Old Yeller by Fred Gipson

Author:Fred Gipson [Gipson, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Ages 10 and up, Newbery Honor
ISBN: 9780061962868
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1908-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Mama cooked the best dinner that day I ever ate. We had roast venison and fried catfish and stewed squirrel and blackeyed peas and cornbread and flour gravy and butter and wild honey and hog-plum jelly and fresh buttermilk. I ate till it seemed like my eyeballs would pop out of my head, and still didn’t make anything like the showing that Burn Sanderson made. He was a slim man, not nearly as big as Papa, and I never could figure out where he was putting all that grub. But long before he finally sighed and shook his head at the last of the squirrel stew, I was certain of one thing: he sure wouldn’t have any trouble throwing a shadow on the ground for the rest of that day. A good, black shadow.

After dinner, he sat around for a while, talking to me and Mama and making Little Arliss some toy horses out of dried cornstalks. Then he said his thank-yous to Mama and told me to come with him. I followed with him while he led his horse down to the spring for water. I remembered how Papa had led me away from the house like this the day he left and knew by that that Burn Sanderson had something he wanted to talk to me about.

At the spring, he slipped the bits out of his horse’s mouth to let him drink, then turned to me.

“Now, boy,” he said, “I didn’t want to tell your mama this. I didn’t want to worry her. But there’s a plague of hydrophobia making the rounds, and I want you to be on the lookout for it.”

I felt a scare run through me. I didn’t know much about hydrophobia, but after what Bud Searcy had told about his uncle that died, chained to a tree, I knew it was something bad. I stared at Burn Sanderson and didn’t say anything.

“And there’s no mistake about it,” he said. “I’ve done shot two wolves, a fox, and one skunk that had it. And over at Salt Licks, a woman had to kill a bunch of house cats that her younguns had been playing with. She wasn’t sure, but she couldn’t afford to take any chances. And you can’t, either.”

“But how will I know what to shoot and what not to?” I wanted to know.

“Well, you can’t hardly tell at first,” he said. “Not until they have already gone to foaming at the mouth and are reeling with the blind staggers. Any time you see a critter acting that way, you know for sure. But you watch for others that aren’t that far along. You take a pet cat. If he takes to spitting and fighting at you for no reason, you shoot him. Same with a dog. He’ll get mad at nothing and want to bite you. Take a fox or a wildcat. You know they’ll run from you; when they don’t run, and try to make fight at you, shoot ’em. Shoot anything that acts unnatural, and don’t fool around about it.

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