BAD NEWS
“Have you heard the news?” Tired Tim asked
Brownie Beaver one day. “There’s
going to be a cyclone.”
“A cyclone?” Brownie exclaimed. “What’s
that? I never heard of one.”
“It’s a big storm, with a terrible wind,”
Tired Tim explained. “The wind will blow
so hard that it will snap off big trees.”
“Good!” Brownie Beaver cried. “Then
I won’t have to cut down any more trees in order
to reach the tender bark that grows in their tops.”
Tired Tim laughed. “You won’t think
it’s very ‘good,’” he said,
“when the cyclone strikes the village.”
“Why not?” Brownie inquired.
“Because—” said Tired Tim—“because
the wind will blow every house away. It will
snatch up the sticks of which the houses are built
and carry them over the top of Blue Mountain.
Then I guess you’ll wish you had taken my advice
and not built that new house of yours.
“I shall be safe enough,” the lazy
rascal continued. “All I’ll have
to do will be to crawl inside my house in the bank;
for the wind can’t very well blow the ground
away.”
Brownie Beaver thought that Tired Tim was just trying
to scare him.
“I don’t believe there’s going to
be any such thing!” he exclaimed.
“Don’t you?” Tim grinned. “You
just go and ask Grandaddy Beaver. He’s
the one that says there’s going to be a cyclone.”
At that Brownie Beaver stopped working and hurried
off to find old Grandaddy Beaver. And to his
great dismay, Grandaddy said that what Tired Tim had
told him was the truth.
“It’s a-coming!” Grandaddy Beaver
declared. “I saw one once before in these
parts, years before anybody else in this village was
born. And when I see a cyclone a-coming I can
generally tell it a long way off.”
“When is it going to get here?” Brownie
asked in a quavering voice.
“Next Tuesday!” Grandaddy replied.
“What makes you think it’s coming?”
“Well—everything looks just the way
it did before the last cyclone,” Grandaddy Beaver
explained, as he took a mouthful of willow bark.
“The moon looks just the same and the sun looks
just the same. I had a twinge of rheumatics in
my left shoulder yesterday; and to-day the pain’s
in my right. It was exactly that way before the
last cyclone.”
Brownie Beaver did not doubt that the old gentleman
knew what he was talking about. He remembered
that Grandaddy Beaver had warned everyone there was
going to be a freshet. And though people had laughed
at the old chap, the freshet had come.
Sadly worried, Brownie went and called on all his
neighbors and asked them what they were going to do.
And to his surprise he found that they were laughing
at Grandaddy once more. They seemed to have forgotten
about the freshet.
But Brownie Beaver could not forget that dreadful
night. And now he tried to think of some way
to keep his new house from being blown away by the
great wind, which Grandaddy Beaver said was coming
on Tuesday without fail.
