One morning a big manatee which they were chasing happened to come up beside the canoe to breathe, when Ned splashed it with his paddle and drove it under water before it could catch its breath.  The sea-cow had to come up again in a few seconds and was once more driven below the surface by Ned.  Almost instantly the creature lifted its head so far above the surface that Ned dropped his paddle and seized the soft nose of the manatee with both hands.

“Look out!” yelled Dick, but he was the one to have looked out.  For, as the sea-cow threw down its head and tail, Ned was dragged out of the canoe onto his upward-arching back.  Then the animal’s back was curved downward and the flat tail thrown violently upward into the air.  As the stern of the canoe was over the tail and Dick was in the stern of the canoe, both boy and canoe went suddenly in the air with a few barrels of water over and around them.  When Dick came to the surface he saw his companion being savagely tossed about by an angry monster that seemed to be holding him between his jaws.  Dick was terribly frightened and swam as swiftly as possible to Ned’s help, but before he could reach him the boy had been tossed aside and the manatee had disappeared.

“Are you hurt?” said Dick, as soon as he got enough breath to speak.

“Course not!  Manatees are harmless.  Told you so before.  But, say, Dicky boy, why didn’t you get there a minute sooner and grab a flipper?  He’d be our manatee now, if you had.”

“More likely he’d have had us, Neddy.  You didn’t see what he did to me with just one slap of his tail.”

The boys collected their paddles and swam with the canoe to shoal water, where they lifted it, poured out the water and got aboard.

On their next hunt the boys put a number of chunks of wood in the canoe and when a manatee was started they paddled quietly and tried not to frighten the creature by going too near it at first.  Then Ned took in his paddle and armed himself with chunks of wood, while Dick paddled toward the quarry.  When the sea-cow lifted its nose out of water, for air, it was hit or splashed by a chunk.  The frightened animal dove quickly, but came up again almost immediately for the air it had to have.  Another chunk hit its nose, but, confused and half strangled, the manatee hardly moved until Dick had driven the canoe beside it and Ned had landed on its back.  Ned failed to grasp the creature’s nose with his right hand, but caught the manatee by the flipper with his left and clung to it, although tossed off of the back of the animal.  But Dick was in the river a second after his companion and was clutching the right flipper of the manatee with one hand and reaching for its nose with the other.  The sea-cow threw its tail high in the air, then lashing it downward, plunged, head-foremost, deep in the water.  The boys went under but hung on to the flippers, and Dick got a grip on the creature’s nose.  Both of the