Page 48 - [2]Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

THE BURROW

“Gerroff me! Gerroff me!” squealed the gnome.
It was certainly nothing like Santa Claus. It was small and leath-
ery looking, with a large, knobby, bald head exactly like a potato.

Ron held it at arm’s length as it kicked out at him with its horny lit-
tle feet; he grasped it around the ankles and turned it upside down.
“This is what you have to do,” he said. He raised the gnome
above his head (“Gerroff me!”) and started to swing it in great cir-
cles like a lasso. Seeing the shocked look on Harry’s face, Ron
added, “It doesn’t hurt them — you’ve just got to make them really
dizzy so they can’t find their way back to the gnomeholes.”
He let go of the gnome’s ankles: It flew twenty feet into the air
and landed with a thud in the field over the hedge.
“Pitiful,” said Fred. “I bet I can get mine beyond that stump.”
Harry learned quickly not to feel too sorry for the gnomes. He
decided just to drop the first one he caught over the hedge, but the
gnome, sensing weakness, sank its razor-sharp teeth into Harry’s

finger and he had a hard job shaking it off — until —
“Wow, Harry — that must’ve been fifty feet. . . .”
The air was soon thick with flying gnomes.
“See, they’re not too bright,” said George, seizing five or six
gnomes at once. “The moment they know the de-gnoming’s going
on they storm up to have a look. You’d think they’d have learned by
now just to stay put.”
Soon, the crowd of gnomes in the field started walking away in
a straggling line, their little shoulders hunched.
“They’ll be back,” said Ron as they watched the gnomes disap-
pear into the hedge on the other side of the field. “They love it
here. . . . Dad’s too soft with them; he thinks they’re funny. . . .”

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