Young Robin Hood | Page 3

in one place the ruddy rays
of the evening sun glowing, and then he could see nothing--think
nothing.
Then he could think, though he still could not see, for it was very dark
and silent and strange, and for some minutes he could not understand
why he was out there on the moss instead of being in Aunt Hester's
house at Elton, or at home in Nottingham town.
But he understood it all at once, recollecting what had taken place, and
for a time he felt very, very miserable. It was startling, too, when from
close at hand someone seemed to begin questioning him strangely by
calling out:
"Whoo-who-who-who?"

But at the end of a minute or two he knew it was an owl, and soon after
he was fast asleep and did not think again till the sun was shining
brightly, and he sat up waiting for old David to come and pull him up
on the horse again.
Robin waited, for he was afraid to move.
"If I begin to wander about," he said to himself, "David will not find
me, and he will go home and tell father I'm lost, when all the time he
threw me off the horse because he was afraid and wanted to save
himself."
So the boy sat still, waiting to be fetched. The robin came and looked at
him again, as if wondering that he did not pull up flowers by the roots
and dig, so that worms and grubs might be found, and finally flitted
away.
Then all at once there was the pattering of feet, and half-a-dozen deer
came into sight, with soft dappled coats, and one of them with large flat
pointed horns; but at the first movement Robin made they dashed off
among the trees in a series of bounds.
Then there was another long pause, and Robin was thinking how
hungry he was, when something dropped close to him with a loud rap,
and looking up sharply, he caught sight of a little keen-eyed
bushy-tailed animal, looking down from a great branch as if in search
of something it had let fall.
"Squirrel!" said Robin aloud, and the animal heard and saw him at the
same moment, showing its annoyance at the presence of an intruder
directly. For it began to switch its tail and scold after its fashion, loudly,
its utterances seeming like a repetition of the word "chop" more or less
quickly made.
Finding its scolding to be in vain, and that the boy would not go, the
squirrel did the next best thing--bounded along from bough to bough;
while, after waiting wearily in the hope of seeing David, the boy began
to look round this tree and the next, and finally made his way some

little distance farther into the forest, to be startled at last by a harsh cry
which was answered from first one place and then another by the noisy
party of jays that had been disturbed in their happy solitude.
To Robin it was just as if the first one had cried "Hoi! I say, here's a
boy." And weary with waiting, and hungry as he was, the constant
harsh shouting irritated the little fellow so that he hurried away
followed by quite a burst of what seemed to be mocking cries, with the
intention of finding the track leading across the forest; but he had not
gone far before he found himself in an open glade, dotted with beautiful
great oak trees, and nearly covered with the broad leaves of the bracken,
which were agitated by something passing through and beneath, giving
forth a grunting sound. Directly after he caught sight of a long black
back, then of others, and he saw that he was close to a drove of small
black pigs, hunting for acorns. One of the pigs found him at the same
moment and saluted him with a sharp, barking sound wonderfully like
that of a dog.
This was taken up directly by the other members of the drove, who
with a great deal of barking and grunting came on to the attack, for they
did not confine themselves to threatening, their life in the forest making
them fierce enough to be dangerous.
Robin's first thought was to run away, but he knew that four legs are
better than two for getting over the ground, and felt that the drove
would attack him more fiercely if they saw that he was afraid.
His next idea was to climb 'up into the fork of one of the big trees, but
he knew that there was not time. So he obeyed his third notion, which
was to jump to where a big piece of dead wood lay, pick it up, and hit
the foremost pig across the nose with