The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban

Author:Russell Hoban
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2016-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

The father could not find a word to say. The sight of the elephant and the rat flashed upon him with such intensity that he seemed to hear the seeing of them; his ears crackled and roared, and the two figures expanded in the center of his vision while all else blurred away. The elephant was shabby and pathetic; her looks were gone, departed with the ear, the eye, the purple headcloth and her plush. The father saw all that, and yet saw nothing of it; some brightness in her, some temper finer than the newest tin, some steadfast beauty smote and dazzled him. He wished that he might shelter and protect her, and all the time he saw the rock uplifted in the paws of Manny Rat. He fell in love, and he prepared to meet his end.

Manny Rat sighed with immense relief as his world spun out of chaos into order once again. Large ease and happiness were his once more; the headache that had plagued him recently was gone. He drew closer with his rock, but his curiosity for the moment overcame his desire to smash the nightmarishly durable father and son. “Winter sports, eh?” he said. “What in the world are you doing? It’s absolutely fascinating. Good heavens!” he said. “You’re chopping down that great, enormous tree. What a crash that’ll make when it goes! How much longer do you think it’ll take?”

“What does it matter now?” said the father.

“I must see the outcome of this,” said Manny Rat. “Let’s speed things up a little.” He put down his rock, seized the string that was tied to the father’s arm, and ran full speed around the track, dragging the mouse and his child along with him while the ax struck faster and faster, its echoes ringing out across the pond.

A long shiver ran up the gray trunk of the aspen to the topmost branches bare against the sky. Slowly at first, then faster, leaving empty sky behind it, the tree leaned earthward with a rending groan, tore one by one its final splinters loose, and fell.

Muskrat had intended to direct the last strokes of the ax so that the tree would fall into the pond in a place where no damage would be done. But now as the aspen toppled it struck a taller tree that had been split by lightning, which fell in turn against a giant that stood dead and rotting at the water’s edge. One after another they crashed and fell, and the last one landed squarely on the beaver dam and smashed it. A great splash went slowly up into the air as the saplings were scattered like matchsticks and the waters of the pond poured out into the valley.

The Canada geese took off in a flurry of great beating wings as the water rushed away. The beavers shot out of their lodge, surfaced in a welter of broken twigs and splintered branches, and grasped the situation at once. “There goes the pond!” they yelled.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.