And it was even less fun when the cage broke, just as another big wave came on deck. The first thing Chunky knew, he was out of his cage in which he had been kept ever since he was taken from the jungle pit. Out of the broken cage rolled Chunky, turning over and over on the slanting deck like a queer football rolling down a cellar door. The cage went one way and Chunky another.
“Look! Look!” shouted some of the sailors, but they could hardly be heard, for the storm was making so much noise. “Look! The happy hippo is out of his cage!”
And so Chunky was. I think it was nice of the sailors, even if they were all excited in the storm, to call Chunky the “happy hippo,” for if ever there was one, he was.
[“Splash! That was Chunky himself falling overboard”]
“Get him!” yelled the animal man! “Get that hippo! He’s the best of the three, and I want him for a circus! Get Chunky!”
But this was more easily said than done. The deck of the ship, pitched and tossed as it was in the storm, now looked like the slanting roof of a house. Anything that was not fast to it would roll off. The other hippo cages had been made fast. But Chunky’s, out of which he had been tossed when it fell and broke, now began to slide down the wooden deck toward the water. And Chunky himself, not being able to stand on the slippery deck, began to slide too. Right toward the ocean slid the hippo, not as happy now as he had been in the jungle.
“Splash!”