Story "Mother and Child Love"

In human society, maternal love is the most common and the deepest. It is not too much to use the adjectives "great" and "sublime" to embellish it. But maternal love is also not unique to humans. In the animal world, the love and care of female animals for their children is probably even greater than that of human mothers.

What is told here is the story of the mother and son of an otter that is not known to ordinary people.

There is a waterfall on a river in Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan, and on the rock behind the waterfall, there are otter mother and son. This is the protagonist of the story we are going to tell.

Otter mothers are old and twice as large as other otters. The little otter was born not long ago and has recently learned to walk.

Mother otters feed their children by catching some fish by the waterfall or catching chickens in the countryside. One night, the mother otter went out to hunt as usual. It had just taken two or three steps on the grass on the bank of the river when it smelled a special fragrance. It was a chick chirping. The mother otter is like a snake, quietly hiding in the grass. The chick flapped its wings as it barked, approaching it little by little.

At this time, as long as the mother otter jumps, it will bite the head of the chicken.

The mother otter put her head on the ground and was about to pounce out, when suddenly a nasty smell wafted from the side. It was the smell of man and iron. This iron tool is what people call a gun pipe, or an iron clip on a beast catcher.

Smell it again, and the smell is coming from the side of the chick. The elderly otter mother revealed a row of white teeth and whimpered in anger. It was hesitating, whether to pounce on the tender chicks or avoid the smell of iron and humans at a distance? With its many years of experience, it knows that, in any case, it must first avoid iron and human beings from a distance, and when it thinks of this, it retreats step by step.

Just then, the little otter bud came up. The little otter is particularly greedy, how to feed it, it is not enough, always noisy hungry, all day thinking about eating fragrant chickens. As for what human smell, what iron smell, it does not understand at all. It aimed at the chick from behind and swooped over suddenly. At this time, the otter mother did not dare to be careless at all. When the little otter jumped up, before it could get close to the chick, it grabbed the little otter's neck. I spun around in the air. At this moment, I only listened to the "popping" sound, and somehow something rang out. With the sound, the old otter whimpered and wailed. It turned out that its tail was caught in a clip that had been buried by someone. Because as it spun, its long tail touched the chick's body. The old otter knew that it was caught in the iron clip laid by the hunter's cloth. This damn chick is the hunter's bait.

The old otter wanted to get rid of this abominable iron clip on its tail, it had the strength, usually, even the cliff three meters high, a jump can go up, now, it bowed, jumped up, the result is counterproductive, it was thrown heavily on the ground, from head to toe stained with sand.

It tried again to bite the thing with its sharp teeth. However, it was an iron clip, and only a "crunch" was heard, which did not work.

The little otter knew he had run into trouble and burrowed under a nearby rock. After a while, he came out again and looked left and right. It may have understood what was happening around it, and was so anxious that it was circling around the mother otter and making a twittering cry.

The old otter knew that the louder the noise on such occasions, the greater the danger. So it wrinkled its nose and groaned in its throat, warning the little otter to be quiet.

However, at this time the little otter did not care about anything. It is like an ignorant child, "twitter, twitter, twitter" non-stop. The cry upset the old otter. Finally, it began to struggle like crazy, and it jumped and jumped again and again, but each time the bones of the whole body were creaked.

Eventually, perhaps the old otter understood that it would be futile to let it struggle.

It curled up and simply lay in the weeds. It needs to rest, it needs to find a way out of the predicament.

The little otter seemed to be tired, snuggled up to his mother, and burrowed his head into her mother's soft fur.

Suddenly, out of instinct, the old otter felt another danger approaching them. It emits a "chirping" warning sound. The little otter immediately got up and burrowed into the rock just now.

There was no sound at all. In the moonlight, a black thing flew in. Ah, that's a big owl bird.

The owl suddenly swooped down and went straight to the old otter to pounce. If you change to other small animals, this will probably be fatal. Otters have the highest agility among animals. Avoiding its tail from being clipped, it still rolled its body to the side at an alarming speed.

The owl bird saw that it did not pounce, and was obviously angry. It screamed "quack", opened its mouth wide, and pounced again.

This time, the old otter cleverly dodged it again. But the bird's hard beak caught the otter's caught tail. The otter's tail "popped" and broke off the clip. - This saved the otter.

The old otter endured severe pain, seized this moment, jumped up like lightning, "pounced" and plunged into the river behind the upper embankment.

The old otter suffered so much that it knew that it would be more dangerous to stay near the waterfall, and it had to leave the house with the little otter. For otters, unless they are raising children, they never live in the same place for long periods of time. They wander around, which is a tradition of the Otter family.

The mother otter leads the baby otter and swims downstream along the river. I swam for five or six days until I reached the big seashore.

It is a bay that juts out into the land, and the quiet waves of water wash away the beach. The mother otter tried to run a lap on the beach. However, for some reason, it was also full of human scents, and so far it had never smelled such a strong smell. The old otter looked around for a moment with its dark eyes, and found that in the far side of the water, there was a small island, so it decided to cross the water to the island.

The island is uninhabited and full of bare rocks. They found shelter in a cave. There is no human smell here except for the smell of moisture. The old otter was very happy with the place.

At low tide, otter mother and son come to the beach side by side to pick up sea shells everywhere. For otters, whether small birds, insects, or fish, they can be used as food, so they can survive.

It has indeed become the ideal place for them to live. They wanted to stay here for a while. However, one morning, a "thump- The sound made their bodies tremble. And since then, I've heard it almost every day. Time has entered hunting season. Flocks of seabirds fly around the island every year, so hunters start flocking to it one by one. They couldn't stay here any longer, so the old otter decided to leave the island.

The otter mother and son lived in the cake field, lived at the foot of the cake mountain, and after a long journey, returned to the river in Miyazaki Prefecture. The banks of the river were covered with heavy snow for several days, emitting a blinding white light, like two walls of ice. In the middle of the ice wall, the clear river is constantly flowing, twisting and turning into the distance.

Upstream, and further upstream, the otter mother and child walked along the riverbank day after day, and finally came to a full pool. Only the strange sound of "fluttering, fluttering" was heard. The old otter put two front paws on a small rock, looked ahead, and then issued a "twitter." Twitter" sound.

The little otter also learned from his mother' appearance, looked at it, and shouted "twitter".

It turned out that the sound of "fluttering, fluttering" was that their companions were playing in the water there.

Next to this pool, there is a gentle ramp that stretches all the way to the pool. On the ramp, a thick layer of snow accumulates. It seems that this ramp was cut by people driving stones up the mountain, cutting half of the hill, leaving this section of the slope, which is now deserted and no one has ever come again. It is now a good place for otters to play.

On the slope of the snow, like a ski, slip down from above, and then jump into the water with a thud.

About fifteen or sixteen otters gathered around this "ski resort" and took turns to descend. The old otter and its children also joined them in playing.

Just as the otters were having a good time, in the pine forest far from the slope, there were two men in white coats, lying motionless, staring at the scene. This old man and young man came to the mountains from other places to hunt. Today, they didn't encounter rabbits and pheasants or the like, they happened to run into this group of otters. For both of them, whatever it is, as long as it is a wild thing. So they raised their hunting rifles and pulled the trigger. "Bang, bang", just as the old otter and the little otter began to slide, Mars erupted from the two guns, and the otters plunged into the pool together and disappeared under the deep water.

"Twitter, twitter," the otters wailing. One of the little otter's legs was hit. Two hunters release hounds. The little otter tried to escape into the pool, but was unsuccessful. The road ahead was blocked by hounds, who dragged one of its injured legs backwards into a hole under the rock next to it.

The hunter ran over. They took off their shovels and kept digging under the rocks. They dug out loose soil and ice ballast, and finally caught the small otters. But this little otter, due to its innate instincts, was facing the sky on its back and pretended to be dead. The two hunters may have seen this trick, and they laughed and said, "This little cub, he still wants to deceive us!" ”

When the hunters finished speaking, they burst out laughing. The young hunter kicked the little otter with his foot, and the little one was kicked and rolled twice on the ground. But it remained motionless. People who don't know the truth still think it's really dead, and it's pretending to be realistic.

The two of you looked at me again, I looked at you, and laughed. "This little thing looks like a mile!" Just as the man squinted and laughed, with a sound of water, the old otter jumped between the two people, grabbed the neck of the little otter, and wanted to run back. However, all of a sudden, he did not jump into the pool.

The old otter sat slightly on the sand, with the small otter in his mouth, staring at the hunter with glowing eyes.

The two hunters were caught off guard, and it must have been god who understood what was happening in front of them. The young hunter aimed his gun at them, and just as he was about to pull the trigger, the old hunter pushed him away. "Bang, bang, bang," the bullet shot out in another direction. Taking advantage of this opportunity, the old otter "pounced" and jumped into the pool, and the mother and son fled.

The young hunter asked, "Well, why don't you let me die?" ”

The older hunter smiled, "Why? When you reach my age, you may understand. - Let's go! Seeing this scene just now, it is worth it for me to go back empty-handed! ”