Green Meadow Stories by Thornton W. Burgess (good short books .txt) đź“•
Description
Thornton W. Burgess was an American naturalist and the author of dozens of books for children, the most enduring of which are Old Mother West Wind and The Burgess Bird Book for Children. Burgess was a passionate twentieth-century conservationist who dedicated his life to teaching children and their families about the importance of the natural life of the northern North American forest.
The Green Meadow Stories compilation is made up of four distinct but entwined tales: those of Happy Jack Squirrel, Mrs. Peter Rabbit, Bowser the Hound, and Old Granny Fox. Through the adventures of these focal characters readers are introduced to the wider territory of the Green Meadows, the Green Forest, and the Smiling Pond as well as to the animals’ Great World.
The animals of Burgess’s stories are anthropomorphized, undoubtedly, but not caricatured: these are not the twee creatures of Disney cartoons. Their behaviour is explained in ways that would be understandable to a human child—this is fiction, after all—but Burgess’s “little people of the forest” are not simply humans dressed in fur and feathers. The original illustrations in Burgess’s books (by Harrison Cady, not reproduced in this edition) show the animals wearing clothes, but Burgess’s own descriptions of animals are more natural and metaphorical, and less fantastic. For example, he describes Chatterer the Red Squirrel, “who always wears a red coat with vest of white,” a compact way of communicating the look of a squirrel that many of today’s children will never have seen with their own eyes. Less pleasantly, it is Peter Rabbit’s fur and flesh that is rent when Hooty the Owl tears Peter’s “coat” one night on the Old Pasture.
Burgess has tremendous respect for the creatures he depicts, as well as for their natural home. While the presentation of the Green Meadow is hardly “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” it is surprisingly unsentimental. Peter Rabbit, for example, lives a highly anxious life under threat from the many predators who would enjoy having him for dinner; similarly, Happy Jack Squirrel experiences days and nights of terror when Shadow the Weasel discovers Happy Jack’s home and hunts him relentlessly. During a long, hard winter, Granny Fox and Reddy Fox come close to starving, and Old Man Coyote leads Bowser the Hound on a dangerous chase that may result in one or the other dying. Despite other fanciful, sentimental elements of storytelling, Burgess does not sugarcoat prey/predator relationships or the precarity of wild animals’ lives.
Burgess is a clear conservationist in his representations of hunting. The animals are highly aware of hunters and their “dreadful guns.” It is a notable moment in this collection when Farmer Brown’s Boy decides he will no longer use his gun to harm the little people of the Green Meadow and the Green Forest. The stories are also notable in their detailed representation of a largely intact forest, something few children in the twenty-first century will experience.
On the other hand, these are books for children, and they contain plenty of sweetness and light. Animal pairings—such as when Peter Rabbit meets the dainty Little Miss Fuzzytail, the future Mrs. Rabbit—are vague but sentimental and soon lead to proud new families of Rabbits, Ducks, Deer, and Owls. The “little people” celebrate the arrival of each spring’s babies, mark each other’s new relationships and homes, play together, and even help each other survive. They laugh, tease, and trick each other—a fanciful interpretation of animal behaviour that could lead to a reader’s life-long fascination with, and respect for, forest creatures—and for generations of readers, they did just that.
The stories are also more didactic than most twenty-first-century authors would dare to be. There are morals associated with most stories, often attributed to the animal about whom the story is being told. Through this practical teaching, Burgess suggests a correspondence between how animals and humans live; but he consistently clarifies that animal intelligence is different from, but certainly no less than, human intelligence.
Unlike the bouncy rhyming verses of many of today’s children’s books, Burgess’s sentences have a somewhat old-fashioned cadence, creating the distinct and appealing music of traditional storytelling. Burgess’s episodic chapters are eminently readable and particularly come to life when they are voiced by animated reading-aloud. For older readers looking for something different to share with children, or for new readers beginning to tackle “chapter books,” the tales of the Green Meadow Stories collection are a delightful place to discover Burgess and his animal friends.
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- Author: Thornton W. Burgess
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Reddy looked about him hurriedly and anxiously. There wasn’t a sign of anybody about, or that anybody had been there. Reddy’s anger began to give place to wonder and then to something very like fear. How could anybody have taken that fat hen and left no trace? And how could a fat hen with a broken neck disappear of its own accord? It gave Reddy a creepy feeling.
XL Where Was Reddy’s Dinner?Often it is better to look for a new trail than to waste time hunting for an old one.
Bowser the HoundReddy Fox is used to all sorts of queer happenings. Yes, sir, he is used to all sorts of queer happenings, and as a rule Reddy is seldom puzzled for long. You see he is such a clever fellow himself that anyone clever enough to fool him for long must be very clever indeed. This time, however, all the cleverness of his sharp wits did him no good. The fat hen he had hidden in a hollow stump had disappeared without leaving trace.
Reddy’s first thought was that probably the farmer from whom he had stolen the fat hen had found it and taken it away. At once he began to use that wonderful nose of his searching for the scent of that farmer. Very carefully he sniffed all about the top of that old stump and inside the hollow. There wasn’t the faintest scent of anybody there. Then he jumped down, and with his nose to the ground, ran all around the stump, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing. The only thing he discovered was the scent of Bowser the Hound, and he knew that Bowser had not taken that fat hen, because, as you remember, Bowser had kept right on chasing him.
Reddy began to feel afraid of that old stump. People usually are afraid of mysterious things, and it certainly was very mysterious that a fat hen with a broken neck should disappear without leaving any trace at all. Reddy sat down at a little distance and did a lot of hard thinking. He looked every which way even up in the tree tops, but all his looking was in vain. It was so mysterious that if he hadn’t known positively that he was awake he would have thought it was all a dream.
But Reddy is something of a philosopher. That fat hen was gone, and there was no use in wasting time puzzling over it. There were other fat hens where that one came from, and he would just have to catch another.
So Reddy trotted through the swamp till he came to the edge of it. There his keen nose found the scent of the farmer. It didn’t take him two minutes to discover that the farmer had followed Bowser the Hound to the edge of the swamp and then gone back. Eagerly Reddy looked over to the farmyard for those fat hens. They, too, had disappeared. Not one was to be seen. But there was no mystery about the disappearance of these other fat hens. He heard the muffled crow of the big rooster. It came from the henhouse. All those fat hens had been shut up. It was perfectly plain to Reddy that the farmer suspected Reddy might return, and he didn’t intend to lose another fat hen. With a little yelp of disappointment, Reddy turned his back on the farm and trotted off into the woods.
XLI What Blacky the Crow SawThe greatest puzzle is simple enough when you know the answer.
Bowser the HoundThere were just two people to whom the disappearance of that fat hen Reddy Fox had hidden in the hollow stump was not a mystery. One of them was Blacky the Crow. When the farmer and Bowser the Hound had rushed out at the sound of Blacky’s excited cawing, Blacky had flown to the top of a tall tree from which he could see all that went on. Everything had happened just as Blacky had hoped it would. Bowser had taken the trail of Reddy Fox, and Blacky felt sure that sooner or later Reddy would lead him back home to Farmer Brown’s.
Blacky was doubly pleased with himself. He was pleased to think that he had found a way of getting Bowser back home, and he was quite as much pleased because he had been smart enough to outwit Reddy Fox. He didn’t wish Reddy any harm, and he felt sure that no harm would come to him. He didn’t even wish him to lose that dinner Reddy had come so far to get, but he didn’t care if Reddy did lose it, if only his plan worked out as he hoped it would.
“I wonder what he’ll do with that fat hen,” muttered Blacky, as he watched Reddy race away with it thrown over his shoulders. “He can’t carry that hen far and keep out of the way of Bowser. I think I’ll follow and see what he does with it.”
So Blacky followed, and his eyes twinkled when he saw Reddy hide the fat hen in the hollow stump. He knew that no matter how far Bowser might chase Reddy, Reddy would come back for that fat hen, and he was rather glad to think that Reddy would have that good dinner after all.
“No one will ever think to look in that hollow stump,” thought Blacky, “and I certainly will not tell anyone. Reddy has earned that dinner. Now I think I’ll go get something to eat myself.”
At that very instant Blacky’s sharp eyes caught
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