Johnny Brown was twelve years old. Ever since he had been old enough to play alone, he had been going out into the woods and fields and bringing home with him some of the living things he found there. Sometimes it was a turtle from the pond, and sometimes it was a bird that had hurt its wing and could not fly. Or it might be a caterpillar that had spun a cocoon about itself in the fall and then turned into a beautiful moth or butterfly in the spring.
Johnny picked the bat up carefully with a towel. He did not want to hurt it. Besides, he did not want it to nip his fingers. Then Johnny dropped the bat into a large glass jar in which he had kept tadpoles the month before, but which was now clean and dry. He tied a piece of cloth over the top of the jar and then went back to bed.
Next morning when Johnny woke up, the first thing he did was to look at his new pet. There it lay in the bottom of the jar, its wings very rumpled and only half spread. Poor little thing, it looked very unhappy indeed, as it lifted its funny little face, opened its mouth, and chattered its teeth.
Johnny thought the bat did not like to lie on the cold smooth glass, so he put a twig into the jar. This, he thought, would give the unhappy little bat something to climb upon if that was what it wanted to do.
As soon as the twig touched the bat, it put out the little hooked thumbs on its wings and began to pull itself up by them. When it got to the top of the twig, it caught hold with its toes, let go its hold with its thumbs, and hung head down. Then it wrapped its wings over its face, and went to sleep.
That was an exciting day for Johnny. For other interesting things also happened to him that day. After he had watched the bat a short time, he thought he would look for a box to make a cage for his new pet. But just then he heard a soft rustling sound among a bunch of cocoons hanging over his table. He looked up, and there he saw a big Polyphemus moth that had just come out of its cocoon.
Johnny ran and caught the moth between his hands. Then he began looking about for a place to put it so
The big Polyphemus fluttered a bit, caught hold of the stem of the leaf Johnny had dropped into the jar, and then hung still again. The fluttering of the moth’s wings must have roused the bat for it poked its head out from between its wings, and moved down on the twig a short way. But Johnny thought the bat would soon go back to sleep again, and so he went off to make its cage.
By and by the cage was done. It was a big box with fine wire netting tacked over the front of it. At the back was a door through which Johnny could put his hand into the cage to clean it and to feed the bat. Inside was a twig for the bat to hang upon.
Then the happy boy went back to the glass jar to get the bat. He found it hanging upside down, just as he had left it. But where was the moth? Johnny looked more closely. There, on the bottom of the jar, lay its lovely wings. They had been snipped off close to its body. But where was the body? Johnny looked even more closely, but the body was nowhere to be seen.
Then Johnny knew what had happened. Somehow the bat had crept over the twig, caught the moth in its mouth, and eaten it. That gave Johnny an idea of what bats eat.
Johnny knew it would do no good to cry about the beautiful big moth. It was gone, but he still had the bat. Besides, he had learned what to feed his new pet.
Of course, Johnny knew that even if he wanted to do so, he could not feed the bat big Polyphemus moths every day. For these moths are not very easy to find. But he thought he could catch the little moths that fly about the lamp at night. He thought, too, that he would try feeding other insects to the bat. It might like beetles, spiders, flies, and maybe even worms.
The next morning Johnny found five or six moths lying on the table under the lamp. They had burned themselves and dropped there the night before, and his mother had not yet brushed them up. Johnny put them all into the bat’s cage, but the bat would not touch them. Johnny thought it might eat them later, when it was dark. But next morning the dead moths still lay at the bottom of the cage.
So Johnny set out to find some live moths for his pet. Very soon he found one fluttering in the corner of the windowpane. He caught it, and then went to the front porch. There he caught a spider as it was spinning its web, and a little brown beetle that was eating at the heart of a pink rose on the porch table.
When Johnny went back to his bat, he reached into the jar to pick up the little animal. But the bat opened its mouth so wide and snapped at him so fiercely that Johnny thought he had better not touch it.
Instead, Johnny took up the spider on the end of a little stick, and pushed stick and all into the cage. When the bat saw the stick coming toward it, it opened its mouth wide to bite it. Then Johnny shook the stick, letting the spider fall near the bat.
Snap, went the sharp teeth, and in a moment the spider was no more. In the same way Johnny fed the moth and the beetle to the bat. Then he went out-of-doors to find something more for the hungry little creature.
After awhile Johnny came back with a worm in his hand. He had found it in an apple his mother had given him to eat. Johnny was almost afraid to put his hand into the jar again, but he thought he would try it. For the bat did not look so fierce as it had before. The minute the worm got near enough the bat snapped it up. But this time it did not snap at Johnny’s hand. After a few days the bat grew to be quite tame. Then it would let Johnny pick it up.
Sometimes the little boy held the bat in his brown fist while he gave it its dinner. He held it so close that only its head and thumbs showed above his closed fingers.
The bat ate almost every kind of insect. One day Johnny fed it some worms that he had found in the green corn he had helped his mother husk for dinner. The bat bit the worms from one end of their wriggling bodies to the other, till they became quite still. Then it ate them.
When Johnny wanted to give his pet a drink of water, he put a little water into a saucer and held the bat over the edge of the saucer. The bat lapped the water up with its tongue, then tipped its head backward to swallow, just as a chicken does.
Most of the time that the bat was in its cage it hung upside down from the wire netting. But, if Johnny turned the cage to the sunny window, the little creature crawled down, crept into the back corner, and lay flat on its face.
The bat did not like the oak twig for a resting place. Perhaps it would have liked the twig if it had been a red bat, for red bats live in trees. But this bat was one of the kind that hide in a dark, quiet place and like to hang against a wall.
When Johnny put his pet back into its cage, he gently moved it from his finger to the twig, and then pushed the twig inside. But the bat always crept down, using its mouth, its feet, or its thumbs to hold by. Then it climbed back to its place on the wire netting.
The bat did this so often that Johnny began to wonder whether it was longing to get out into the free air again. He knew it had plenty to eat, but he thought perhaps it missed flying through tree tops with other bats.
Johnny never saw his pet again, but he often watched the bats that darted about the fields and woods in the twilight, and wondered whether any of them might be the one he had cared for once upon a time.
Nguồn: Wikisource English — By the Roadside (Dunn and Troxell)/A Queer Pet. Văn bản được nhập và định dạng lại; CC BY-SA 4.0, có thể áp dụng điều khoản bổ sung của tác phẩm.