Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  “It’s the mother bear you have to keep your eyes peeled for, if she has her cubs with her. I pretty nigh got mauled to death once when I accidentally got between a four-hundred-pound black bear and her two young’uns, and she thought I was a-gonna hurt ’em. She swung on me with her powerful paw, knocked me sky-west and crooked. I sure got scratched up aplenty. See that there scar there?”

  Ed whisked off a mitten, pulled up his right sleeve, and showed us two scars, each eight or nine inches long. “If I hadn’t had my knife out and hadn’t managed to jab it into her while she was standin’ over me with her hot breath a-blowin’ in my face, I reckon Marthy’d have been a widow for the last three years.

  “But this ain’t spring, and you boys don’t need to worry none.”

  “Did you kill her just with a hunting knife?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Well now, you shouldn’t of asked me that,” Ed said with a twinkle in his eyes. “It sorta spoils the story. But I reckon as how, now that it’s spoiled, Marthy’d expect me to tell you she saw what was a-goin’ on from the window of the lodge and come a-runnin’ with her .300 Magnum. Ain’t nobody in these here parts can shoot straighter’n Marthy. She’s kinda lost now, runnin’ the store, but the doctor says she’s got to quit trapline runnin’ and buckin’ the weather. That’s why we sold the Snow Goose and moved to town—what town there is.”

  I was still thinking about the long scars on the old-timer’s arm when I asked, “What’d you do with the bear’s skin?” I’d noticed a bearskin rug on the lodge floor when we’d been inside a little while before. I hoped the bear old Ed had knifed and Marthy had shot with her .300 Magnum was the one the rug had been made of.

  “We let the Everards have it when they bought the lodge. Mrs. Everard’s such a dainty little thing, and so delicate, you’d never think she’d go for something like that. But she wanted it so badly, and Marthy and her liked each other so well. Marthy’s got a tender heart ever since we lost our Jerry. She’s got to have something to mother, and she’s spending her heart on the little Everard woman now, her and our grandniece Jeanne.”

  All of a sudden, Ed’s voice choked, and I noticed there were tears in his gray eyes, which he brushed at with his hand, then looked away. When he looked back in our direction, I thought I read a very sad expression in them.

  I knew I had when, a second later, he told us, “Marthy’s had a rough time in life. She’s jolly on the surface, but her heart’s broke. She sort of feels that maybe there isn’t any God anymore, with all her children gone. Freddie left us at thirteen. Little Marion stayed with us only till he was four, and Jerry was twenty-two and goin’ to be married …”

  The old-timer stopped abruptly and shook his head the way Little Jim does sometimes when he has tears in his eyes and wants to get them out without anybody knowing they’ve been there. His tone of voice changed as he said, “Well, I gotta run down the road a piece to Rum River Crossin’. I got a couple traps set for marten about a hundred yards from the last Snow Goose sign. It’s quite a chore wading the snow through the underbrush, but if I could take a look at ’em, I wouldn’t have to do it tomorry, maybe. There’s been an Indian Devil runnin’ that side of the creek, and I have to beat him to the traps, or all there is left when I get there is my traps thrown. Or if there’s been any varmints in ’em, he’s killed ’em and spoiled their pelts or carried them off somewhere and cached them.”

  “What,” I asked, “is an Indian Devil?”

  “A wolverine,” the old-timer told us. “I’ve got a story a mile long to tell you about the one that’s following my line. But I gotta get going now. If you want to go along—but you’d have to wait in the Jeep at the Crossin’. I could get there and back quicker alone …”

  Poetry looked at me with his eyebrows down and a shake of his head, meaning he had a different idea and for us to stay at the lodge till Ed came back.

  “I’ll be back after a while.” Those were the last words we were to hear the old man say for quite a spell. A lot of things were going to happen afore he got back to us’uns.

  I looked out across the snowbound lake, following with my eyes the long row of evergreens all the way out to the shanty, where the fishing was the best and where we could catch some of the big’uns. I was surprised to notice how high the sun still was.

  We wouldn’t have time to go all the way, but we could fish awhile out by the second tree. I could hardly wait. We could have a mess of fish caught and cleaned, and when the gang got there, Poetry could have them sizzling in the pan for supper.

  We’d done a little ice fishing at Sugar Creek on the bayou pond and in a few places on Sugar Creek itself, but not much—only enough to learn a little about how.

  We got our tackle ready, using some we found in the lodge, because ours was with Barry and the gang somewhere back on the highway.

  “We’ll fish till Ed gets back,” Poetry said.

  As soon as we had spudded the right-size hole, we baited our hooks with the worms Mr. Wimbish had shown us and in only a few minutes were hauling in some fine yellow perch.

  Just for fun we made a game of it, and Poetry said, “The next one’ll be Santa Claus himself, a whopper.”

  And it was—a huge perch.

  “My turn next,” I said. “Mine’s going to be a mother bear just come out of hibernation!”

  And just like that—wham! I got a whale of a strike. I felt the line pulling and jerking down under the ice. I knew my line and leader were extrastrong, so I held on, and almost right away there was an even bigger perch flopping on the ice beside me.

  While I was baiting my hook with another half-frozen worm, which acted as lazy as a sleeping bear, Poetry got a strike. I could tell by the excitement on his face that he had a really big one.

  “I’ve got Old Timber himself!” he cried. And before anybody could have said “Jack Robinson Crusoe,” he landed a whopper of a walleye. Boy oh boy! Fishing was really good. Really! Would the gang ever be surprised!

  But after that we didn’t get any bites for a while, so we decided to go back to the lodge. Any minute now, the old-timer might come driving back for us.

  We hadn’t any sooner reached the shore than we were startled by a rabbit springing up and bounding away in a long, leaping gait. A second later, there was a grayish-brown explosion at Poetry’s feet, and a covey of six partridges sailed out in a fan-shaped direction, dropping down farther on in a tangle of weeds and sedge.

  I certainly felt fine. One of the happiest feelings I ever get comes from being outdoors in a woodsy place, studying wildlife signs, breathing fresh, crisp winter air—when it’s not too cold—and any minute expecting to see in the snow a track of some different kind of animal. We’d already seen enough to give Barry a good start on his paper for his class.

  The half-dozen partridges hadn’t any sooner disappeared than I got a sad feeling in my heart, though, the sad feeling and the glad feeling getting mixed up in my mind the way they do sometimes back at Sugar Creek. I was standing and dreaming in the direction the birds had flown and at the same time looking at the chalk-white bark of a friendly little tree in front of me. It was one of my favorite trees back home—a white birch.

  In the summertime at Sugar Creek, there isn’t anything prettier in the whole world of trees. There is a clump of them along the marsh at the edge of a gravelly ridge, and their triangle-shaped dark green leaves are always trembling in the breeze and glistening in the sun as if they are the happiest things in the world. In the fall they are pretty, too, the leaves as yellow as the pages of the goldenrod writing tablet we use at school.

  But in the wintertime, when all the leaves are gone, and all the dark blotches on the trunk just below the branches are coal black, and there isn’t a single leaf left to shimmer in the breezy sunlight—well, a birch tree like the one I was looking at right that minute near the lake at Snow Goose Lodge made me feel very sorry for it. It was too bad, I thought, that there had to be such a thing as freezing weather to kill all th
e leaves, and cold driving winds to blow them from their summer home on the tree and whirl them away into nothing.

  We moseyed along away from the shore, looking for other signs of wildlife, expecting any second we might scare up a snowshoe rabbit or flush another covey of partridges.

  All of a sudden Poetry stopped and exclaimed, “Listen! I hear water running!”

  I stopped and listened and did hear water, like a small stream gurgling. It took us only another minute to find a singing brook, completely covered with snow and ice except for here and there where a patch of dark water hissed and tumbled over rocks.

  “It’s like the branch back at Sugar Creek,” I said. “Water flows under the ice.”

  We followed the stream to its mouth, which was at the lake itself. There was quite a patch of open water there, so clear you could see the bottom.

  We stayed only a few minutes and were wandering on back toward the lodge, both of us feeling fine and glad to be alive, when all of a sudden Poetry’s voice honked into my peace of mind. “William Jasper Collins!” he cried. “Stop dragging my walleye in the snow!”

  I certainly hadn’t realized I was doing it—I was carrying the whole stringer of fish. His interruption was so startling, blasting into my thoughts, that it stirred up my sleeping temper. Without knowing I was going to do it, I gave the stringer a disgusted toss in the direction of the lake, where it landed at the base of the sad little white birch tree.

  The half-dozen perch and the walleye hadn’t any sooner landed than there was a shadow of excited wings from somewhere up in the air. With a harsh, rattling cry, something swooped down toward the stringer of fish and landed with a flapping-winged sizzlety-plop right on them. There was an excited flurry of feathers then and some fast action, and a crested black-and-blue-and-white bird, which looked about twelve inches long, was in the air, flying like a Sugar Creek blue jay straight for his perch high in the dead branches of a cottonwood.

  Poetry came to life in a flurry of temper and angry words. He yelled up at the bird on the bare, gray treetop, “You come back here with that fish! I worked hard to catch that!”

  He scooped up a snowball to throw, but I stopped him, saying, “That’s a kingfisher! Let him have one little fish. He’s hungry!”

  Talk about a lot of ridiculous motions. That kingfisher certainly was going through the most twisted-up contortions you ever saw a bird go through, trying to keep his balance on the branch and at the same time swallow one of our medium-sized perch completely whole.

  Here was more help for Barry. I could tell him about the perch and also what I already knew about kingfishers from having learned it back home. I never in my life saw a saucier bird. The kingfisher is as noisy around his house as a whole neighborhood of robins. A pair of them make their home in the bluff near the Sugar Creek bridge. Most of the time, when the kingfisher isn’t way back in his hole in the bluff, he’s perched on a tree stump above the creek, watching his chance to swoop down into the water for a fish. That is his only food, except for crawfish and frogs and sometimes, when fishing is bad, a few locusts and beetles. And he always tries to swallow completely whole whatever he gets.

  Once, back at Sugar Creek, we’d dug back into a kingfisher’s hole in a sandbank. When we finally found his nest, we saw it was made of small pellets of fish bones and shells of crawfish. After he’d digested the fish, he’d swallowed the bones and shells backward and made a nest of them.

  And talk about a noisy family! The kingfisher and his kingfisher wife and their kingfisher children scream and shriek at each other as if they didn’t have a peaceful thought in their large, long-crested heads.

  Sometimes, when there was a mild, open winter back at Sugar Creek, two or three kingfishers would stay all winter, not bothering to make the long, tiresome migration to a warmer climate where fishing might be better.

  It was easy to see that this saucy bird that had swooped down out of nowhere and stolen one of our perch would be tempted to stay in the North—just as the bears would have a hard time staying asleep in such nice weather. He could probably catch plenty of small fish in the water at the mouth of the little stream.

  Well, it took that clown of a kingfisher only about three minutes to beat that perch into being quiet and to gulp him down. Then he shook his feathers, wiped his sharp, straight, longer-than-his-head bill on the bare dead branch he was on, and swallowed three or four times as if maybe there was a part of the perch’s tail that wasn’t all the way down. A flash of a second later, he took off with a rattling shriek in the direction of a low bank about fifty yards up the lake, where I saw him light and disappear into a hole the size of a rabbit’s burrow

  Poetry picked up our stringer of fish and said, “Come on, let’s get these to the lodge before some other wild animal with wings comes galloping down from the sky and steals all the rest of them!”

  “Don’t begrudge a friendly, lonely fisherman one little fish!” I said.

  “It wasn’t so little!” Poetry exclaimed. “That was my fish! I don’t catch small fish!”

  As we ambled toward the lodge, for a while we pretended to quarrel over whose fish had been stolen. It was getting later fast, and I knew pretty soon it’d be sundown. Ed Wimbish hadn’t come back yet, and the gang would have to step on the gas to get here before dark.

  Our friendly quarrel was interrupted by Poetry letting out a whoop. “There they are! Coming around the bend! Oh boy! Will they ever think I really caught a fish!”

  There was a wild honking of Barry’s car coming from the other side of the cache where we’d first seen Old Timber. In minutes they were swinging around the bend in the trail and coming to a stop in a flurry of snow not more than ten feet from the twin pines at the door of the lodge.

  Quicker than anything the car doors were open, and what looked like a whole swarm of boys came catapulting out.

  Barry Boyland was not only going to get a chance to study wildlife in the frozen North but was going to have to do something about taming down some of it—six two-legged animals that exploded into the wildest lot of whoops and hollers and actions you ever heard six boys explode into in your life!

  “Look here!” Dragonfly cried, calling from over near the outdoor cache, where a little more than two hours ago Poetry and I had seen Old Timber, maybe the biggest wolf there ever was. “Here’s a bear’s tracks! There’s a bear around here somewhere!”

  Poetry looked at me and winked and kept still, and I winked back at him and kept still, waiting to see what the rest of the gang would say when they saw the huge doglike tracks in the snow.

  Circus got to where Dragonfly was first and let out an explosive groan. “Dog tracks!” he exclaimed. “Somebody’s big hound’s been around here.”

  Well, there wasn’t any reason we shouldn’t tell the rest of the gang what had really made the tracks, so Poetry and I helped each other tell the exciting story of how, while we had been in the Jeep with Ed Wimbish, we had seen the biggest wolf there ever was in “these here parts.” And that Ed didn’t want anybody to shoot him, because he and Marthy wanted to outsmart him by catching him in a trap.

  I looked around at all the faces of the gang to see if anybody was going to be afraid of the big bad wolf, and it looked as if quite a few of us were—nearly all of us, in fact, except maybe Theodore Collins’s only son, who was only a little bit worried. I was wondering, though, if Ed Wimbish was right and that wolves were cowards and didn’t like to eat people and wouldn’t unless they were starved half to death.

  The gang was in a mischievous mood for a while, and different ones of us quoted to the rest of us some of the lines of an old story we’d had in one of our Sugar Creek School readers, “The Old Wolf and the Three Little Pigs.”

  “Little pig! Little pig! Let me come in!” Poetry cried and raced over to the oak door of the Snow Goose and began to pound on it.

  Circus called back in what he tried to make sound like a pig’s squealing voice, saying, “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-ch
in!”

  With that, Little Jim piped up in the best growl he could manage, “Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in.”

  Barry broke into our fun almost right away to say, “How about all of you huffing and puffing on that rick of fireplace wood over there so we’ll be sure to have enough for tonight and tomorrow.”

  In a little while we were huffing and puffing louder than we needed to, carrying logs of oak and ash and pine and balm of Gilead and stacking them in a large stack in the fuel room of the lodge.

  There was a lot of excitement over the string offish Poetry and I had caught, and most of the gang wanted to go out onto the lake right away to catch some more. But because it was already twilight, Barry said, “No. We’d better clean the few we have and make our supper.”

  Tomorrow would be the big day—the actual beginning of our vacation, I thought—not knowing that the first exciting experience would start even sooner.

  Evening came in a hurry, and we all scrambled around, getting supper and laughing and talking and helping Barry and ourselves decide which bunks were to be whose and getting our luggage unpacked. Boy oh boy! A winter vacation studying wildlife in the frozen North!

  I was glad to notice Barry’s rifle was in the corner, where it would be handy in case some of the wildlife we had come up to study decided it wanted to see how good a boy would taste for breakfast or dinner or supper or a midnight snack.

  Poetry and I were busy at the sink by the iron pump when, all of a sudden, Dragonfly broke into the half silence with a hissing exclamation, saying, “Listen, everybody! There’s something scratching at the door!”

  I started, my fish scaler in my right hand. My hair began to crawl under my hat, which, even though we were inside the lodge, was still on. There was something at the door. Then I heard something else—an animal voice like a wildcat’s growl.

  My mind’s eye visualized a brownish-gray bobtailed lynx, which I’d read there were in the North country. In fact, I’d read as much as I could in our school library and in the Collins library upstairs in our Sugar Creek house about all the different kinds of wildlife up here. I wanted to be as much help to Barry as possible during our vacation.