Jip Quotes

I decided I liked squirrels just as much as Jip did, but in a completely different way.

Then Jip went up to the front of the ship and smelt the wind; and he started muttering to himself, "Tar; Spanish onions; kerosene oil; wet raincoats; crushed laurel-leaves; rubber burning; lace-curtains being washed--No, my mistake, lace-curtains hanging out to dry; and foxes--hundreds of 'em--cubs; and--" "Can you really smell all those different things in this one wind?" asked the Doctor. "Why, of course!" said Jip. "And those are only a few of the easy smells--the strong ones. Any mongrel could smell those with a cold in the head. Wait now, and I'll tell you some of the harder scents that are coming on this wind--a few of the dainty ones." Then the dog shut his eyes tight, poked his nose straight up in the air and sniffed hard with his mouth half-open. For a long time he said nothing. He kept as still as a stone. He hardly seemed to be breathing at all. When at last he began to speak, it sounded almost as though he were singing, sadly, in a dream. "Bricks," he whispered, very low--"old yellow bricks, crumbling with age in a garden-wall; the sweet breath of young cows standing in a mountain-stream; the lead roof of a dove-cote--or perhaps a granary--with the mid-day sun on it; black kid gloves lying in a bureau-drawer of walnut-wood; a dusty road with a horses' drinking-trough beneath the sycamores; little mushrooms bursting through the rotting leaves; and--and--and--" "Any parsnips?" asked Gub-Gub. "No," said Jip. "You always think of things to eat. No parsnips whatever.

Jip!

The other mystery nobody cared to solve was Jip. I’d found him, too, not lying on top of her as usual but under the sheet, curled up against her cold belly. Did he have the same junk in his veins she did, I’ll never know. Accident or no accident, the question of my life. As part of my cleanup before calling 911, I’d picked up his hard little body that was curled like a cinnamon roll and wrapped it in the ratty striped towel he always dragged around the house. Pretending that rag was me, I assumed. Then later, with so much else going on, I forgot about him. The little towel bundle turned up outside, on the black-bagged trash pile. This fierce tiny being that never stopped loving her, nor wanting me for dinner. I took him around to the back and buried him behind the tool shed. The one goodbye that was left up to me.

She introduced us to a strange pastime called jip-norring…She would carry a sort of pogo stick, dig it in the earth and then catapult herself all over the grounds. Hard to describe —it was a mixture of skipping and pole vaulting, and she insisted it got her places far sooner than other more normal modes of travel.