Old Yeller Read Online Free PDF Page B

guess the iron tire on the spinning wheel was roughed up pretty badly and maybe had chips of broken rock and gravel stuck to it. Anyhow, from the way Chongo acted, it must have scraped all the hide off his tongue.
    Chongo bawled and went running backward. He whirled away so fast that he lost his footing and fell down. He came to his feet and took out in the opposite direction from the roan bull. He ran, slinging his head and flopping his long tongue around, bawling like he’d stuck it into a bear trap. He ran with his tail clamped just as tight as the roan bull’s.
    It was enough to make you laugh your head off, the way both of those bad bulls had gotten the wits scared clear out of them, each one thinking he’d lost the fight.
    But they sure had made a wreck of the yard fence.

FIVE
    T hat Little Arliss! If he wasn’t a mess! From the time he’d grown up big enough to get out of the cabin, he’d made a practice of trying to catch and keep every living thing that ran, flew, jumped, or crawled.
    Every night before Mama let him go to bed, she’d make Arliss empty his pockets of whatever he’d captured during the day. Generally, it would be a tangled-up mess of grasshoppers and worms and praying bugs and little rusty tree lizards. One time he brought in a horned toad that got so mad he swelled out round and flat as a Mexican tortilla and bled at the eyes. Sometimes it wasstuff like a young bird that had fallen out of its nest before it could fly, or a green-speckled spring frog or a striped water snake. And once he turned out of his pocket a wadded-up baby copperhead that nearly threw Mama into spasms. We never did figure out why the snake hadn’t bitten him, but Mama took no more chances on snakes. She switched Arliss hard for catching that snake. Then she made me spend better than a week, taking him out and teaching him to throw rocks and kill snakes.
    That was all right with Little Arliss. If Mama wanted him to kill his snakes first, he’d kill them. But that still didn’t keep him from sticking them in his pockets along with everything else he’d captured that day. The snakes might be stinking by the time Mama called on him to empty his pockets, but they’d be dead.
    Then, after the yeller dog came, Little Arliss started catching even bigger game. Like cottontail rabbits and chaparral birds and a baby possum that sulked and lay like dead for the first several hours until he finally decided that Arliss wasn’t going to hurt him.
    Of course, it was Old Yeller that was doing the catching. He’d run the game down and turn it over to Little Arliss. Then Little Arliss could come in and tell Mama a big fib about how he caught it himself.
    I watched them one day when they caught a blue catfish out of Birdsong Creek. The fish had fed out into water so shallow that his top fin was sticking out. About the time I saw it, Old Yeller and Little Arliss did, too. They made a run at it. The fish went scooting away toward deeper water, only Yeller was too fast for him. He pounced on the fish and shut his big mouth down over it and went romping to the bank, where he dropped it down on the grass and let it flop. And here came Little Arliss to fall on it like I guess he’d been doing everything else. The minute he got his hands on it, the fish finned him and he went to crying.
    But he wouldn’t turn the fish loose. He just grabbed it up and went running and squawling toward the house, where he gave the fish to Mama. His hands were all bloody by then, where the fish had finned him. They swelled up and gotmighty sore; not even a mesquite thorn hurts as bad as a sharp fish fin when it’s run deep into your hand.
    But as soon as Mama had wrapped his hands in a poultice of mashed-up prickly-pear root to draw out the poison, Little Arliss forgot all about his hurt. And that night when we ate the fish for supper, he told the biggest windy I ever heard about how he’d dived way down into a deep hole under the rocks and dragged that