“I guess I haven’t walked far enough,”
he said to himself. “I must go along through
the jungle some more. But I did not think I came
as far as this when I was looking for a tree to knock
over.”
So, taking a tighter hold of the branch of palm nuts
in his trunk, off started Umboo again, splashing through
the muddy puddles. He looked this way and that,
and he listened every now and then, stopping to do
this, for he made so much noise himself, as he hurried
along, that he could hear nothing else.
“Well, this is certainly funny!” thought
Umboo, when he had stopped and listened about ten
times. “I can’t hear any other elephants
at all. I wonder if they could have gone away
and left me?”
Then he knew, that, though the other animals might
have gone away and left him, his father and mother
would not do this.
“And,” thought Umboo, “if there
had been any danger from hunters and their guns, Tusker
would have sounded his call, and I would have heard
that. I guess I haven’t gone back far enough.”
Then he hurried on again, but, after awhile, when
he had listened and could hear nothing of the herd
of elephants, and could not see them through the trees,
Umboo began to be afraid.
“I guess I must be lost!” he said.
“That’s it! My mother said it might
happen to me, and it has. I’m lost!”
And so he was! Poor Umboo was lost in the jungle,
and the rain was coming down harder than ever!
UMBOO AND THE SNAKE
“Weren’t you terribly frightened?”
asked Chako, the lively monkey, as he swung by his
tail from a bar in the top of his circus cage.
“Weren’t you dreadfully scared, Umboo,
when you found out you were lost in the jungle?”
“Indeed I was,” answered the elephant
boy, who was telling his story to his friends in the
big, white tent.
“I was lost once, in the jungle like that,”
went on the monkey chap, “and all I had to eat
was a cocoanut. And I—”
“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” cried
Humpo the camel. “Are we listening to your
story, Chako, or to Umboo’s?”
“Oh, that’s so! I forgot!”
exclaimed Chako. “Go on, Umboo. I won’t
talk any more.”
“Well, I won’t either—at least
for a while,” said Umboo. “For here
come the keepers with our dinners. Let’s
eat instead of talking.”
And surely enough, into the circus tent came the men
with the food for the animals—hay for the
elephants, meat for the lions and tigers, and dried
bread and peanuts for the monkeys.
Then after a sleep, which most animals take about
as soon as they have eaten, it was time for the circus
to begin. Into the tent where the jungle folk
were kept, came the boys and girls, with their fathers
and mothers, or uncles, aunts and cousins.
“Oh, look at the big elephant!” cried
one boy. “I’m going to give him some
peanuts!” and he stopped in front of Umboo.
