The Way West by Guthrie

Author:Guthrie
Language: eng
Format: epub

He didn't mean to run away. He just meant to move around a little, being so tired of forts and mud pies and staying in one place that he couldn't hold still any longer. He walked out from the washtub, stepping through a patch of dry grass, and a great, gray grasshopper with blind eyes looked at him and jumped up with a flutter of red wings and a whirring clatter. He ran after it, watching its crazy flight in the breeze, and saw it settle. He came up with his hand lifted and cupped, a little fearful of clapping it down. The eyes stared and the legs hitched and the stone-gray body rose, turning red again, and clattered ahead.

He stooped and grabbed two finger stones, thinking he would kill the grasshopper with them, and set off after it, running toward a grass clump where it had lighted. It winged up just as he thought he had lost it, and he ran again, holding a rock in each hand. He threw and missed, and the grasshopper rose and he followed, and it rose and he followed, hot and eager with the chase of it.

After a while he did lose it. It wouldn't rise from the dust or the curled grass where he thought it had landed though he scuffed the place and scuffed it again, feeling let down because fun should have been taken from him so soon.

Giving up, he looked around and saw that Mother was out of sight, over a swell of land, beyond a wagon itself half hidden by the swell. He couldn't see any person, not a man or a woman, and not even any children, though their shouting voices came to him.

A sudden emptiness came on him, and he started trotting back, wanting the safe arms of his mother and the soft bosom and the mouth scolding while it kissed him.

Then he heard the grasshopper again, the nervous, whirring rattle of it coming from somewhere in a ragged pile of rocks. The known sound reassured him. He stopped trotting and angled off toward the pile.

Low on the ground, hard to see against the broken stone, among the sun-browned grasses, a little-man's face looked at him, pinch-mouthed and hard-eyed, with two holes for a nose. A tongue licked red and quick from the tight mouth.

Little-man's face! Snake's face! Rattlesnake's face, the coil behind showing dusty on the dusty rock, the tail blurred with shakingl

In the shock of first knowing, he couldn't run. He stood there with fear washing in him while his eyes blurred with the blurring tail and lost the face in the fast, red licking of the tongue.

"Toddie! Oh, Toddie!"

He swung around and started off and felt the bite of needles in his leg and the drag of the coil before it pulled free.

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