Mutiny of the Little Sweeties
- Автор: Емец Дмитрий Александрович
- Серия: My Big Family #1
- Год: 2016
- Язык: английский
- Переводчик: Jane H. Buckingham
- Жанр: Детские и приключения
Электронная книга - «Mutiny of the Little Sweeties». Краткое содержание книги:
“Why is it our Stool? You didn’t allow us to keep it!” Kate was indignant, not managing to hear clearly. Then the meaning of the words reached her and she shouted, “WHAT? PUPPIES?” She bolted off, not even thinking of putting shoes on. Costa, Vicky, Alena, and Alex flew after Kate. Peter went last, hands in his pockets, pretending that he was not interested and was above this.
“Take Rita with you, since you’re forcing yourself to go anyway!” Mama said.
“Okay, kiddo, let’s go!” Peter generously agreed and put Rita on his shoulders.
Rita very much loved being on someone’s shoulders and she squealed happily, just in case grabbing Peter’s hair for insurance. Admittedly, Mama feared that Peter would put Rita down on top of the gates, but he squatted down. She heard Peter through the window instructing Rita indulgently, “Hold my ears! You can steer with my ears! Understand? Pull the right one, I go right! The left, then I go left… What are you doing? Don’t spit on my head, or else I’ll give it to you on the forehead!”
“Head! Head!” Rita shouted happily. She was forever doing this. When she felt good, she followed someone closely and, not knowing how to express her delight, repeated a word after him. Often the most ridiculous and random of those said. For example, “nose” or “curtains.”
Mama watched from the window as the children ran past the mailboxes. Seven people had on four pairs of shorts, one dress, one skirt, one diaper, one sword, four pairs of sneakers, a pair of rubber boots, one baseball cap, and some bare feet.
They ran to a narrow entrance, which Papa once could not find by car, and stopped. Here on the figure-eight street was a small apiary, enclosed by a three-metre fence of rusty iron. Behind the fence were a tractor, which had not gone anywhere for many years, and three or four hives. Looking through a crack, it was possible to see how the bees were buzzing near the hives.
“Grandma Mila and her husband live here! They sell honey to suckers!” Alex declared loudly.
“Sell to whom? I’ll wash your tongue with soap!” Kate was outraged. Even though she knew a bunch of bad words, she always demanded her brothers and sisters not to know any.
“Well, vacationers!”
“Here you can also say ‘visitors’! From where did you learn such a word?”
“‘Visitor’? You said it! Is it really bad? Really, really?” Alex asked eagerly, reckoning opportunities were opening.
“You’re driving me crazy! No, the other one!”
Realizing that the word “visitor” was normal, Alex sagged, losing interest in it. “Ah! I heard them and Aunt Klava swearing at each other. Aunt Klava said that their honey was made from sugar and that their bees sting, and they replied that them pigeons stained their wash in the yard.”
“Not ‘them’, but their!”
“I also say ‘their’. Them pigeons stained, the geese squawk and these get frostbitten!”
Vicky and Alena turned their heads, looking for the puppies. Someone was making noises nearby, and then the puppies, already fairly grown, about four weeks, climbed out from under a bent-back sheet of metal. It was strange that the bald, scary, infinitely long Stool had such beautiful, fat, and fluffy puppies, like cutlets on legs.
Stool was rushing around the cutlets barking with alarm and trying to make them listen to it. It even knocked to the ground the “cutlet” butting Vicky’s legs and bit it lightly. At the same time, it also tried to growl at Vicky.
“What's this?!” Vicky said sternly, and Stool, recollecting, wagged its tail. A minute later, it was already eating cold buckwheat with meat gravy, which Alena had brought. One of the puppies fell into the buckwheat and the rest were licking it clean.
After the puppies had finished eating, Kate stated loudly that they certainly would not be living on the street anymore. The street was full of dangers. Germs, viruses, cars, other dogs. Bees, after all, could sting.
“And they haven’t before? Now they’re so huge!” Vicky said.
“You keep quiet! Tell me, are the puppies vaccinated? Do they have flea collars? Has a vet looked at them? Here, this one’s eye is running!” Kate yelled and Vicky retreated, because it is extremely difficult to argue with a person who is right in everything.
“Well, it has started!” Peter groaned and stomped home. Rita was bouncing up and down on his shoulders, tugging his ears in all directions and demanding that her horse return.
There were six puppies. Kate, Alena, and Vicky each took two and, accompanied by a worried Stool, set off home. Kate was planning complicated forms of treatment and the construction of a multi-storey kennel, but Papa unexpectedly opposed. “Either the puppies or me!” he declared.
Kate looked at Papa and at the puppies, making a difficult choice. “But where will you live?” she asked Papa.
However, Mama took Papa’s side and he had to be left alone, while the puppies had to return to the apiary. Kate and Alena were angry with Papa for about two hours, and then discovered eye drops in the medicine box and went to treat the puppy with the runny eye.
“Why are you dragging the dogs back to me? Well, take them away! You took them, so take them away! I’ll drown them all!” Grandma Mila shouted at them from behind the fence.
Then Grandma Mila went home and the girls decided that she was going for a bucket to drown them, but Grandma Mila evidently did not find a bucket and returned with macaroni. The macaroni was cold, but there was a lot of it. Only now did it become clear to the girls why Stool and the puppies were so fat.
It all ended up with Alena being stung on the hand and the puppies taking refuge under the hive and growling at Kate when she tried to drag them out with a fragment of a mop. The eye drops remained unused and Alex used them up that very day trying to figure out whether they would burn or not.
The puppies made the biggest impression on Rita. She was still not talking very well, but, trying to show how the puppies amazed her, she ran on all fours the whole day and even demanded soup in a bowl in order to eat like a dog, standing on all fours. Mama let her, but it turned out to be awkward and Rita was forced to sit at the table and take a spoon, because it was against her principles to stay hungry.
After lunch, Rita again went down on all fours and, barking abruptly, began to run on the stairs and scratch like a dog plagued by fleas, and kind Alena put Papa’s tie on her as a collar and led her behind her.
By means of much persuasion, Kate convinced Papa that they would take in the sickest puppy for the night to render it urgent medical care and return it to Stool in the morning, because she understood that the puppy still needed its mother’s milk. Stool did not notice the abduction of its baby because crafty Kate distracted its attention with a sausage and, after grabbing the puppy, ran away before it began to yelp.
Interested by this phenomenon, Alex and Peter recorded the yelps of the remaining puppies on the phone and began an experiment. It turned out that Stool did not know how to count. It was possible to steal all its children, not letting them squeal, and it was all the same to it, but if all the puppies were in place but the phone continued to yelp a little, then Stool would go crazy and search for the source of the sound. The experiments would have continued until the evening, but the bees came to help Stool. One of them flew into Peter’s mouth, and although he got rid of it before it stung him, he preferred to withdraw and leave the dogs alone.
Meanwhile, Kate was busy with the sick puppy. It was hideously fat and, perhaps from weakness, was continuously getting into a mess. Kate washed it with shampoo, then removed two bloated ticks from it and threw them onto a burner of the gas stove. This angered Costa very much. After shouting “Bad! Bad!” at Kate, he began hitting her on the leg with the sword.