Explore "The Swiss Family Robinson" by Johann David Wyss on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
More stores from the wreck.
I rose with the first crowing of the cock, before the rest of the family was awake, descended the ladder, and employed myself in carefully skinning the kangaroo, so as not to deface its beautiful mouse-coloured coat; and it was really high time to think about it. Our dogs were so well satisfied the preceding evening with their meal on the entrails of the animal, that they became partial to it, and had just sprung up in the design of making a complete breakfast of the whole carcase. Before I was at the bottom of the ladder, they had torn off the head of the kangaroo, which I had suspended at some height by the hind feet, and, half friends half foes, they were going to divide it amongst them, when my presence opportunely prevented the partition. It occurred to me, that as I had neither cellar nor safe to keep my provisions in, it behoved me to give them a slight correction: growling and barking, they took refuge under the roots, and the half-suppressed kind of howling they continued to make, awoke my wife, who, on missing me, came down alarmed to know what was the matter. For the love of God, exclaimed she, what has happened? Are the dogs run mad, or have you lost your senses? -- Nothing of the kind, I answered; I was only giving our dogs a short sermon on temperance and the necessity of self-control.