Winterbound by Margery Williams Bianco Read Free Book Online Page A

you say ‘scared’?”
    â€œI said mad. I wasn’t scared. I knew it was just a gray fox, all right, but any time I hear one of them darn things holler it makes me jump, and it would anyone else, too!”
    â€œHow big is a gray fox?” Caroline wanted to know.
    â€œNot as big as you are, Sis!” and Caroline looked relieved.“They’re about so long—” Neal spread his hands apart. “They’re heavier built than a red fox, and sort of low in the body; a red fox is most all fur.”
    â€œIs there anything bigger than foxes?”
    â€œThere’s wild cats. There was a lot of ’em round where I lived once. And there used to be a thing they called bobcats; some folks call it a link.”
    Martin nodded. “I’ve seen lynxes, in the zoo. They’ve got tufted ears.”
    â€œThat was up among the big ledges, the place they call the Cat Rocks still, though I guess there’s nothing much but snakes there now, up over west of here. I don’t suppose there’s been one of those things seen in years,” Neal said.
    â€œThere used to be bears,” Jimmie said. “Dad saw a bear once.”
    â€œI was always sure it was a bear, but when I told them at home no one believed me. You know how it is; if Jimmie were to come home one day and tell me he’d seen a tiger I’d just say, ‘Yeah?’ and think no more about it. Though they should have had more sense, for in my grandfather’s day there used to be bears, back round the swamp there. I was going to school across lots by the short cut—just about Shirley’s size, I was—and all at once I seen it standing up there in a berry patch, and I turned right around quick and came home. ‘I ain’t goin’to school today,’ I says, but when I told them all I got was a licking. But I went back and found its tracks next day, right along the brook where the ground was soft. Just like a naked foot print. It was a bear, all right. I can see it now, standing there. Of course if it was Jimmie, now, he’d have walked right up to it and made sure!”
    â€œI would not! Not without I had a gun with me.”
    â€œA gun wouldn’t do you any good,” said Martin. “Father knew a man who met a bear right on a narrow ledge of rock and he didn’t have any weapon—he was coming back from fishing—so he just waved his arms and yelled and the bear ran away. He said he was glad he didn’t have a gun, ’cause he might have fired it, and then the bear would have gone for him. It was up near Canada. They had mountain lions there, too; panthers. I guess there wouldn’t be any panthers round here?”
    â€œI wouldn’t like to say there was. But there was a queer thing happened when I was a boy,” Neal said. “I’ve often wondered about it. It was when we were living up in that house I showed you, the time we drove over to the cider mill. The big swamp’s right in back and it used to be pretty wild up in there those days; not much cleared land around. I’d gone over to my aunt’s one day, and I had my brother with me; he was just a bit younger than Jimmie is now. It was getting on dusk and we was coming back by the old corduroy road, not hurryin’ any,and all at once I heard something hollering up the hill back of the swamp, a kind of a long howl: ooh—ooh—ooh!
    â€œI says: ‘Hear that owl, Nate?’ And Nate he looked over his shoulder, sort of quick, and then he looked up at me, but he didn’t say nothing, so I says: ‘Getting latish; we’d better walk a bit faster!’ I knew mighty well that wasn’t no owl we heard, and it wasn’t a wildcat, either, for I’d heard them screeching at night, and I knew what they sounded like. This was bigger and deeper, and it didn’t sound like nothing I’d ever heard before; it was a kind of a hunting cry, if you know