by Gary Paulsen
I got the impression that he didn’t really need to lead them. They knew exactly where to go and what to do. When they came to what I learned was the mower they turned themselves around and backed, one on either side of a long wooden tongue, into position for pulling.
Knute hooked their trace chains into a big crosspiece of wood hooked to the mower and brought the tongue up to attach to a crosspiece from one horse to the next.
“Come on,” Harris said, and I was surprised to see he was carrying an empty feed sack he’d picked up somewhere. “We got to get on.”
“Get on what?”
“The horses...”
Harris jumped into the space between the horses by climbing on the mower and hopping along the tongue until he was even with their shoulders. Then he grabbed two horns that stuck up on top of the collar and climbed up until he was sitting on the right horse.
“Come on,” he said. “Get up on Bill. You want to be left behind?”
As a matter of fact I was thinking that exact thing just then—that rather than climb up onto a horse as big as most trucks, I would definitely rather be left behind. But pride won out and I hesitantly made my way onto the mower in back of the left horse, Bill, and took one careful step after another to climb the tongue until I could pull myself up on his shoulders. He was so wide my legs seemed to go straight out to either side and I could feel him breathing beneath me like a warm bellows, great drafts of air as his shoulders worked slowly.
The ground seemed miles away and when I heard a sudden mechanical clanking and the horses moved slightly, I grabbed desperately for the homed things around the collar.
“Let go the hames,” Harris said. “And raise your leg and put it under the reins. Pa can’t drive with you sitting on the reins.”
I turned and Knute had raised the sickle bar so it stood almost straight up and worked a lever to disengage it and was waiting patiently for me to do what Harris said.
“We want to hurry,” Harris told me while I sorted my legs out from all the lines and straps and rings. “We want to get out of the yard before Buzzer knows we’re going... Oh shoot. Now it’s too late.”
I had just gotten squared away and was about to ask who Buzzer was when out of the corner of my eye I saw the cat come to the barn door and sit, watching us. “You mean the cat?”
Harris nodded. “It’s better if we get out without him seeing us.”
I had seen the cat briefly earlier, during milking when Louie squirted milk into his mouth, but I hadn’t appreciated just how large he was; he was the size of a collie, maybe just a bit bigger, with large forelegs and huge, round pads on his feet. On the end of each ear there was a bedraggled tuft and his coat was spotted, almost dappled.
Knute steered the team toward a gate in a pasture fence that led us directly past the front door of the barn and Harris leaned across the space between the horses to talk quietly.
“You don’t want to touch Buzzer.”
I nodded. “You’re right. I don’t want to touch him.” It seemed an odd thing to say since Buzzer was sitting down on the ground and I was what felt like eight feet in the air.
“He ain’t normal or nothing,” Harris continued. “Louie found him in the woods one spring when he was looking for wood to cut. Buzzer was just a kitten then and Louie brought him back in his pocket. He grew some.”
“I guess...”
I was going to say more but we were right next to the door and the cat suddenly bounced up—it seemed without effort—and landed on the rear end of the horse I was riding on.
I started, expecting the horse to react, but nothing happened. Bill just kept plodding on with Buzzer sitting on his butt, leaning out a bit to look ahead around me.
“No matter what he does, don’t you touch him,” Harris repeated. “Only Louie can touch him. Buzzer can be a little edgy about being touched if it ain’t Louie.”
I nodded and whispered to him, “Why is he riding on the horse with me?”
“He likes it when Pa mows ’cause he can get the mice. That’s why I wanted to sneak out. He makes it hard to catch the mice because he’s so fast. Just watch what I do and do the same. Sometimes we can get out without him if he’s sleeping, but if he sees the mower he knows what’s going to happen and he comes along and ruins it for everybody.”
I wasn’t sure what Buzzer was going to ruin—I couldn’t, for instance, understand why we were going to get mice. As far as I was concerned Buzzer could have them all. I was ready to get off and let him have the horse as well.
Knute had stopped at the gate and Harris jumped down, opened it, closed it after we were through, and scrambled back up on Bob while we were still moving.
Once through the gate Knute turned the team and we walked slowly along the fence that went next to the driveway back out toward the main road. I kept a leery eye over my shoulder, watching Buzzer, but the big cat just sat there, looking at the sky and flying birds while the horses walked.
In a quarter mile or less we came to a stand of densely packed alfalfa almost waist high, and Knute stopped the horses at the corner of the field and lowered the sickle bar. He took a can of oil from a little holder beneath the seat on the mower and squirted oil all along the sickle bar, then sat once more and worked a lever to engage the clutch.
Harris got down and motioned for me to do the same. “We got to walk in back of the mower now and catch mice.”
It was, finally, too much. “Harris, why do we want the mice?”
“For the money.”
“What money?”
“Louie. He pays us a penny for each two mice we get him. Except for Buzzer, of course. Louie don’t pay Buzzer nothing ’cause Buzzer he just ruins ’em all to pieces and won’t give them up anyway. Last summer I tried to take one away from him and get the money for it and he like to killed me. That’s why I say don’t you touch him nor take none of his mice.”
“I won’t.”
I was going to ask why Louie paid for the mice—I thought, after watching at breakfast one and breakfast two and lunch, that he might eat them—but Knute made a squeaking sound by pursing his lips and the horses started forward, pulling the mower. With the clutch engaged, the wheels drove the sickle bar back and forth as the mower moved and sharp, triangular-shaped blades snick-snicked back and forth rapidly and cut the hay as neat as scissors.
I stood behind with Harris and watched the hay falling back across the sickle bar. The motion was mesmerizing. The bar slid along cutting and the alfalfa dropped and dropped in a never-ending row.
“Come on.” Harris started following the sickle bar, walking eight or so feet in back of it. “Watch for ’em now, keep watching...”
I was more involved in watching Buzzer. He was between Harris and me, walking along, studying the newly fallen grass ahead alertly, taking one careful step after another. Suddenly he pounced, rising in an arc and down, with his feet buried in the grass. He brought one pad up with a mouse hooked in a razorsharp claw, gave me what I took to be a threatening look, and popped the mouse into his mouth. If he chewed at all, it was just a single bite and down it went.
“Rats,” Harris said. “See? Right there goes half a cent. He always gets ’em first. I think he hears ’em or something.”
He waved for me to follow and I stepped forward, keeping well wide of Buzzer. Harris hadn’t taken two steps when he jumped, forward and down, grabbed at the grass, and raised his fist clutching a handful of grass and a mouse. “Got one!”
I nodded but noted that Buzzer was watching as well, with a faintly proprietary air, and I wondered just which mice he might consider his and which he might consider mine.
For the time being it didn’t matter. The alfalfa that fell back across the sickle bar was so thick I didn’t understand how Harris or Buzzer could see mice.
I kept walking along. Harris got two more and Buzzer got three more and I still hadn’t gotten any. Harris was starting to give me distinctly dirty looks and I decided I better get busy and had no mor
e than lowered my eyes for another look than I saw a little form scurrying through the grass.
“Got one!” I yelled, a bit prematurely as I jumped for it. I missed, saw it wiggle again, grabbed at the grass, and felt the mouse wriggle inside my hand. I looked up and there was Buzzer—staring at me full on in the face with his wide yellow eyes. He pointedly looked down at the mouse, then up at my face again.
I nodded—“My mistake”—and gave him the mouse, throwing it to him. He caught it in midair and swallowed it whole.
“Ahh, come on,” Harris snorted. He’d been watching the whole exchange. “That ain’t fair—he didn’t earn that one. He’s just taking them from you.”
“It’s all right. I don’t mind.” I didn’t, either. When he looked at me that way I would have given him anything he wanted.
“Don’t be giving up so easy—that’s half a penny every time you let him get away with it.”
“You said not to take his mice.”
“Well... just don’t give up so blamed easy. He don’t own the whole world.”
I nodded to Harris and we continued, working through the morning. Harris caught just under thirty. I didn’t do so well, first because I hadn’t learned the trick of seeing them as well as Harris and second because of Buzzer. We worked out an agreement after a fashion. To wit: if I caught a mouse and he wanted it, I gave it to him. It turned out he wanted about two out of three mice that I caught, so when Knute pulled the team up in the shade of a huge elm and unhooked the trace chains and said, “Time for dinner,” I had only put six mice in the bag. Three cents’ worth.
“I’m not doing so well,” I said as we sat under the tree and waited for Glennis and Clair to bring us what I would call lunch but they called dinner. “It’s Buzzer. He keeps taking them from me.”
Harris nodded. “He’s a crook. That’s how he got his name, sort of...”
“What do you mean?”
“We had an old collie dog somebody gave us last year. It didn’t bother Buzzer none but Buzzer, he kept taking food from the dog. One day the dog got sick of it and bit him on the leg a little. That’s how he got his name.”
“From getting bit?”
“Naw—he killed the dog. Louie said it was like the dog got hit by a buzz saw. So we called him Buzzer after that. Just keep giving him mice. He’ll fill up in a little while.”
We sat, leaning against some rocks. Knute had taken the bridles off the horses, rubbing their ears and saying low things to them while he did, and they were eating alfalfa off to the side. I liked the sound of their chewing—it made the grass sound like it tasted good.
Knute rolled a cigarette and leaned back, dragging deeply. At the other end of the field I saw Glennis and Clair coming, carrying a double-handled boiler between them.
Harris stood. “Come on, let’s help them.” He took off running across the field and I followed, and we took a pail of water Glennis had been carrying in her free hand.
“Mind you don’t spill,” Glennis said. “There’s just enough for the horses.”
“Mind you don’t spill,” Harris mimicked, his voice singsong. “There’s just enough for the damn horses...”
Smack.
He had forgotten himself. By taking the bucket from Glennis we freed up her right arm and she used it to pop him across the back of the head.
“Watch your mouth...”
He was unfazed. “You ever try that? Watching your mouth? It’s impossible. You can’t see your mouth without you have a mirror and I don’t have a damn mirror...”
Smack.
We walked in silence until we came to the horses. I thought it was mean to hit him. He swore naturally, the way I had heard soldiers swear in the Philippines; swearing was a part of him. It was like hitting him for breathing. But it didn’t seem to bother him to be hit.
The horses drank the way they ate. Their sounds made the water seem delicious. We gave half the bucket to Bill and took it away to give the other half to Bob, after which they stood slobbering water and wiggling their lips before returning to grazing while we ate.
Clair and Glennis had carried what amounted to another full meal out in the boiler. There was sliced bread with butter, cheese, a big pot of beef stew, a whole round cake, three quart jars of rhubarb sauce, a large bowl of cookies, and a couple of two-quart jars wrapped thickly in feed sacks—one full of cool milk and the other full of hot coffee.
I thought I would still be full from the two breakfasts and the forenoon lunch but there was an edge of hunger there and I found myself eating right along with Harris and Knute. The food was so good it made my jaws ache to chew.
Neither Clair nor Glennis ate but sat picking at grass and talking softly, in a teasing way. Every once in a while Glennis would laugh softly and blush and Clair would poke her with a finger and laugh.
Knute leaned back and rolled and lit another cigarette when we were done and Harris flopped on the grass and burped.
“Good food,” Knute said to Clair and Glennis by way of a compliment. He seemed about to say more but stopped and watched a hawk swoop low over the new-cut grass and I realized that Knute was always like that; always seemed about to say something but never quite got it out.
“I like field dinners,” Harris said to no one in particular. “Especially when Louie ain’t here. You don’t got to fight so damn hard for food.”
Glennis was too far away to smack him, sitting on the grass watching the horses, but she turned and threw a clump of dirt at him. “Watch your tongue.”
He easily dodged and smiled, and I lay back on the grass at the edge of the field and watched small clouds moving across the sky overhead. A noise off to the side caught my attention and I rolled up to see Clair feeding Buzzer a scrap of meat from the stew pan.
She held it up pinched between her thumb and index finger and Buzzer delicately, with great care, used one needle-point claw in his huge foot to pull it from her fingers and place it into his mouth, the way he had done the mice.
“What kind of cat is he?” I asked.
Knute smiled but said nothing.
“We found a picture in a magazine looks just like him,” Harris said. “What was that, Ma? What kind of cat was it?”
“He’s a lynx,” Clair said. “A big old puppy baby lynx...” Her voice got soft and you could see she wanted to pet Buzzer but she didn’t touch him, and when she didn’t feed him more, he walked away and began hunting the edge of the field looking for more mice.
In a little time Knute shredded his cigarette and put the leftover tobacco back in the sack and stood. The horses watched him, waiting, and he hooked them back up to the mower and sat in the seat and dinner was over.
Harris took the sack of mice and moved to the back of the mower and I followed and the afternoon went that way.
I got seven more mice for myself, Harris about forty, Buzzer six of his own and my other fourteen—he never did fill up. We ate again—Glennis and Clair brought out cake and milk and coffee and meat sandwiches—and then it was evening and we rode the horses back to the barn in time to help with milking. This time Harris took half the time on the separator, which was just as well because I was so tired I could hardly walk.
I vaguely remember eating another huge meal in the evening—watching Louie swallow what seemed like a whole chicken, bones and all—with heaping mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits, and pie covered with whipped fresh cream for dessert. But I was so tired everything was fuzzy and things seemed to blur together.
After supper—what I would have called dinner and what seemed like the tenth meal of the day but was really only the sixth—everybody went into the dining/sitting room and sat in chairs while a clock on the wall ticked, and I went face down on the table and started to sleep. I simply couldn’t keep my eyes open.
“Poor dear,” Clair said. “He’s a little tuckered...”
I felt somebody lift me, smelled Knute’s tobacco, and I was carried upstairs and laid on my bed, fully clothed. I kicked out of my shoes and p
ants, and the events swirled in my head as I lay back in the dark.
I’d been kicked in the testicles, slammed in the head, worked at the separator until my arms seemed about to fall off, narrowly averted disaster with a manic rooster, wrestled commie jap pigs in a sea of pig crap, ridden horses as big as dinosaurs, had a losing relationship with a lynx, eaten eighteen or twenty meals, and helped to capture mice for God-knows-what purposes.
And I’d been there one day.
I tried to open my eyes. (I’d heard Harris come in the room as I flopped back and I needed to know the answer, was dying to know the answer: why did Louie want the mice?) But it was impossible. My eyes didn’t open, a wave of exhaustion roared over me like a soft train and I was gone.
6
Wherein I learn some more physics,
involving parabolic trajectories,
and see the worth of literature
A daily routine evolved in the first week that was to carry me through my entire summer with Harris and the Larsons: up while it was still thick dark, watch Louie feed and try to compete and get a little food, out to help with milking—searching carefully for Ernie on the way—eat again when milking was done, and then get in trouble.
It wasn’t that we tried to get in trouble. Indeed, Harris and I did not think in terms of trouble at all. It’s just that many of the things we wanted to do—well, perhaps all the things we wanted to do—seemed to cause difficulties in some way that we had not expected.
A good example of this theory is the problem that happened because of the Tarzan of the Apes comic book.
Part of my treasures, along with the “dourty peectures,” was a goodly supply of comic books. Some of them were not so good. There were, for instance, two Captain Marvel comics that I didn’t like. But among the better ones—Superman, some good Donald Ducks, and a couple of really good Real War comics—there was my favorite, a Tarzan of the Apes bonus edition with a story about Tarzan in the lost land of dinosaurs, where he trains a triceratops to ride by hitting it on the side of the snout with a stick.
