The Book of the Dun Cow Read Online Free Page A

give a brown curse for a hide?”
    But the compliment was lost on the Hens, who shot about in panic.
    â€œCock-a-stop!” Chauntecleer crowed from the top of the roof. “Cock-a-lorum! Cock-a-silence! COCK-A-RUDDY-SHUT-IT-OFF!”
    And they did. They all fell silent. All except Mundo Cani, who had a white feather between his paws and the sniffles in his nose.
    In the quiet, first one Hen and then one other walked to special places in the yard and scratched at the soft earth. Little holes were made. Chalcedony took something from her hole and brought it below Chauntecleer. She laid it, with great care, upon the ground. Jacinth did the same; and the things which they laid below him were pieces of empty eggshell.
    â€œIf it pleases you,” they clucked each a lowly cluck to him, “a crow for the grief of these?”
    Chauntecleer heard them. He would do this thing for them.
    The morning had turned into a lasting irritation. The night to come, Chauntecleer could foresee, would be without sleep; and so it would be an irritation, too. And there was a plan to be formed in the time between. Irritation. But the plan was necessary, if they were going to do anything about the cruelty of Ebenezer Rat. Chauntecleer sighed. He had seen something fixed in the dry yolk on a piece of Jacinth’s shell, a whisker, black, sharp, and exceedingly long. A Rat’s whisker. Ah, Nezer, the Rooster sighed; for John Wesley Weasel had been right. And something would have to be done tonight.
    But for the present moment . . .
    Into the silence—with Beryl, Chalcedony, and Jacinth standing close below him—Chauntecleer lifted up his voice and crowed. And even John Wesley Weasel forgot himself for the moment and listened.
    The Coop was empty. Someone took advantage of its emptiness. A small hole existed between two floorboards. Through that hole there slipped a silent, long, long, black nose, and after that a head like a finger pointing: eyes as narrow as needles; a body like black liquid; a tail which came and came and never ceased to slide out of the hole. Dark, smooth, and as quiet as this one was, yet he was no mere shadow.
    While the crow of grief rolled out over the countryside, Ebenezer Rat crushed and swallowed one more egg.

[FOUR] A cosmography, in which Wyrm is described, and one or two things about him
[FOUR] A cosmography, in which Wyrm is described, and one or two things about him
    I n those days, when the animals could both speak and understand speech, the world was round, as it is today. It encountered the four seasons, endured night, rejoiced in the day, offered waking and sleeping, hurt, anger, love, and peace to all of the creatures who dwelt upon it—as it does today. Birth happened, lives were lived out upon the face of it, and then death followed. These things were no different from the way they are today. But yet some things were very different.
    For in those days the earth was still fixed in the absolute center of the universe. It had not yet been cracked loose from that holy place, to be sent whirling—wild, helpless, and ignorant—among the blind stars. And the sun still traveled around the moored earth, so that days and nights belonged to the earth and to the creatures thereon, not to a ball of silent fire. The clouds were still considered to flow at a very great height, halfway between the moon and the waters below; and God still chose to walk among the clouds, striding, like a man who strides through his garden in the sweet evening.
    Many tens of thousands of creatures lived on this still, unmoving earth. These were the animals, Chauntecleer among them, whom God noticed in his passage above. And the glory of it was that they were there for a purpose. To be sure, very few of them recognized the full importance of their being, and of their being
there;
and that ignorance endangered terribly the good fulfillment of their purpose. But so God let it be; he did not choose to force