Right out in the middle and also up and down the edge of the bayou were some cute three-foot-high brown houses shaped like Eskimo igloos, which the muskrats used for homes.
When it was my turn to use the binoculars, I focused them on a moving V-shaped trail of water out in the middle of the bayou. There a little blunt-headed muskrat, which I knew had webbed hind feet, went swimming along from one igloo-shaped house to another. He was probably using his flat tail for a rudder to help him swim and to steer his body in the direction he wanted to go.
I got to thinking how the One who had created all the wild things around Sugar Creek had made them exactly right for the kind of life they had to live. And it seemed wonderful that He had made so many different kinds of animals for a boy to enjoy watching and to help make him glad to be alive—which I was most of the time.
Pretty soon it would be winter, I thought, and that cute little quadruped would really need his fur coat, especially if he was going to swim around under the ice. The bayou always freezes over in the wintertime. I also was thinking how the little muskrat children could go in swimming anytime they wanted to and could get their clothes all wet and their parents wouldn’t care. And they could dive into their houses from outdoors without having to wipe their feet or dry them on a mat. What fun it might be to be a muskrat!
But I was glad I wasn’t one, because hunters, and especially trappers, catch them in the fall and early winter and sell their fur. I was even thinking a kind of silly thought—there was hardly a fur coat worn around Sugar Creek that some friendly little blunt-headed, flat-tailed, web-footed muskrat hadn’t worn first, just as I had worn an unfinished woman’s dress while standing on a chair in the living room of our house.
I didn’t like to think of such a sad thing happening to the cute muskrat I was watching. But when I remembered what a large family Circus’s dad had and how hard it was for him to make a living, it seemed all right for him and Circus to make a little extra money that way so that Circus and all six of his many sisters could have nice enough clothes to wear to Sunday school. They all went every Sunday now that Circus’s dad had given his heart to God.
It was a lazy autumn day, and for a while I forgot about watching muskrats and just let myself relax in the warm Indian summer sun. It felt good to be resting after my two weeks of hard work helping Mom make a dress for Little Tom Till’s mother to wear to the banquet tomorrow night.
That is one of the things I like to do almost better than anything else—lie on a nice bed of long, mashed-down bluegrass and, looking up, watch what is going on in the trees or in the sky. Sometimes I imagine myself to be a bird and I fly all around wherever I want to. Sometimes I am a leaf like the red-and-yellow one that right that minute I saw let go of the twig it had been fastened onto all summer and start on an end-over-end tumble toward the ground, where most of the little leaf friends it had laughed and played with all summer already were. It would have been lonesome staying up there all alone all winter, which once in a while a leaf does—not even letting go when the wind blows hardest of all.
Just thinking that made me wish it was a hot summer day, instead of a warm autumn one, and we could go in swimming once more before Sugar Creek would freeze over and would have a cold, white face all winter. As much as I liked snowballing and skating and coasting and the long winter evenings by the big heating stove at our house, when Mom or Dad and I would play checkers or all three of us crack walnuts or make and eat popcorn or maybe Mom would sit at the organ and play and sing a few songs—and the gang in the daytime would have fun playing in the snow—still, I liked the summers best and hated to think of how soon winter would be really here.
Even though my thoughts were half sad, I liked to think them, and I didn’t like to have anybody interrupt them. So I was startled into being half mad when all of a sudden there was a sharp hissing behind me.
It was Dragonfly saying, “Psst.” That’s just what he always says when he sees or hears something unusual before the rest of us do.
Sometimes what Dragonfly sees or hears first is important, and sometimes it isn’t. But this time it was really important—more than anything he had hissed about in a long time.
“See,” he whispered excitedly, “somebody’s coming up the bayou.”
I quickly looked and saw a rough-looking man or boy—I couldn’t tell which—wearing a coonskin cap and an old brown coat that was the color of the muskrat igloos. I could tell, from remembering the kind of hunting coat Dad wears sometimes, that it would have a blood-proof game pocket in it, especially made for storing away anything the hunter had shot or caught in a trap, so that he wouldn’t get the rest of his clothes soiled.
The man or boy was carrying a rifle and was walking stealthily along the other side of the bayou, peering into every place that looked as if it might be cover for quail or rabbits. “Cover,” as any hunter or farm boy knows, is a thicket or underbrush or anything else that shelters “game,” which around Sugar Creek generally means rabbits or quail or raccoon or possum or fox or muskrat or squirrel or bobcat or wolf or even bear.
The short, chubby man or boy was holding his gun in readiness so that, if he found any animal, he could shoot quick. Then all of a sudden he stopped—not more than six feet from the water’s edge—and stooped to study the ground.
From behind me Poetry whispered. “He’s looking for muskrat signs, I’ll bet you.”
I focused my binoculars on him. Right that minute he stood his gun against the trunk of an old willow tree. Then he stooped low at the water’s edge, reached out with his right bare hand, and plunged it under the water. Before I could have said “Jack Robinson Crusoe,” his hand came back up with a long, slender forked stick in it. And what I saw made me gasp. Dangling on the end of the stick was a chain, and on the chain was—
“Hey!” I screamed under my breath to Dragonfly and Poetry. “He’s got a muskrat, and it’s in Circus’s trap!”
“Let me look,” Dragonfly begged, tugging at my sleeve to get me to give him the binoculars. But I wouldn’t, because right that second I was looking at the little brown-furred animal caught in the jaws of the trap. It was a muskrat all right, and it was still alive!
It hurt my heart to see the hunter kill it and shove it into his hunter’s coat. But he did. Then he tossed the trap back into the water again.
And right then is when Dragonfly sneezed the way he sneezes sometimes when he doesn’t try to control his sneeze. It was like a small torpedo exploding. “Ker-choo!” His sneeze was almost loud enough to be heard as far away as the Sugar Creek bridge.
When that “ker-choo” exploded into the quiet Indian summer air, it was as if the hunter himself was a rabbit hiding in a brush pile and somebody had shot at him and missed. He quickly looked around in a circle of directions. Then he made a dive for his gun, leaning against the willow. But he stumbled over something and lost his balance. He grabbed for an overhanging branch but missed, and the branch brushed against his coonskin cap and knocked it off onto the marshy ground where it got accidentally stepped on with the hunter’s wet boots.
I could imagine how mad that must have made him. A second later he scooped up the cap and shook off the water and whatever else was on it. Then he grabbed his gun, and, even before he got his cap on, he disappeared in the thicket of small trees and bushes that border the edge of Dragonfly’s dad’s cornfield, a narrow strip of bottomland between the bayou and Sugar Creek itself.
4
What do you do when you have been watching what looks like an innocent person hunting rabbits or quail and all of a sudden he quickly stoops, takes a muskrat out of somebody else’s trap, and stuffs it into the pocket of his hunter’s coat! And then, when your crooked-nosed friend right beside you sneezes, that innocent-looking hunter jumps like a scared rabbit, makes a dive for his gun, stumbles over himself and falls down, makes another dive in the direction of a thicket of bushes and small trees, and disappears!
For a second, the three of us—spindle-legged,
noisy-nosed Dragonfly; barrel-shaped, detective-minded Poetry; and redheaded me—stared at each other with startled faces. And almost at the same time, all three of us said our thoughts out loud, which were, “What on earth?”
We argued for maybe five minutes, trying to decide what to do. Not a one of us was brave enough or foolish enough to take out after a man with a gun who was mean enough to steal a muskrat out of a boy’s trap.
“Let’s just follow him before he gets too far away and see where he goes,” Poetry said. He started down along the rail fence. “Come on!” he cried back to us.
And then we heard a noise on our side of the bayou, coming from the direction of the Collins house. It sounded like an animal of some kind, running. When I looked, I saw one of Circus’s dad’s big hounds, which I recognized as old Blue Jay himself. He was a genuine bluetick—one of the best coonhounds in all the county.
When Blue Jay and Mr. Browne’s other dog, old Black and Tan, were on a coon trail at night, it sounded like a half-dozen excited pipe organs galloping through the woods and along the creek.
A moment later we saw Circus himself. “Hey, there, you guys,” he called. “That you, Bill?”
“You see me, don’t you?”
“Sure,” he said, “I see you, but I thought you got hurt. I heard you had an accident.”
Then Circus changed the subject by saying, “You guys want to help me follow my trapline? I had to work—didn’t get a chance to do it this morning,” which I knew was generally the time Circus or his dad went to look at their traps.
“You won’t need to look on the other side of the bayou,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
Poetry answered, “Somebody has already been there.”
In a fast, excited-talking minute, the three of us were telling him what we had seen happen with our own eyes.
Before we were half finished, I saw a fiery look come into Circus’s eyes, a look I hadn’t seen there in a long time. It was the same kind of fire I had seen in them once when his father had been drunk and Circus was mad at the people who made and sold and advertised the whiskey and other stuff that make people drunk. I never will forget how he doubled up his fists and with a trembling voice said savagely, “I wish they would just once take a picture of my dad when he is drunk and looking like he did tonight and put that in their old papers and magazines! I bet that wouldn’t make anybody want to buy any!” Circus had looked so fierce for a minute and also so sad that it had scared me, but I was also proud of him for getting mad at something like that.
While we finished telling him what we had seen happen on the other side of the bayou, the muscles of Circus’s jaws were tensing and relaxing, tensing and relaxing, and I knew he had his teeth shut tight and was really mad inside.
“Which way did he go?” Circus asked.
“Toward the creek, I think.”
“Let’s follow his tracks and see who he was,” Circus said and started off in a hurry toward the spring and the path that would lead across a small trickling stream and up the other side of the bayou, with us following.
Dragonfly showed that, even with his toy cowboy gun and lariat, he wasn’t as brave as he had sounded a half hour before when he came whooping it up toward Poetry and me lying in our leaf pile. “He’s g–g–got a gun,” he stammered.
I felt sorry for Dragonfly for being so scared, and yet, for some reason, I didn’t feel very brave myself. In fact, the very thought of our trailing a man who was mean enough to steal, and who also had a gun, sent cold chills chasing each other up and down my spine.
“We’ll just sort of stroll along the other side of the bayou like we didn’t know anything,” Circus said. “Then we’ll study his tracks and follow them. Here, Jay,” he called his long-nosed, long-bodied, long-eared hound, “come here.” He ordered him to heel—meaning to follow close behind him, which a dog will do if he is well trained. And right away that beautiful bluetick coonhound proved he was.
“How come?” Dragonfly asked.
Circus explained, “Never let a dog follow a trapline with you unless you can keep him from getting close to where you set your traps. Fur-bearing animals are scared of dogs and won’t go anywhere near your traps if a dog has been there. They have a keen sense of smell.”
With my heart pounding with excitement at what might be just ahead of us, I followed Circus and old Jay on the narrow footpath that skirts the other side of the bayou. Dragonfly and Poetry trailed behind, and every second all of us were getting closer and closer to the place where we had last seen the hunter with the coonskin cap and the igloo-colored coat.
I just knew we were going to run into some exciting adventure, and I was glad Little Jim wasn’t with us. He was pretty little to be getting into what probably would be a dangerous experience. I did wish Big Jim were along though, in case we had to fight our way out of something.
In only a very few minutes we reached the overhanging willow, against the trunk of which the man had stood his gun. And boy oh boy! Old Jay, who had been trotting lazily along beside Circus in the path—and acting as if he didn’t care whether he was alive, because he was probably thinking there wasn’t a coon within a mile of that part of the neighborhood—old Jay all of a sudden began to sniff the air and whine and whimper and to become the most excited dog you ever saw.
When we reached the place where the short, chunky man had been standing when he took the muskrat out of the trap, the coon-hound stopped and sniffed and shoved his nose into the man’s shoe track and all around it. Then he lifted his head about a foot off the ground and let out a long, mournful bawl like the kind he makes at night when he has struck a red-hot coon trail.
Without stopping to wait for orders from Circus, he started on a long-legged dash into the thicket where we had last seen the man himself.
Boy oh boy! What on earth? I wondered.
When Blue Jay shot up that little incline and into and through the thicket that edged the bayou, it could only mean one thing—he being a coon dog—and that was that there had been a raccoon here and he smelled it. It had set him as wild as the smell of a skilletful of raw fried potatoes would set a hungry farm boy at six o’clock in the evening when he hasn’t had anything to eat since noon.
“It’s a coon!” Circus cried, and the fire that had been in his eyes, ever since we told him about somebody’s stealing a muskrat out of his trap, changed into a coon hunter’s excitement.
And away he and the rest of us went—pell-mell, helter-skelter, lickety-sizzle into and through the thicket and out across Dragonfly’s dad’s cornfield, following the excited music old Jay’s voice was making. Already the hound was as far as the creek and racing along the bank as fast as his nose could take him.
“Coons don’t run around in the daytime,” Poetry panted behind us.
Circus said, “Not most of the time but sometimes. Hurry up, you guys!”
And we hurried up—running and panting and dodging around chokecherry shrubs and elderberry bushes and marsh rosebushes and driftwood that had been left when the creek overflowed last spring. And all the time my blood was racing in my veins. My half-happy heart was pumping it faster than our old iron pitcher pump can pump water at our house.
For a while the chase was almost like a night chase when Jay and Black and Tan are whooping it up on a hot trail ahead of us. Down the creek we went, past the spring, and up a little incline skirting the edge of the hill.
At the rail fence that runs along the east side of the north road, old Jay’s one-hundred-pound body shot up and over as if he was light as a feather. He quickly found the trail on the other side, crossed the gravel road, raced up the ditch, leaped over the other fence, and went on and on and still on.
We were racing after him—falling down, getting up, panting and sweating and yelling to each other in short excited sentences, saying we bet we were trailing one of the biggest coons that ever lived in the county anywhere.
“He’s headed for the swamp!” Circus exclaimed.
It looked as if he was right, because by then Blue Jay was so far ahead we couldn’t see him anymore.
A little later, though, we heard his long, musical howl change, and he began making an entirely different sound. Circus, who was maybe twenty-five feet ahead of the rest of us, cried back over his shoulder, “He’s treed! He’s got him up a tree! Come on, let’s get there quick!”
I was already running so fast I couldn’t see straight, which is why right that minute I accidentally ran into a colony of Canada thistles—of which there were about thirteen three-foot-tall, fierce-looking, autumn-browned, many-stemmed stalks. Each stalk had maybe a hundred dry, sharp prickles on it—and a lot of the prickles pierced through my epidermis and into me. That made me yell even louder than I had when I had fallen off the chair in our living room an hour or two before and some very ordinary straight pins had barely scratched me.
Poetry, who had seen the colony of thistles before I had and had swerved around it, saw me go down. It seemed to remind him of a line of the poem “The Night Before Christmas.” He quoted it: “And away they all flew like the down of a thistle”—“they” meaning Santa Claus’s reindeer as they went galloping through the sky to somebody else’s chimney.
While I was untangling myself and getting to my feet in as fast a careful hurry as I could, I managed to mumble a grumpy answer to Poetry. “You mean, ‘Away Bill Collins went down-stumbling over a thistle.’”
In a moment, Poetry, Dragonfly, and I were racing on again, trying to catch up with Circus, all of us hurrying toward the place where, away up ahead of us, old Jay’s voice was whooping it up under a tree.
In my mind’s eye, I was already at the base of some kind of tree and was seeing way up in the crotch of a limb a brownish gray raccoon with black patches of fur on its cheeks and a bushy tail with six or seven dark brown or black rings around it—which is why a raccoon is sometimes called a ringtail.
I had been on many a coon chase at night but never in the daytime. I thought how wonderful it would be to help catch a live coon and how Circus could have its fur to sell to help his dad make a living for his big family of many sisters and one boy.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 40