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IV SOME HUNTING STORIES FOR CHILDREN The Heavenly Twins had been off in the
mountains during their summer holiday, and in consequence had seen very little
of their good old friend, Mr. Munchausen. He had written them once or twice,
and they had found his letters most interesting, especially that one in which he
told how he had killed a moose up in Maine with his Waterbury watch spring, and
I do not wonder that they marvelled at that, for it was one of the most
extraordinary happenings in the annals of the chase. It seems, if his story is
to be believed, and I am sure that none of us who know him has ever had any
reason to think that he would deceive intentionally; it seems, I say, that he
had gone to Maine for a week's sport with an old army acquaintance of his, who
had now become a guide in that region. Unfortunately his rifle, of which he was
very fond, and with which his aim was unerring, was in some manner mislaid on
the way, and when they arrived in the woods they were utterly without weapons;
but Mr. Munchausen was not the man to be daunted by any such trifle as that,
particularly while his friend had an old army musket, a relic of the war,
stored away in the attic of his woodland domicile. "Th' only trouble with
that ar musket," said the old guide, "ain't so much that she won't
shoot straight, nor that she's got a kick onto her like an unbroke mule. What
I'm most afeard 'on about your shootin' with her ain't that I think she'll bust
neither, for the fact is we ain't got nothin' for to bust her with, seein' as
how ammynition is skeerce. I got powder, an' I got waddin', but I ain't got no
shot." "That doesn't make any
difference," the Baron replied. "We can make the shot. Have you got
any plumbing in the camp? If you have, rip it out, and I'll melt up a
water-pipe into bullets." "No, sir,"
retorted the old man. "Plumbin' is one of the things I came here to escape
from." "Then," said the
Baron, "I'll use my watch for ammunition. It is only a three-dollar watch
and I can spare it." With this determination,
Mr. Munchausen took his watch to pieces, an ordinary time-piece of the
old-fashioned kind, and, to make a long story short, shot for several days with
the component parts of that useful affair rammed down into the barrel of the
old musket. With the stem-winding ball he killed an eagle; with pieces of the
back cover chopped up to a fineness of medium-sized shot he brought down several
other birds, but the great feat of all was when he started for moose with
nothing but the watch-spring in the barrel of the gun. Having rolled it up as
tight as he could, fastened it with a piece of twine, and rammed it well into
the gun, he set out to find the noble animal upon whose life he had designs.
After stalking the woods for several hours, he came upon the tracks which told
him that his prey was not far off, and in a short while he caught sight of a
magnificent creature, his huge antlers held proudly up and his great eyes full
of defiance. For a moment the Baron
hesitated. The idea of destroying so beautiful an animal seemed to be abhorrent
to his nature, which, warrior-like as he is, has something of the tenderness of
a woman about it. A second glance at the superb creature, however, changed all
that, for the Baron then saw that to shoot to kill was necessary, for the beast
was about to force a fight in which the hunter himself would be put upon the
defensive. "I won't shoot you
through the head, my beauty," he said, softly, "nor will I puncture
your beautiful coat with this load of mine, but I'll kill you in a new
way." With this he pulled the
trigger. The powder exploded, the string binding the long black spring into a
coil broke, and immediately the strip of steel shot forth into the air, made
directly toward the neck of the rushing moose, and coiling its whole sinuous
length tightly about the doomed creature's throat strangled him to death. As the Twins' father said,
a feat of that kind entitled the Baron to a high place in fiction at least, if
not in history itself. The Twins were very much wrought up over the incident,
particularly, when one too-smart small imp who was spending the summer at the
same hotel where they were said that he didn't believe it, — but he was an imp who had never seen a cheap watch, so how
should he know anything about what could be done with a spring that cannot be
wound up by a great strong man in less than ten minutes? As for the Baron he was
very modest about the achievement, for when he first appeared at the Twins'
home after their return he had actually forgotten all about it, and, in fact,
could not recall the incident at all, until Diavolo brought him his own letter,
when, of course, the whole matter came back to him. "It wasn't so very
wonderful, anyhow," said the Baron. "I should not think, for
instance, of bragging about any such thing as that. It was a simple affair all
through." "And what did you do
with the moose's antlers?" asked Angelica. "I hope you brought 'em
home with you, because I'd like to see 'em." "I wanted to,"
said the Baron, stroking the Twins' soft brown locks affectionately. "I
wanted to bring them home for your father to use as a hat rack, dear, but they
were too large. When I had removed them from the dead animal, I found them so
large that I could not get them out of the forest, they got so tangled up in
the trees. I should have had to clear a path twenty feet wide and seven miles
long to get them even as far as my friend's hut, and after that they would have
had to be carried thirty miles through the woods to the express office." "I guess it's just as
well after all," said Diavolo. "If they were as big as all that, Papa
would have had to build a new house to get 'em into." "Exactly," said
the Baron. "Exactly. That same idea occurred to me, and for that reason I
concluded not to go to the trouble of cutting away those miles of trees. The
antlers would have made a very expensive present for your father to receive in
these hard times." "It was a good thing
you had that watch," the Twins observed, after thinking over the Baron's
adventure. "If you hadn't had that you couldn't have killed the
moose." "Very likely
not," said the Baron, "unless I had been able to do as I did in India
thirty years ago at a man hunt." "What?" cried the
Twins. "Do they hunt men in India?" "That all depends, my
dears," replied the Baron. "It all depends upon what you mean by the
word they. Men don't hunt men, but animals, great wild beasts sometimes hunt
them, and it doesn't often happen that the men escape. In the particular man
hunt I refer to I was the creature that was being hunted, and I've had a good
deal of sympathy for foxes ever since. This was a regular fox hunt in a way,
although I was the fox, and a herd of elephants were the huntsmen." "How queer," said
Diavolo, unscrewing one of the Baron's shirt studs to see if he would fall
apart. "Not half so queer as
my feelings when I realised my position," said the Baron with a shake of
his head. "I was frightened half to death. It seemed to me that I'd
reached the end of my tether at last. I was studying the fauna and flora of
India, in a small Indian village, known as ah — what was the name of that town! Ah — something like Rathabad — no,
that isn't quite it — however, one
name does as well as another in India. It was a good many miles from Calcutta,
and I'd been living there about three months. The village lay in a small valley
between two ranges of hills, none of them very high. On the other side of the
westerly hills was a great level stretch of country upon which herds of
elephants used to graze. Out of this rose these hills, very precipitously,
which was a very good thing for the people in the valley, else those elephants
would have come over and played havoc with their homes and crops. To me the
plains had a great fascination, and I used to wander over them day after day in
search of new specimens for my collection of plants and flowers, never thinking
of the danger I ran from an encounter with these elephants, who were very ferocious
and extremely jealous of the territory they had come through years of
occupation to regard as their own. So it happened, that one day, late in the
afternoon, I was returning from an expedition over the plains, and, as I had
found a large number of new specimens, I was feeling pretty happy. I whistled
loudly as I walked, when suddenly coming to a slight undulation in the plain
what should I see before me but a herd of sixty-three elephants, some eating,
some thinking, some romping, and some lying asleep on the soft turf. Now, if I
had come quietly, of course, I could have passed them unobserved, but as I told
you I was whistling. I forget what the tune was, The Marsellaise or Die Wacht
Am Rhein, or maybe Tommie Atkins, which enrages the elephants very much, being
the national anthem of the British invader. At any rate, whatever the tune was
it attracted the attention of the elephants, and then their sport began. The
leader lifted his trunk high in the air, and let out a trumpet blast that echoed
back from the cliff three miles distant. Instantly every elephant was on the
alert. Those that had been sleeping awoke, and sprang to their feet. Those that
had been at play stopped in their romp, and under the leadership of the biggest
brute of the lot they made a rush for me. I had no gun; nothing except my wits
and my legs with which to defend myself, so I naturally began to use the latter
until I could get the former to work. It was nip and tuck. They could run
faster than I could, and I saw in an instant that without stratagem I could not
hope to reach a place of safety. As I have said, the cliff, which rose straight
up from the plain like a stone-wall, was three miles away, nor was there any
other spot in which I could find a refuge. It occurred to me as I ran that if I
ran in circles I could edge up nearer to the cliff all the time, and still keep
my pursuers at a distance for the simple reason that an elephant being more or
less unwieldy cannot turn as rapidly as a man can, so I kept running in circles.
I could run around my short circle in less time than the enemy could run around
his larger one, and in this manner I got nearer and nearer my haven of safety,
the bellowing beasts snorting with rage as they followed. Finally, when I began
to see that I was tolerably safe, another idea occurred to me, which was that
if I could manage to kill those huge creatures the ivory I could get would make
my fortune. But how! That was the question. Well, my dearly beloved Imps, I
admit that I am a fast runner, but I am also a fast thinker, and in less than
two minutes I had my plan arranged. I stopped short when about two hundred feet
from the cliff, and waited until the herd was fifty feet away. Then I turned
about and ran with all my might up to within two feet of the cliff, and then
turning sharply to the left ran off in that direction. The elephants, thinking
they had me, redoubled their speed, but failed to notice that I had turned, so
quickly was that movement executed. They failed likewise to notice the cliff,
as I had intended. The consequence was the whole sixty-three of them rushed
head first, bang! with all their force, into the rock. The hill shook with the force
of the blow and the sixty-three elephants fell dead. They had simply butted
their brains out." "I got nearer and nearer my haven of safety, the bellowing beasts snorting with rage as they followed." Here the Baron paused and
pulled vigourously on his cigar, which had almost gone out. "That was fine,"
said the Twins. "What a narrow escape
it was for you, Uncle Munch," said Diavolo. "Very true," said
the great soldier rising, as a signal that his story was done. "In fact
you might say that I had sixty-three narrow escapes, one for each
elephant." "But what became of the
ivory?" asked Angelica. "Oh, as for
that!" said the Baron, with a sigh, "I was disappointed in that. They
turned out to be all young elephants, and they had lost their first teeth.
Their second teeth hadn't grown yet. I got only enough ivory to make one paper
cutter, which is the one I gave your father for Christmas last year." Which may account for the
extraordinary interest the Twins have taken in their father's paper cutter ever
since. |