“Anyhow it has caught me!” thought Chunky.
Then he listened again, waving his ears to and fro for any sound that might tell him the hunters were coming to get him. But he heard nothing but the noises of the jungle, which he heard every day—the cries of the red and green parrots, the trumpeting of elephants afar off, the chatter of monkeys and, now and then, the roar of a lion.
“I hope one of the lions doesn’t get me,” thought Chunky. “They could easily, now that I am fast in the mud.”
Once more he tried to pull his feet loose, but could not. The mud was too sticky. Chunky was sinking deeper and deeper into it. But still he tried to be cheerful.
“After all,” he thought to himself, in the queer way that such animals have of thinking, “it may not be so bad to be caught and taken to a circus. Tum Tum said it was jolly. Maybe it will be so for me.”
So Chunky waited in the mud. He could not do anything to get himself loose. He put his nose down in the water and drank some, but it was not nice like the water of the river near which he lived. The water in the muddy pool where he was held fast was hot, and not at all tasty.
“Still, it is better than none at all,” thought Chunky. “And it is a good thing I ate a good breakfast this morning, or I would be hungry now.” And it was a good thing, I suppose, for there was nothing to eat near the jungle pool, and no sweet grass grew on the muddy bottom.
All at once, after the happy hippo, who was not as jolly as he had been at other times, had tried again and again to get loose—all of a sudden, I say, he heard a noise back of him. He tried to look around to see what it was, but he could not turn far enough.
The noise came closer.