Fedor by Brant Vickers

Author:Brant Vickers [Vickers, Brant]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult Fiction, Coming of Age, Historical, General
ISBN: 9781637529447
Google: 0PgwzgEACAAJ
Amazon: B08Z7MNS6M
Goodreads: 57446727
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Published: 2021-05-19T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter 28

The weeks passed by and I was in a rut of reading and going for short walks and meeting my friends for supper. I loved reading and learning about this new land I had found myself in. Russia was Russia, but the United States was different in every part. I was going over Moby Dick for the third time and a little bit more of my old favorite, Mr. Tolstoy. Another case of books arrived from Mr. Mark Twain and it was a blessing along with keeping me in my rut. I watched what I could of the animals being trained, but after a while even that grew old. I didn’t like the look I saw in the animal’s eyes. I began to believe what the audience saw wasn’t the truth of the matter. In the wild, they are free and roaming where they please. No matter how they’re treated in the circus, they are forced to live in cramped cages and only get out into the rings when training or at a show. I found out none of the tigers or lions are with their papa or mama, they are always separated for an added safety factor. I can see how they go crazy once in a while and attack their master. I also learned they do that more often than we or the public learn.

The new Ringmaster and Lion Tamer Mr. Rose was gentler and was trying to get the animals used to him. He interacted with the tigers, I saw one day, by just putting his arms and legs, one at a time, through the bars. When he entered the lion’s cage, one morning, a cage boy talked to me.

“He is only doing this for the second time. He has taken a week to let them get to know him and be familiar,” he said. He kept looking at me when he thought I wasn’t aware.

“Does he use a chair too?” I asked.

“Yeah, Mr. Rose told me the whole story behind that. It’s not that the lion is afraid of the chair. It’s that it confuses the lion and they are so single-minded—the legs on the chair muddies their brain so much when they’re bobbing around they don’t think about biting Mr. Rose’s head off,” he said, laughing.

“Like Mr. Marley?” I asked.

“Yeah, like that imbecile. Did you know him?”

“No, but I knew Freddy,” I said.

“I heard about that. I was just new then. Mr. Barnum hired the rest of us from another circus and we’ve all started new. Mr. Rose is trying a way of training them different. But we don’t have much time. I hope it works,” he said as he walked away.

I sure didn’t find him as friendly or charming as Freddy was in his own way. After talking to him, I realized he was more like in his twenties than a boy anyway. I found another place to walk from then on.

One afternoon, I was summoned to what served as an office for our stay here in our Winter Quarters——Max and Katie’s cabin.

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