“Why, what did it look like?” asked Jack.
Dick thought earnestly for a minute. Then he looked up brightly as if he had hit on a clever definition.
“Like nothing that I can think of,” he remarked with a grin. Tom aimed a swinging blow at the jester, which Dick dodged easily.
While they were thus engaged, Jack’s rifle spoke sharply. He had caught sight of the odd animal swinging to the tree beyond that to which it had already transferred itself.
There was a great threshing among the branches and an odd sort of squealing cry.
“You hit it, all right,” declared Tom.
“Yes; but I’m afraid it’s got entangled in the branches and we’ll lose it after all.”
“I’ll climb up and get it,” volunteered Dick.
But there was no necessity for this. After a minute’s interval a hairy body came crashing and toppling down, landing with a thud at their feet. As Dick had said, the animal was certainly unlike anything the boys had seen up to that time.
It was a hairy creature, about the size of a large monkey. Its nose was snub, its eyes large and round, and it apparently had no ears. But strangest of all, in among its coarse hairs grew a sort of moss of almost the exact hue of the vegetation adhering to the tree trunks.