Lost on a Mountain in Maine Read Online Free PDF

close that I could have touched it and went down to the brook. I must have made a noise of some kind, for the deer suddenly stopped and turned its head and looked at me, then it wheeled around and faced me. I never saw such big eyes. I stayed as still as a mouse. I wasn’t frightened, either. I wanted to see what that deer would do. Pretty soon it took a step towards me, then another and another. I wondered if it would walk on me, but it didn’t. It looked and looked, then snorted and banged up and down with its front feet. Then it turned and went down to the stream and took a drink.
    I can throw a baseball pretty straight, and there were plenty of round stones handy, but I didn’t want to kill that deer. I felt glad it had come, and I felt glad that it wasn’t afraid of me. I watched the deer for a long time. When he had gone, I closed my eyes. Just before I went off to sleep, I thought of a glass of milk—a big, cold glass with white foamy milk in it. Boy, the juice just ran down the corners of my mouth thinking of it! Anybody who doesn’t like milk is crazy.
    The brook was pretty noisy right there, and it sounded like someone humming a tune. I went to sleep listening to it.

CHAPTER 7
    B EARS A RE N OT S O B AD • F OURTH D AY
    I HAD plenty of dreams that night—maybe you never chased your pants all over the lot and never could catch up with them because they could run faster than you could. Well, that’s the kind of dream I had, and I must have been thinking a lot about my pants, because when I woke up, the backs of my legs were as sore as though I had slid down a rock and taken the skin off. The skin was off, too, but I had done it myself in the night, scratching mosquito bites. Christmas, was I sore! The red, deep scratches burned like fire and a million blackflies and mosquitoes bit right into them.
    It’s bad enough in the woods to have a whole skin for bugs to peck at, but get a break in it and see what happens! That’s when you run into real trouble. I guess flies are just lazy, and a cut saves them the bother of boring in. Anyway, I woke up with every cut and scratch lined with insects. Even the ants were having a picnic on me, but the worst pest of all was the moosefly. You wouldn’t think a fly could bite like that fellow. He lands and zingo—you’re bit and the blood is flowing.
    The flies were so bad in that place that I knew I had to get out of there in a hurry. It was sort of swampy, with water standing between rocks, and when I got down on my stomach to drink from the stream, I noticed black, slick bloodsuckers all over the bottom. I wondered why the trout didn’t feed on those bloodsuckers. There were millions of them.
    As soon as I had washed myself, I started away from the stream to escape the flies. I went towards an open space I could see above me through the bushes. The stream had cut into the bank at that spot, and I had some trouble climbing up the steep side, but I made it. When I crawled out on top, on all fours, was I surprised! Four or five deer were feeding right out in the open! They looked up and saw me, but didn’t seem the least bit frightened. They just moved over to one side of the open space and watched me. Now and then, a buck would snort and make his front legs prance up and down.
    I looked around and found strawberries there, and I ate some. Then I saw some bushes that were full of blue and green berries. I didn’t eat any, but I got down on all fours and picked the strawberries that grew in between the clumps. Those strawberries were good. I thought of cream, and that made me think of milk, and that made me think of Mommy and Dad, and I cried while I was eating the berries.
    I was pretty lonesome, too, and getting discouraged. Besides, I wasn’t as strong as I had been the day before. I had to work harder to get through the brush and once, when my jacket was caught in a thorny vine, I had trouble getting it loose.