorn. The hunters blow their trumpets and gallop toward it. The unicorn kicks out. It swings its horn to defend itself.
    It gets away. But it sees a girl in the woods. The unicorn stops and puts its head in her lap. She strokes it gently.
    The hunters ride up. They capture the unicorn and put it in a pretty fenced garden.
    This story is shown in a set of seven tapestries. They were woven over five hundred years ago. They hung in a house in France. In the 1700s, peasants broke into the house. They took the tapestries. They used them to protect fruit trees from frost and to cover potatoes in their barns.

    Many years later, the owners got the tapestries back. Today they hang in a museum in New York City. Thousands of people see them every year.
    The story that the tapestries tell seems strange. Why would anyone want to hunt a unicorn?
    The answer is that people wanted unicorn horns. They believed that these horns had strange and magical powers.

In the Middle Ages, people worried a lot about poison. It was an easy way for someone to hurt his enemies. How could a person tell if his food was poisoned?
    The best way was with a unicorn horn. When poison was nearby, the horn started to sweat. At meals, rich people would put a unicorn horn in the middle of the table. Ifa person couldn’t afford a whole horn, he used a little piece of one.
    Doctors made unicorn-horn medicine. They scraped tiny bits off a horn and mixed them with water. Then they gave the mixture to a sick person to drink. This was a powerful cure for many sicknesses. In fact, if a few grains of horn were put on a person’s tongue right after he died, it sometimes brought him back to life!
    Unicorn horns cost a lot of money. Some people tried to sell fake ones. But there were ways to tell if a unicorn horn was real. If you dropped a piece of it into water, it sent up bubbles. If you burned apiece, it made a sweet scent. But the best test was to try it out with poison.
    A king paid a fortune for a unicorn horn. To make sure it was real, he dipped it in poisoned water. Then he told one of his servants to drink the water.
    The servant drank it and died right away. The king was angry! He had been sold a fake unicorn horn!

    A unicorn horn could do more than check for poison and cure diseases. It helped people’s memory. It even kept them young. So of course everyone wanted one. And in the 1200s, sailors began bringing horns to Europe from faraway places.
    The horns were real. But did they come from real unicorns?

A long time ago, people believed that for every animal that lived on land a similar animal lived in the sea. Horses, for example, lived on land and sea horses lived in the sea.
    What about unicorns? In the Middle Ages, people began hearing reports of a sea unicorn. Hardly anybody had seen one. Sea unicorns lived in the freezing ocean near the North Pole. They died if they were taken away from their home.

    The sea unicorn is actually a kind of whale called a narwhal (NAR-wall).
    Narwhals are huge. They have eight-foot-long horns sticking out of their heads. The horns are pure ivory and grow in a spiral—just like a unicorn horn!
    But are narwhals really sea unicorns? Sailors thought they knew how to find out.
    First they cut off a horn. It was hollow inside. They put poisonous spiders into it and sealed it shut.
    When they opened it, the spiders weredead. They had died from lack of air. But the sailors