"Oh, so much berries!" sighed Dot. "They're all our berries, too."
Yes, and Mrs. Calliper meant to dry them all and sell them, and buy some things for Dot and Molly and the baby. Bob had said that he meant to sell his own berries and buy him a new gun.
Want of appetite was the trouble with Dot; but there was somebody else in there, among the thickest of those bushes, picking, picking, picking, and eating every one he picked, and that fellow had never seen an hour in all his life when he could not have eaten some more blackberries.
An enormous fellow he was, and fatter for his size than Dot Calliper was for hers. He did not look at all ill-natured, and there was even a sort of funny twinkle in his little black eyes, as he pulled the branches full of fruit to his mouth with his great clumsy-looking paws.
They were not half so clumsy as they looked, and they were armed with long, sharp, cruel claws that were bent in a curve, like the teeth of the big shell comb Dot's mother bought of the peddler for her back hair. Then, too, when his mouth opened wide, as it did when he made one of his lazy, sleepy yawns, the teeth he showed were something dreadful to look at. Teeth of that size were never needed for eating such things as blackberries. They looked a great deal more as if they were meant for eating Dot Callipers.
He was evidently very fond of berries, and did not seem to have any doubt but what they all belonged to him. It was just as if he had offered a prize that summer for the bush that would bear the most blackberries, and was now going around among them to see which had won it. Every bush he came to just held out its branches for him to look at; but if Dot had been watching him, she would have seen at once that the fat old rascal never seemed to count the berries at all, but just gathered and swallowed them. How would he be able to tell, when he was done, which bush had done the best for him?
But Dot was not watching him. She had not even seen him yet, and she did not know he was there till he made a great crash among the bushes, when his foot slipped, and he rolled down through half a dozen of them.
"Bob," exclaimed Dot, "is that you? Did you tumble down?"
There was no answer, and she asked again, "Bob, did you 'pill your berries?"
Then she thought she heard something like a grunt, such as the pigs made when they were rooting in the garden, and she and Bob went to drive them out, and she said, "Oh, the pids are come! they'll pick all our berries."