“My mother has taught me always to obey my father,” I said.
It wasn’t more than three minutes before I was started on the way to my favorite sport, my cane fishing pole in one hand and the can of worms in the other, running a barefoot-boy race toward the house, where I had to phone Poetry to see if he could go with me.
I stormed into the house and was on our party-line phone before Mom, who was upstairs doing something or other, realized what was going on.
Poetry’s mother answered, and I quickly asked if I could talk to Poetry. It was very important, I told her.
“Sorry,” she said, “but he’s down at the creek somewhere. He’s trying to catch a few fish for our supper.”
“Thank you very much,” I said politely and hung up quick.
Then I was outdoors and racing through the orchard toward Poetry’s dad’s woods and the mouth of the little branch that winds a sunshiny way through it to the place where it empties into Sugar Creek and where the sunfish always are, if there are any.
I might even run into some kind of exciting adventure before I get back, I thought as I flew along. When you are with mischievous, detective-minded Poetry, you never can tell when your innocent fun is going to turn into a hair-raising experience of some kind, as it has done quite a few times in my life.
Over the last fence and through the woods I went, feeling as fine as anything, better even than the way a certain poet whose poem we had had to memorize in school felt when he wrote, “I know a place where the sun is like gold, and the cherry blooms burst with snow, and down underneath is the loveliest nook where the four-leaf clovers grow.”
I was smelling the sweet smell of wild plum blossoms right that minute, and the sun glinting on the water of the riffle of the branch toward which I was racing was like live silver hurrying on its way to the creek. Poetry and I wouldn’t need any four-leaf clovers to help us have good luck. I was sure of it as I dashed down the hill on one of about thirty-seven paths made by boys’ bare feet that crossed and crisscrossed the countryside everywhere.
It certainly felt fine to be free from work for a while. But I never dreamed that, while Poetry and I were in the middle of some of the best luck we had ever had, we’d be interrupted by one of the most nonsensical experiences.
I didn’t have any idea, either, that before sundown that day I’d get my temper all stirred up by the beginning of a series of adventures that would be different from any we had ever had—and that, before the summer was half through, I’d really need some of the information I had read in Dad’s new book, which he had on the shelf of the tool cabinet by the north window of our barn, named What to Do Before the Doctor Arrives.
2
Poetry was at the mouth of the branch before I was, and he already had almost three fish. He was sitting on a root at the base of a big sycamore tree with his cane pole in both hands, his face tense, and his eyes focused on his line, which was hanging loose on the end of his pole about fifteen feet out in the lazy water. He hardly looked at me when I showed up in the path that runs from the little bridge to the mouth of the branch. He just half glanced back over his shoulder, scowled, and shook his head, meaning to keep still as he might be getting a bite.
“You caught any?” I whispered. He whispered back, “Sh!” holding up three fingers to show me how many.
I looked down at the edge of the water to see if he had a stringer there and to see what kind he had. But I couldn’t see a single fish. The stringer was still coiled up beside him on the ground.
As quickly and as quietly as I could, except for breathing hard from running, I baited my hook as I whispered, looking at the empty stringer, “I thought you said you had three.”
“Not three,” he answered. “Just almost three.”
My line was out right away, and my red-and-white bobber was in the middle of a small circle of widening waves it had just made when it landed not more than five feet from Poetry’s bottle-cork bobber. On the hook on the end of my line were six long fishing worms, each of them dangling. I knew if they were doing what ordinary fishing worms do on a hook, they were down there near the bottom of the creek, twisting and squirming and wrapping themselves around the shank of the hook like the arms and legs of six boys on the ground in one tangled-up pile in a football game.
Saying “almost three” was silly, and I said so to Poetry, who answered with another shush, adding, “Just as soon as I get this one and two more, I’ll have three.”
It was supposed to be a joke, so Poetry laughed. Then he stopped quick as his bobber started moving around in a circle, then dived under and stayed under. His line went tight, and wham! Poetry set the hook, and I could see he really had something.
Wham again out there! And this time it was my line. My bright red-and-white bobber made a plunking noise as it smacked the water and shot under just as my line went tight. The two of us let out yells, each of us saying, “I’ve got a fish!”
And we had. Really had, I mean. I had never felt such a heavy weight on my line in Sugar Creek. Why, this fish felt as if it was as big as one of Old Addie’s piglets, and it kept running wild down under the water, making me actually need all the strength of my powerful biceps as I held on for dear life.
“Get your line out of my way,” Poetry ordered, “or we’ll get them crossed and lose both of them!”
Because he was right next to the branch, I knew he couldn’t go more than four feet in his direction without having to get into hip-deep water and getting all wet. But I could go left down the creek and probably land my fish there.
So I worked my way along the slippery bank as fast as I could, without stumbling and without letting that monster fish of some kind get a slack line. In a few seconds I was the whole length of a cane pole from where Poetry, on his bare feet, was struggling to land his own fish.
Neither of us had reels on our poles, but we were trying to do what you generally do with a fish when you have just a cane pole and only a line.
“I’m getting mine!” Poetry cried happily. “He’s coming!”
“So am I!” I cried back.
A second later a great big yellow-stomached, brown-backed, bullhead fish, a foot long and with horns on his head, came struggling up through the excited water, battling against my biceps and stirring up a lot of new waves and foam. If any other fish had been around, they’d have been scared half to death.
And then I got a sickening surprise as Poetry shouted, “Hey, you! You’ve got your line wrapped around mine!”
What a letdown! I was disgusted. “It’s your fault!” I cried to my best friend. “If your old fish hadn’t made a beeline for mine, he wouldn’t have gotten all tangled up in it.”
Well, there wasn’t anything I could do but help Poetry pull in his fish. In another minute, I thought, we’d land him together, and then it’d be fifteen minutes of wasted time while we untangled our lines before we could start fishing again.
And all for a silly bullhead or catfish. It was probably a catfish, which is in the same family as a bullhead, anyway. At least I, Bill Collins, hadn’t wasted my perfectly wonderful, juicy-tasting six-wormed bait on a slimy bullpout. That is another name for the dumbest-looking kind of fish that lives in Sugar Creek.
In another minute, sure enough, we had landed it, and it was a whopper! Boy oh boy! We swung him away back up onto the bank about fifteen feet from the water’s edge and into the tall weeds and bushes behind us. And then both of us went back to see how big he really was and to get our lines untangled.
Talk about a surprise! What to my wondering eyes should appear but—
“Hey!” I cried excitedly. “He’s on my hook! He’s my fish! It was your dumb old line that got tangled up and wrapped itself around mine!”
“It was not! He’s on my hook!” my best friend thundered back at me. “It’s your dumb old line that—”
Poetry stopped short of finishing what he had started to say and exclaimed, “Well, for land’s sake. Look, would you!”
&
nbsp; I had already seen. That giant-headed bullhead or catfish had both hooks in his huge mouth, and his beady black eyes were glaring at us as much as to say, “It’s both your faults! You tricked me!”
And we were both right. We had both caught a fish, maybe the biggest one there ever was in Sugar Creek. Boy oh boy! Our lines were entangled plenty, but nobody was to blame.
That is, I thought nobody was, but Poetry for some reason was stubborn about it. “My bobber went under first! He took my bait first!”
I looked at the huge mouth and remembered how hard it was to clean a bullhead. In a second I had my knife out of my pocket and had cut off my line right where it entered the cavernous mouth, saying cheerfully, “OK, pal, he struck your line first. He’s your fish. I’ll see if I can catch another. You untangle the lines while I get started.”
I quickly snipped off the other end of my line at the end of the pole where I had it tied and in a jiffy was on my way out of the bushes, hurrying toward the creek and taking another line out of my pocket as I went. Let him be selfish, I thought. Let him have his old fish. Let him untangle the lines himself.
And right then is where we ran into something else we had to untangle, and it took both of us to do it.
Like the sound of a hippopotamus running or something as big, a noise sounded in the bushes and tall weeds behind us. Smashety-crashety-swishety.
What on earth! It was coming straight toward us, and I could imagine it to be as big as a circus elephant—and as dangerous, if you happened to be in the way while it was charging toward you!
“Look out!” Poetry yelled behind me. “Get out of the way, or you’ll get crushed under her feet!”
I looked out, and I jumped out of the way of something as long and as tall and as wide as I had always imagined a rhinoceros would be if it was like the ones I’d seen in the animal picture book I had in my library in my upstairs room.
And its color was blue! Blue, imagine! And it had horns and wild eyes and was crashing through the underbrush as if there wasn’t any there.
Poetry was on the ground by the catfish or bullhead, whichever it was, and was all tangled up in the lines. And all I had to defend him with—because he couldn’t get up—was my lineless cane pole. I quickly whirled around and started yelling in the direction of the horned wild animal. I rushed toward it and screamed for it to stop.
If it didn’t stop, it would charge feetfirst through the underbrush into the little tangle of weeds and shrubs where Poetry, my best friend, was down and couldn’t get untangled in time to save himself.
It was a tense minute, and it didn’t make any difference whose fishing worms had caught whose fish. I had to save Poetry. I still had my straw hat on, and I started waving it as I yelled.
And then the animal stopped and stood stock-still. I saw its face as clearly as anything. What I was seeing didn’t seem possible, but I was seeing it, anyway. It was a wild-eyed, scared cow. A skinny, half-starved-looking blue cow!
She saw me at the same time I saw her, and she was probably as surprised at seeing a boy with red hair on the top of his head as I was in seeing a blue-haired cow. She whirled, snorted, raised her tail up over her back, swerved to the right, and charged toward the branch, not stopping till she had landed out in the middle of it in water up to her stomach.
And then I saw a very round boy with a long stick in one hand, puffing down the incline near the bridge and hurrying toward us. Seeing me, he started yelling, “You leave my cow alone! Don’t you dare hit her with that old fish.”
And then I knew who it was.
I cried out to Poetry, “It’s Shorty Long!”
He was the new boy who had moved into our neighborhood one winter and who had caused a whole lot of trouble for our gang. But then his folks had moved again, and we hadn’t heard from him since.
What was he doing in our territory again? Had his folks moved back? I certainly hoped not. He had almost divided our gang by getting Dragonfly, our pop-eyed member, on his side and teaching him some filthy-minded things a decent boy doesn’t care to know.
Imagine that! Shorty was the only person in the world who was as hard to get along with as my city cousin, Wally Sensenbrenner, who had been to visit us with his nonsensical copper-colored dog and had upset the whole neighborhood. Shorty was just as bad, or worse, and he had brought with him a blue cow! Blue, mind you! It didn’t make sense!
Also, I could tell from just one look at that wild-eyed quadruped that she wouldn’t have any respect for boundaries of any kind. And most any farmer in the Sugar Creek territory could expect to wake any morning, or maybe any midnight, and find her in his cornfield or pasture or orchard or strawberry patch. If she didn’t know any more than to come charging into the privacy of a boy’s favorite fishing place and then, when she got stopped, to plunge horns first out into the branch-But I didn’t have time to do any more worrying about what she might do in the future, because right that second Shorty was after her, trying to round her up so that he could get her back to the road.
And a second later, she started on a wild, splashing run up the middle of the branch toward the bridge.
“Crazy old dumb bunny!” Shorty’s squawky voice cried after her and also toward us, maybe to get our sympathy. “She absolutely refuses to cross that bridge! She’s scared to death of it. And I’ve got to get her home. You guys come help me!”
“Where’s home?” I called to him.
He called back, “First house past Dragonfly’s.”
In the next few fast-flying seconds, I was remembering the first time I had met Shorty Long. It was in the wintertime, and he had accidentally run face first into a snowball I had made and thrown with all my might toward the corner of our barn. I didn’t know he was going to come around the corner just in time to get squished with it.
There had been a rough-and-tumble fight in a snowdrift right after that, till we had gotten well enough acquainted to stop fighting, which I was glad to do. I had just had the wind knocked out of me and was struggling to get out of that snowdrift I had plunged headfirst into.
While I was gasping for breath because of having had the wind knocked out of me and from being smothered in the snowdrift, Mom had come out the back door of our house just in time to invite all of us in to have a piece of blackberry pie, which she had just that minute taken out of the oven.
Well, a boy in trouble is a boy in trouble, so it seemed I ought to try to help Shorty. I left Poetry to untangle himself from his horned, yellow-stomached bullhead, while I started off after Shorty and his horned, blue-backed cow to help him chase her back up to the road and across the bridge.
But my first impression about her disposition was right. She was wild. She was in shallower water now, and she kept on right in it, in spite of my chasing along the shore after her and prodding her with my fishing pole and ordering her to get out of the water and head toward the road, up the ditch, and onto the bridge.
Maybe she heard the word bridge, though, because at last she made a splashing beeline for it—not up to the road to go across it but straight up the branch to it. Then she went under the bridge, where I knew the water was deeper and where many a time I’d seen hundreds of chubs and silversides and smaller minnows playing in the riffle.
“We’ll get her now!” Shorty puffed behind me. “There’s a fence under there on the other side. If I can catch her by the halter, we’ll lead her across if we have to drag her.”
But old bossy had different ideas. That old fence on the other side, which had been a nuisance to us boys many a time when we had wanted to wade around under the bridge, and which had kept all the livestock that pastured in the woods from getting through, was just like so much spider web to her.
She charged under the bridge, splashing water all over herself and everywhere, and ignored the fence as if it wasn’t there—which it wasn’t after she hit it head-on. In a few wire-squeaking seconds she was running like a wild thing up the steep bank and out into the woods I had come through just
a little while ago myself.
Whew! And for land’s sakes! If I had been on the comics page of the newspaper that comes every day to Theodore Collins’s mailbox, I would have had question marks and exclamation points shooting out of my head.
Just then I heard a woman’s voice coming from the direction of my house, quavering out across our orchard and through the woods. I knew it was Mom’s voice calling me to come home. In fact, it was the same kind of call I’d heard a thousand times around our farm when I was quite a way from the house and it was time to eat.
I looked at my watch to see if it was supper-time, then I looked at the sun to see if my watch was right. At the same time I noticed an empty feeling in my stomach that made it seem that was what time it really was. Supper was ready, and Mom wouldn’t get to have fish fillets at all—not even fried bullhead.
I looked through the arch of the bridge I was now under and at the broken fence. The post it had been fastened to at one end was floating in the water. The current of the riffle was pulling it downstream toward me and toward the creek.
And then, Shorty, instead of appreciating that I had left off what I had been in the middle of doing, which was putting a new fishing line on my pole so that I could throw it out and catch another fish—this one probably the biggest sunfish that ever lived in Sugar Creek-well, Shorty was mad at me for trying to help him.
“Look at her go!” he cried angrily from his dry standing place up on the bank. “What’d you get her all excited for? You scared her into breaking down somebody’s fence, and my father will have to pay for it, and now I never will catch her!”
Such appreciation!
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 48