Definition of shel

(Helen Hooven Santmyer, "There Were Fences"...)

And the cast shell of a locust , straw colored and transparent , weighing nothing , fragile but entire , with eyes like bubbles and a gaping slit down its back .

Every morning early , in the summer , we searched the trunks of the trees as high as we could reach for the locust shells , carefully detached their hooked claws from the bark where they hung , and stabled them , a weird faery herd , in an angle between the high roots of the tulip_tree , where no grass grew in the dense shade .