Green Forest Stories by Thornton W. Burgess (best e ink reader for manga txt) đź“•
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American naturalist and conservationist Thornton W. Burgess was the author of more than one hundred books for children; the best-remembered of these is Old Mother West Wind, which was originally written for his young son. Burgess also wrote dozens of books about the creatures of the northern North American forest, four of which are collected here as the Green Forest Stories.
This Green Forest Stories compilation focuses on Lightfoot the Deer, Blacky the Crow, Whitefoot the Wood Mouse, and twin bear cubs Woof-Woof and Boxer. Readers may have encountered these characters in other of Burgess’s stories about the “little people” of the Massachusetts forest. Burgess’s earliest ventures into animal fantasy are roughly contemporary with Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories and Beatrix Potter’s tales of various animals, and represent the most lasting American entry into this genre.
Animal fantasy is a sub-genre of children’s literature in which animals are anthropomorphized into human-like characters and use language like humans. It is often criticized by those who want readers to experience more realistic representations of animals and the natural world, but animal fantasies engage a millennia-old tradition, in the Western canon reaching back at least as far as Aesop’s Fables; animal characters feature in teaching stories for children (and adults) in cultures around the world. Burgess’s stories are intended for children in the early elementary grades. The challenges and triumphs of the “little people” in his stories will feel identifiable to many young readers, and the snippets of moralizing and authorial commentary interleaved with the actions of the plot reflect a teaching device with a long history.
In the late twentieth century, Burgess fell out of favour with teachers and librarians. This shift occurred in part due to changing tastes in literary style and in part due to a changing society. Burgess is entirely a writer of his time. Most of the animals he depicts are male, and many of the female animals who wander into the stories are more passive and more stereotyped than the kinds of representation preferred for girls today. (Such is not the case, however, of Old Granny Fox, who may be the smartest of the little people Burgess represents and certainly does not lack agency or self-determination.)
The style of Burgess’s storytelling is undeniably old-fashioned but still deserves consideration. Although the writing is often simple and plain, there are rhetorical flourishes that reveal the author’s attention to craft. In particular, Burgess’s use of formulaic expressions such as “jolly, round, bright Mr. Sun” and “the Merry Little Breezes” links these tales to an orality that stretches back to at least The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer (think of phrases such as “the wine-dark sea,” “rosy-fingered Dawn,” and “bright-eyed Athena”). Through his broader use of repetition and through onomatopoeia, Burgess underscores characteristics of his characters’ real-life forest counterparts—the way a chickadee calls, a squirrel scolds, or a rabbit lopes, for example.
In these stories, as in the Green Meadow Stories collection, we observe features that signal Burgess’s experience as a writer for periodicals and as an early radio broadcaster. Each chapter begins with reminders about the previous chapter, and chapters end with either a strong, propulsive conclusion or a traditional cliff-hanger. The chapters are generally quite short—a comfortable size to read as a bedtime story, and just long enough to hold a new reader’s attention without demanding too much of that reader’s energy. The strong narrative voice sounds distinctly like oral storytelling. One can almost imagine a small group of young people seated in a circle at the storyteller’s feet.
That image captures the essence of these animal tales. They are light, bright peeks into a complex and beautiful world, a world any girl or boy may want to pursue through study or personal explorations. As humanity faces the daily loss of animal species, stories that delight readers and listeners, that encourage them to learn about and respect the creatures of the non-human world, deserve our renewed attention and respect.
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- Author: Thornton W. Burgess
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Blacky shook out his feathers and then flew out of the tall pine-tree as silently as he had flown into it. He headed straight toward Farmer Brown’s cornfield. When he was near enough to see all over the field, he dropped down to the top of a fence post, and there he waited. He didn’t have long to wait. In fact, he had been there but a few minutes when he spied two people coming down the Long Lane toward the cornfield. He looked at them sharply, and then gave a little sigh of satisfaction. They were Farmer Brown and Farmer Brown’s boy. Presently they reached the cornfield and turned into it. Then they went to work, and Blacky knew that so far as they were concerned, the way was clear for him to visit the henyard.
He didn’t fly straight there. Oh, my, no! Blacky is too clever to do anything like that. He flew toward the Green Forest. When he knew that he was out of sight of those in the cornfield, he turned and flew over to the Old Orchard, and from the top of one of the old apple-trees he studied the henyard and the barnyard and Farmer Brown’s house and the barn, to make absolutely sure that there was no danger near. When he was quite sure, he silently flew down into the henyard as he had done many times before. He pretended to be looking for scattered grains of corn, but all the time he was edging nearer and nearer to the open door of the henhouse. At last he could see the box with the hay in it. He walked right up to the open door and peered inside. There was nothing to be afraid of that he could see. Still he hesitated. He did hate to go inside that door, even for a minute, and that is all it would take to fly up to that nest and get one of those eggs.
Blacky closed his eyes for just a second, and when he did that he seemed to see himself eating one of those eggs. “What are you afraid of?” he muttered to himself as he opened his eyes. Then with a hurried look in all directions, he flew up to the edge of the box. There lay the two eggs!
XXXI An Egg That Wouldn’t BehaveIf you had an egg and it wouldn’t behave
Just what would you do with that egg, may I ask?
To make an egg do what it don’t want to do
Strikes me like a difficult sort of a task.
All of which is pure nonsense. Of course. Who ever heard of an egg either behaving or misbehaving? Nobody. That is, nobody that I know, unless it be Blacky. It is best not to mention eggs in Blacky’s presence these days. They are a forbidden topic when he is about. Blacky is apt to be a little resentful at the mere mention of an egg. I don’t know as I wholly blame him. How would you feel if you knew you knew all there was to know about a thing, and then found out that you didn’t know anything at all? Well, that is the way it is with Blacky the Crow.
If anyone had told Blacky that he didn’t know all there is to know about eggs, he would have laughed at the idea. Wasn’t he, Blacky, hatched from an egg himself? And hadn’t he, ever since he was big enough, hunted eggs and stolen eggs and eaten eggs? If he didn’t know about eggs, who did? That is the way he would have talked before his visit to Farmer Brown’s henhouse. It is since then that it has been unwise to mention eggs when Blacky is about.
When Blacky saw the two eggs in the nest in Farmer Brown’s henhouse how Blacky did wish that he could take both. But he couldn’t. One would be all that he could manage. He must take his choice and go away while the going was good. Which should he take?
It often happens in this life that things which seem to be unimportant, mere trifles in themselves, prove to be just the opposite. Now, so far as Blacky could see, it didn’t make the least difference which egg he took, excepting that one was a little bigger than the other. As a matter of fact, it made all the difference in the world. One was brown and very good to look at. The other, the larger of the two, was white and also very good to look at. In fact, Blacky thought it the better of the two to look at, for it was very smooth and shiny. So, partly on this account, and partly because it was the largest, Blacky chose the white egg. He seized it in his claws and started to fly with it, but somehow he could not seem to get a good grip on it. He fluttered to the ground just outside the door, and there he got a better grip. Just as old Dandy-cock the Rooster, with head down and all the feathers on his neck standing out with anger, came charging at him, Blacky rose into the air and started over the Old Orchard toward the Green Forest.
Never had Blacky felt more like cawing at the top of his lungs. You see, he felt that he had been very smart, and I suspect that he also felt that he had been very brave. He would have liked to boast a little. But he didn’t. He wisely held his tongue. It would be time enough to do his boasting after he had reached a place of safety and had eaten that egg.
He was halfway across the Old Orchard when he felt that egg beginning to slip. Now
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