We slowed down as we realized we might be in some kind of danger. I took a quick look around and saw an ax with its blade buried maybe an inch deep in a chopping block. When I eased the blade out by pumping the ax handle, I noticed a lot of feathers and blood on the block and around it, which maybe meant that Poetry’s father had killed a young rooster there so they could have fried chicken for dinner. Or else maybe it meant that the wild animal we had in our trap had already killed and eaten at least one chicken this very night.
And then, what to my wondering eyes should appear in the circle of my flashlight’s light but something black and white and furry.
“It’s a skunk!” Poetry exclaimed. “We’ve caught a skunk!” With that disgusted remark, he lifted his camera, focused it, and let go with a picture.
“Skunk, nothing,” I disagreed. “If it was a skunk, it’d smell all over the place!”
As quick as Poetry’s camera’s flash, there was silence, except for one still-scared old hen that kept on cackling like a woman on a Sugar Creek party line who didn’t know all the other women had hung up and was going on to finish a story she had started.
One thing for sure, whatever we’d caught wasn’t in either of the steel traps but was inside the wire network of the take-it-easy. In the three-foot circle of my flashlight, two fiery eyes stared back at me, and the black-and-white whatever-it-was crouched as if it was ready to spring.
Then Poetry came to with a snicker and a guffaw, and he exclaimed, “Well, well, well! Now we know the black-and-white truth. Our chicken thief is somebody’s dumb old house cat!”
Hearing my almost best friend say what he said in such a sarcastic way fired my temper a little, because “somebody’s dumb old house cat” was a very special friend of mine. I knew the minute we were within seven feet of the take-it-easy trap that the wildcat we had caught was Mixy herself.
“Of all the dumb things for a cat to do!” I scolded her, as I stooped to open the trap and let her out.
She began to spit at me and to jump and struggle against the bars of her jail as if I was an enemy of some kind and it was my fault she had gotten caught.
While we were getting our black-and-white wildcat out, there was a movement behind us and the sound of a lady’s skirt brushing across the grass.
It was Poetry’s mother in a long green housecoat, coming to see what all the fuss was about. When she saw Mixy, she couldn’t believe her eyes. But as soon as she realized we’d caught the chicken thief—if we had—she said, “I’m going to phone your mother right now and tell her. I promised her I would call just as soon as we caught anything, and in which trap.”
“Mixy isn’t anything,” I objected, “except a dumb old house cat that doesn’t know enough not to go snooping around a wild animal trap. It might be better to wait till morning anyway, because Mom’s been having insomnia the last few nights and she won’t sleep a wink if the phone rings in the middle of the night.”
“Besides,” Poetry chimed in, “you know what happens when a party line phone rings at night. Every mother on the line will wake up and get up and stagger to the phone to eavesdrop, and it wouldn’t be fair to an innocent cat to get gossiped about at midnight, even if the innocent cat is a dumb bunny.”
Poetry’s mother’s mother spirit came to life then, and she began to pet Mixy, who for some reason had become as quiet as a worried mouse and was actually purring in my arms.
“Poor little darling!” Poetry’s mother cooed to our big fat cat. “You’re hungry! I’ll take you into the house and get you some milk.”
“Hungry!” Poetry disagreed. “That cat’s already eaten half a can of sardines!”
I looked at the floor of the trap Mixy’d been caught in, and it was as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.
Well, it seemed we ought to bait the trap again to try to catch the real chicken thief, which we all knew Mixy wasn’t. She had only been wandering around in the neighborhood the way house cats do at night and, smelling the sardines, had walked innocently into our trap.
I hoped it would be a lesson to her not to follow a Collins boy around.
Not having any more sardines, we baited the take-it-easy with a small piece of fresh meat from the Thompsons’ refrigerator. Then, taking a look at the two steel traps under the chicken house window to see if we had caught even a rat in them (we hadn’t), I was ready to give Mixy strict orders to go home and take a long catnap. She always does that after every meal, the way I have to brush my teeth after every meal.
Before I could tell Mixy that, Poetry’s mother all of a sudden made Poetry and me come into the kitchen to eat a slice apiece of blueberry pie. She offered Mixy a little milk in a saucer on the floor, but Mixy wasn’t interested. Instead, she went snooping in the direction of the wastebasket in the corner.
“She smells the empty sardine can,” Poetry’s mother explained. “That cat’s starved for fish. You boys’ll have to go fishing and catch her a sunfish or something tomorrow.” That didn’t sound exactly like something a boy’s mother would say.
Well, there was quite a lot of night left to sleep away, so it seemed a good idea for us to go back to bed. What to do with a fish-hungry cat was the problem, because the two steel traps under the chicken house window were still baited with sardines.
Poetry’s mother said she’d lock up Mixy in their screened porch.
Back in the tent, Poetry and I climbed into our still hot cots. We had started to try to go to sleep when I heard a strange sound outside somewhere.
I was quick out of my cot and looking out the nylon-net opening at the front of the tent. And that’s when we both did hear for sure a sound of something or somebody from the direction of the henhouse. It was the weirdest, middle-of-the-night outdoor sound I’d ever heard. It was a little like a screech owl or maybe a blue jay or a redheaded woodpecker with a bad cold, one that was scared and had a trembling voice.
Out of the tent we went again, slippers on, pajamas flapping in the breeze we were stirring up as we ran, my flashlight making a long, white, cone-shaped hole in the darkness, and Poetry carrying his flash camera, ready to snap a shot of whatever we had caught. It took only a few minutes of dodging shrubbery in their yard before we came to the hedge that separated the lawn from the orchard. Squeezing through a narrow place, we came to where the traps were. But they were as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard—not bare of food but bare of any kind of varmint. We hadn’t caught anything!
Swinging my flash around, I saw that not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
Poetry let out a hissing sigh and said, “What’s going on in our minds, anyway? Are we just hearing things or what?”
On the way back to the tent, we had just reached the opening in the hedge when Poetry stopped in front of me and exclaimed, “There it is again! Down by the mouth of the cave!”
And he was right. Now that the sound didn’t have to come through the walls of a tent, it was as clear as a school bell on a cold frosty morning. And the sound was like that of a howling dog—a long, high-pitched, wailing squall.
I stayed stock-still, glued by my fear of what I might be hearing. I was also beginning to tremble. This was different from hearing a howling dog in the daytime. This was at night! And it wasn’t Dragonfly hearing it, or his superstitious mother. It was I, Bill Collins, Theodore Collins’s first and worst son, who was hearing it—or was I me? Maybe I wasn’t myself at all but somebody else. Or maybe I was back there in my hot cot in the tent asleep, and this was only my subconscious mind sailing off in a sea of dew.
“There he is again!” Poetry cried. “He’s got one of our old hens down by the cave or in a den in the sycamore tree!”
It was exactly the kind of sound a grown-up chicken makes when a boy catches her in his mother’s garden and is carrying her to the fence to throw her back over into the chicken yard. It was also like the sound a young rooster makes when your father is getting ready to put his head on the chopping block so you can have him for di
nner, as though it is scared even worse than half to death.
“Let’s go see if we can save her!” Poetry called back over his shoulder, already on a puffing run toward the cave.
Away we both went, past old Whitey’s tree house and down the sloping barnyard in the direction of where it sounded as if the hen’s dying squawk had come from.
Then Poetry cried out, “Did you see that?”
Yes, I had already seen it—whatever it was. A light above the swamp was going on and off in the trees somewhere. “It’s still on!” I said. I, myself, with my own two wide-awake eyes was seeing it. A bright light as powerful as an extra-strong flashlight was skirting through the heavily leafed trees about as far out in the swamp as the muskrat pond.
“It’s moving!” Poetry cried, his voice trembling. “It’s taking off across the sky!”
“It’s a flying saucer!” Our two voices squawked at the same time. “Dragonfly’s mother was right!”
We were both standing still now. Our fear, like contact glue, was holding our feet fast to the ground.
Not only had there been a light flashing on and off, and not only had there been a light as big as a pitchforkful of alfalfa hay moving among the trees in the swamp, but there had also been a whirring noise, like a motor running—sounding kind of like a squeaking wheel, a dying hen, and a howling dog.
And we had seen it! We had heard it! We were two honest-to-goodness Earth people who had seen a space vehicle of some kind right in Sugar Creek territory!
And now what to do?
“I’ve got it!” Poetry exclaimed. “Let’s go up to Old Man Paddler’s place, where the girl and her father are camped, and tell them, and they’ll put the news in the Indianapolis News, and our pictures and everything! When they ask us if we heard a sound or what the sound sounded like, we’ll tell them it sounded like the squawking of a dying hen.”
We had just started as fast as we could in the direction of the shortcut leading to Old Man Paddler’s place, when we were startled by the sound of something behind us.
I quick whirled around and shone my flashlight in several directions. And then I saw coming toward us, making a beeline for the cave, a furry, fiery-eyed animal. It had a broad head and pointed nose, and as the gray thing swished past the sycamore, I saw that its long tail had black rings around it. It was running pell-mell toward the big ash tree that grew beyond the sycamore. Up that tree, like a scared cat with a neighborhood dog after it, that wild animal went.
“It’s a coon!” Poetry cried. “And there’s a hound after it.”
A big black-and-tan coonhound swept into the circle of my flashlight, getting to the tree just as Ringtail reached the first branch about twenty feet from the ground.
Then it seemed the whole neighborhood came to life. There was a wild bawling and barking and howling as that hound let loose with a happy, excited, and also worried voice, as if to say to whomever he belonged to, “Come and get it! I’ve chased it up a tree for you!”
“It’s Silent Sal!” Poetry exclaimed.
And it was. Circus’s father’s silent trailer, which never let loose a bark or howl or even a whimper when she was trailing the scent of a varmint—until she caught a possum or coon or chased one up a tree. Then it would be like somebody had pulled out all the stops of a giant-sized pipe organ and turned a pack of hounds loose to chase up and down the keyboard.
If we needed any more proof that it was Silent Sal, Circus’s father’s long-nosed, long-voiced black-and-tan hound, we right away had it. Several human beings were running through the woods, making a clomp-clomp-clomping sound with their feet. And then, Circus, Big Jim, and Dragonfly pell-melled themselves toward the ash tree, where Silent Sal was still whooping it up like a pack of savages on the warpath.
10
The minute those three other members of our gang reached the ash tree, Big Jim, who was carrying a powerful electric lantern, turned it on. It sent a long white cone of light up into the trees all around, searching for whatever Silent Sal’s baying voice was telling us was up there somewhere. In only a few seconds the light came to focus on a gray, shining-eyed animal swaying in the branches of the ash tree.
That, my disappointed mind told me, is your flying saucer—Big Jim’s electric lantern! That was what we had seen moving above the muskrat pond, lighting up the treetops, then going off and on again.
There wasn’t any flying saucer or flying cigar or flying boxcar!
But my mind wasn’t going to give up easily. So I came out with “But if there isn’t any saucer or anything, what was that squawking noise we heard up there in the trees?”
It took us only a few minutes of excited talking and explaining to find out what was what and why and how come Circus, Big Jim, and Dragonfly were there with Silent Sal.
“Some varmint has been getting into our chickens almost every night,” Circus began to explain.
Big Jim cut in with “Ours too. Almost every night. So we decided that, whatever it was, if it came snooping around tonight we’d put Silent Sal on its trail.”
Big Jim and Circus had decided it together—they being the biggest members of our gang and not wanting to tell the rest of us their plans, or we’d all have wanted to go, too. “We had enough trouble getting our parents to let us do it,” Big Jim explained. “If we’d asked you guys to come along, we’d have had eight more parents to worry about, with all twelve of them worrying about us.”
“How come you brought Dragonfly along then?” Poetry’s squawky voice asked.
“Dad and Mother don’t know it,” our sneezy little friend explained. “They painted my room yesterday, and I had to sleep in the motel. I picked the unit at the end, closest to the woods.” Maybe you know that the Gilberts own and run the Tall Corn Motel.
I looked at Dragonfly’s pinched face with its crooked nose that turns south at the end, and I decided to ask, “What if your mother gets insomnia tonight and gets up and goes out to see if you’re asleep and all right and finds you gone?”
That question scared him a little, it seemed, because he all of a sudden said, “You shouldn’t have thought of that. Maybe she’s already awake—with all the noise Silent Sal is making.”
Dragonfly had to almost yell what he was saying, because Silent Sal was still sounding like the Sugar Creek High School band when it plays on a cold day at a football game.
“Might as well all go home,” Big Jim decided. “Old Ringtail’s scared enough now to stay out of anybody’s chicken house tonight. Let’s get Dragonfly back into his motel room before his folks come looking for him.”
“What about tomorrow night?” Poetry asked. “That coon’ll forget all about what happened tonight and will be right back stealing and killing chickens. I’m for shooting her and throwing her into the muskrat pond. The turtles can have her for breakfast. Here, give me the rifle.” He reached for the .22 that Big Jim was holding.
The rifle had been pointed away from all of us all the time. It’s a rule of safety never to let a loaded gun be pointed toward anything you don’t want to shoot. If a gun goes off accidentally, somebody or something might get killed.
Big Jim stepped back. “Didn’t you notice how large she was? Look at her. She might be a mother coon expecting a family of babies!”
I took a look at Poetry’s face to see how he would take an answer like that. I knew he was still pretty angry at having two of his mother’s best laying hens killed the night before.
“Besides,” said Big Jim, who seemed to be on the coon’s side, “coons travel in families, hardly ever alone. Old Silent might have trailed only one of them, and if we shoot this one we might kill the one that’s not guilty.”
Forgetting for a few seconds that Little Jim wasn’t with us, it seemed I was expecting his tender heart to make him speak up and say, as he does whenever any chicken-killing varmint has to get killed in the neighborhood, “She wasn’t trying to be mean! She was just hungry!”
Big Jim sent another long bright beam of light
up into the branches of the ash and searched around until its circle focused on the big fat coon. This time it lighted up only the black-ringed tail. The rest of the chicken thief, if this was the chicken thief, was hidden behind the large branch she was on.
Silent Sal, even though being held tightly by her collar by Circus’s strong hands, was finding it as hard to be quiet as a boy does when he has to stay in the house on a rainy day.
“Let’s go,” Big Jim ordered us. “She has a right to live until she’s been proved guilty. If we’d caught her in the act of stealing, it might be different. But it is out of season to hunt coon, and we could get into trouble for hunting and killing one out of season”—something that, up to now, not a one of us had thought to say.
In all the excitement, I’d forgotten for a minute that sound of a dying hen that we’d heard maybe fifteen minutes ago. But a boy can’t forget hearing a sound like that for very long—especially when all of a sudden it comes rasping again, this time from the woods in the direction of Old Man Paddler’s cabin. It was a harsh, grating, long squawk that sent shivers all over me.
“A mountain lion maybe?” Circus suggested. “What do you say, Silent Sal?”
Well, that hound’s black back was already bristling the way a dog’s back does when it is getting acquainted with a strange dog it’s not sure is going to be friendly.
Hearing that ghostly cry again, Poetry said, “Whatever it is, it’s after our chickens again!”
“Ours, you mean,” Circus disagreed. “It came from the direction of our house.”
“It could be ours,” Big Jim put in. “Let’s go find out whose!”
And away we went, not sure of our directions but trying to go toward the sound.
Circus was holding tight to the leash he had snapped on Silent Sal’s collar. He didn’t want her to take off on the trail of the first varmint scent her snuffling nose came across, leaving us maybe not knowing where she was until she treed something.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 8