Page:Bambi A Life in the Woods (1928).pdf/71

ously happy whenever he frightened anybody. “Oi, yeek!” he would cry so dreadfully loud that the forests heard it for a mile around. But afterwards he would laugh with a soft chuckle, though you could only hear it if you stood close by.

Bambi discovered that the screech-owl was delighted whenever he frightened anyone, or when anybody thought that something dreadful had happened to him. After that, whenever Bambi met him, he never failed to rush up and ask, “What has happened to you?” or to say with a sigh, “O, how you frightened me just now!” Then the owl would be delighted.

“O, yes,” he would say, laughing, “it sounds pretty gruesome.” He would puff up his feathers into a grayish-white ball and look extremely handsome.

There were storms, too, once or twice, both in the daytime and at night. The first was in the daytime and Bambi felt himself grow terrified as it became darker and darker in his glade. It seemed to him as if night had covered the sky at mid-day. When the raging storm broke through the woods so that the trees began to groan aloud, Bambi trembled with terror. And when the light-