The Bears of Blue River

Christmas morning the boys awakened early and crept from beneath their warm bearskins in eager anticipation of gifts from Santa Claus. Of course they had long before learned who...

One day Tom Fox was told by his mother to kindle the fire, which had been allowed to grow so dim that only a smouldering bed of embers was left upon the hearth. Hanging from the...

NOTE.—The author, fearing that the account of fire springing from the earth, given in the following story, may be considered by the reader too improbable for any book but one of...

Balser’s arm mended slowly, for it had been terribly bitten by the bear. The heavy sleeve of his buckskin jacket had saved him from a wound which might have crippled him for lif...

“You, Tom! You, Jerry! come here!” called Balser one morning, while he and Jim were sitting in the shade near the river in front of the house, overseeing the baby.

For many years after the killing of the big bear, as told in the preceding chapter, time was reckoned by Balser as beginning with that event. It was, if I may say it, his “Anno...

It was a bright day in August. The whispering rustle of the leaves as they turned their white sides to the soft breath of the southwest wind, the buzzing of the ostentatiously b...

One evening in December, a few weeks after Liney had saved Balser’s life by means of the borrowed fire, Balser’s father and mother and Mr. and Mrs. Fox, went to Marion, a town o...

Away back in the “twenties,” when Indiana was a baby state, and great forests of tall trees and tangled underbrush darkened what are now her bright plains and sunny hills, there...

Late one afternoon—it was the day before Christmas—Balser and Jim were seated upon the extra backlog in the fireplace, ciphering. Mrs. Brent was sitting in front of the fire in...

“When the bear got within a few feet of Balser ... the boy grew desperate with fear, and struck at the beast with the only weapon he had—his string of fish” 25