“I commend you,” I said to her as I caught her eye just above a little tuft of what looked like bluegrass. “I wish you the best of success.”
Then I stepped carefully back and went on to see how a mother robin was getting along. Her mud-lined nest of dry grass and twigs was in the crotch of an elm tree near a big patch of mayapples with large, spreading, shining, light green leaves. But Mother Robin not only didn’t stay on her nest when I crept up to take a look, but she and her husband and about a dozen neighbor robins started to give me one of the worst scoldings I’d ever had. It seemed they were all around me and above me, ordering me to get out and stay out. “Quick! Quick!” All of them were screaming the same thing.
“OK, OK!” I said disgustedly. “Give me a chance!” And I got myself out of there as quick as I could. Such a neighborhood!
I found out right away why Poetry was late to our meeting when I saw him swinging along, on one shoulder happily carrying something about four feet long, and grinning broadly.
“What you got there?” I asked.
“Birthday present for the biggest fish that has never been caught.”
As soon as I got to where he was, I saw it was a new minnow net of carefully woven twine, probably cotton, having what looked like six or eight meshes to every inch of length. When he unrolled it, it was about three yards long. It had dozens of properly spaced lead sinkers at the bottom and plenty of wooden floats at the top.
“What do you mean, ‘the biggest fish’?” I asked him. “If you ask me, I’d say minnows are the smallest fish.”
“Minnows for bait,” he said. “We’re going after bass next time—not somebody’s little old yellow-stomached catfish!”
He was in a cheerful mood, and so was I, in spite of having been driven out of a whole neighborhood of noisy robins. “Where you going to get the minnows?” I asked him.
He answered, “Under the bridge in the branch.”
Well, I’d been under that bridge before, and for a different reason, so I said, “If there are any minnows left, after being half scared to death by Shorty’s nonsensical cow!”
Pretty soon, Big Jim came. I looked secretly at his mustache and, still more secretly, at mine, using a small pocket mirror. I could see that I really didn’t even have any fuzz—not even as much as a baby pigeon has on its awkward body when it is just hatched and has had a chance to dry a little.
I looked at Big Jim’s biceps too, which he was always feeling to see if they were as hard as he wanted them to be. And when I looked back at the one on my right arm, it was actually bulging a little, like a pullet egg, and it seemed to be getting harder! Spying a branch extending out from a tree trunk beside me, I leaped up and started chinning myself, managing to do it ten times before I got tired.
“It’s your feet that make you so heavy,” Poetry squawked, and he quoted a little poem he was always quoting when he got a chance or when anything made him think of it:
“A centipede was happy, quite,
Until a frog, in fun,
Said, ‘Pray, which leg comes after which?’
This roused her mind to such a pitch,
She lay distracted in the ditch,
Considering how to run.”
“The centipede lay in the ditch, or the frog?” I asked Poetry. Whirling around, I used a wrestling trick I knew, and in a tangled-up second he was sprawled on the ground. If there had been a ditch there, he would have been lying in it, considering how to run.
Pretty soon after that, Little Jim came moseying along, swinging his ash stick and grinning and socking the tops of weeds and mayapples and looking as if he didn’t have a trouble in the world.
“Hi, everybody!” he said to us, and we said, “Hi!” back to him.
In only a few more minutes, Circus loped up the path that runs from the big Sugar Creek bridge to the spring, and we were all there except Dragonfly and Little Tom Till, who generally is not able to meet with the gang as often as the rest of us.
Big Jim looked at his watch and said, “Anybody seen Roy?”
“Roy who?” Little Jim asked with a mischievous grin in his voice and on his face. It did sound strange, hearing anybody call Dragonfly by his birthday name, which nobody but his mother and father used when they talked to him.
Well, we waited around quite a while, rolling in the grass and listening to Poetry’s and my stories about the monster catfish and the six night crawlers on one hook and the blue cow that had come charging in on our fishing privacy. And about Shorty Long, who had moved back to our neighborhood.
That was one thing we always had to decide whenever a new boy moved in—whether or not he could belong to our gang and what to do if he was bullheaded, or a bully, or a sissy, or was stuck-up, or wasn’t quite a human being. Sometimes, without any of us wanting to, someone from the gang got into a fight with the new boy, which helped us get acquainted right away—or a little quicker, anyhow.
I had already had my fight with Shorty over a year ago. We had made up at least partway but still were not able to like each other very well for some reason.
After we had waited another ten minutes for Dragonfly, who knew we were having the meeting and should have been there, we decided to go ahead and have it without him.
“Maybe it would be better anyway,” Circus said, “the way Shorty got Dragonfly against the rest of us when he lived here before.”
Poetry, who was lying on his side in front of me, rose up on his elbow and asked, “Are we going to stand for having our gang almost broken up?”
Big Jim’s narrowed eyes said no without the lips under his almost mustache saying a word.
“And what about his blue cow?” Poetry asked again.
Big Jim answered that for us. “I’m afraid that’s out of our hands. Old Man Paddler has rented this woods to the Long family, and it’s a simple business arrangement between them.”
“But what if she comes charging wildly into whatever we’re doing!” Poetry exclaimed. “We don’t have to stand for that!”
I didn’t realize that the members of our gang knew so much about what to do with a wild cow until different ones said what they thought was the best thing to do.
Little Jim spoke up first. “You can have the rubber grips off my bicycle handlebars. If you slip them over her horns, they won’t be so sharp and hurt so much if she runs into you headfirst.”
I looked at his small serious face, and he had really meant it.
Big Jim answered, “They do make such things—‘Safety Rubber Horn Protectors,’ I believe they call them. I saw them advertised in a farm magazine. That’s a good idea. It might protect Shorty himself. I understand she has to be milked twice a day, and if she’s as wild as you say she is, she might gore him to death.”
That seemed to be a nice attitude, I thought. And there ran through my mind an idea that I not only ought to grow a mustache the way Big Jim was doing faster than any of the rest of us—and develop my biceps till they were as big and as hard and maybe even stronger than his—but I ought to really watch my attitude toward Shorty Long. It ought to be as kind as Big Jim showed his was right that minute.
Circus spoke up then, taking something out of his hip pocket at the same time. “I found this in our barn. It was kind of rusty, but I sandpapered it and oiled it and wiped it off and cleaned it up, and it works. If we can get it into her nose, she’ll be as meek as a lamb.”
I looked at what he had, and it was what farmers call a “cattle lead,” the kind that snaps into a cow’s nose but not the kind that pierces the cow’s nostrils. As Circus worked the coil spring up and down and opened the jaws and closed them again, I started to grin to myself as I imagined how, if we could get the lead snapped into Shorty’s blue cow’s nose, anybody could lead her across a noisy-floored bridge or anywhere. Then we wouldn’t have to drive her with a club or a whip or a long cane fishing pole or throw rocks at her or scream at her and make her wilder than ever.
Of course, if she had an honest-to-goodness
bull ring in her nose that couldn’t ever come out, she’d really be safe.
I looked at Poetry, and he had a stubborn look on his face. “Have you ever thought where she’ll have to get her drinking water?” he asked savagely with his squawky voice. “Do we want somebody’s cow walking around in the mud all around the spring? Do we want her to thrust her cow’s nose into the same cement pool we put our lips into when we lie down and drink? Do we want her to make a barnyard out of our nice cool resting place? I, for one, don’t like the idea!” He finished with a very stormy voice.
What he had said certainly made the situation seem a lot worse than it had.
But Little Jim, who always liked to take anybody’s part, chimed in. “Paul Bunyan had a blue cow named Babe, and everybody liked both of them.”
Poetry came back with a saucy answer, saying gruffly, “Paul Bunyan was a mythical character. But this cow’s not imaginary. She’s got real horns and doesn’t have any sense. She tore through the fence my father had under the bridge and that had kept our horses and cows from going through for years and years. In one-fifth of a second she tore it down and went storming out into our woods! I hate to think what she’ll do to our playground if she stays here all summer. And that dumb boy! Honestly!”
Poetry was sitting beside his unrolled minnow net. His jaw was set, and his eyebrows were down in a scowl as he finished.
Big Jim was getting warmed up, too, I could see. Poetry had introduced a few ideas we hadn’t thought of yet. Who did want an uncontrollable cow making a barnyard out of the nice, cool, shady place down below the linden tree where we got our drinking water and which was the only place where a cow in that woods could get her water?
Big Jim spoke then. “One thing we ought to decide right now—and that is, absolutely no fighting!”
I remembered what Mom had said at the lunch table, and I joined in with Big Jim’s idea. “We ought to watch our attitudes. We don’t want to make it any harder for the Longs to become Christians than it would have been if they had never met us.”
For some reason, saying that made me feel as fine inside as I do when I see a flying squirrel sailing out from a high branch of a butternut tree and landing lightly on another branch a lot lower down. I’d seen one of those round-headed, shorthaired, short-bodied, beautiful, and very graceful little animal friends make his flying leap many a time when he got scared and wanted to get somewhere from somewhere.
All the flying squirrels around Sugar Creek are what is called “nocturnal,’’ which means they forage around for food at night like owls, and their big eyes can also see better at night. But once in a while, one will get waked up out of its leafy nest by a boy throwing a stone and hitting it. And then it gets excited and makes a running jump with its front and back legs spread out wide. The skin that is attached to its wrists and ankles on each side makes a kind of sail, and it just flies through the air with the greatest of ease.
I get a happy feeling when I see a flying squirrel do that. I also feel fine when it lands on the ground, if it can run fast enough to get away from a dog that might be there to chase it. The very second it lands, it quickly scampers for the base of another tree and scoots up it like lightning, sometimes to the very top. If it’s still scared and wants to get farther away, it makes another running leap and sails out again toward the foot of another tree. And when it lands again—scoot! Up that next tree it goes like a rusty brown streak of live lightning. Or, if I happen to see its side instead of its back, it looks like a light brown streak.
Anyway, when I said to the gang, quoting my mother, that we ought to watch our attitudes toward Shorty Long and his parents, it made me feel as fine as if I had jumped out of a high tree, had landed safely, and was up another tree and safe myself.
From where I was lying, I could still hear the robins scolding up along the bayou fence near the patch of mayapples. In fact, all of a sudden they began to scold louder and louder, as though they had gotten their heads together, were talking it all over again, and couldn’t agree on what to do about a red-haired boy who all of a sudden had come out of nowhere into the peace and quiet of their neighborhood and interrupted it. They sounded even worse and more impatient than they had when I had been there.
And then, all of another sudden, I knew they weren’t scolding about Bill Collins at all, for from that same direction there came the sound of running feet, loud enough and fast enough to have been made by a centipede as big as a circus elephant, one that knew exactly how to run. It also sounded like a windstorm.
Rolling over quick and looking up along the bayou fence, I saw a chubby boy and a skinny one, hanging onto a rope apiece. The other ends of the ropes were attached to the halter of a scrawny-looking, half-scared-to-death blue cow that was dragging them along on an impatient run straight toward us, breaking into the privacy of an innocent gang meeting the way she had done yesterday to a peaceful fishing adventure.
One of the boys being dragged along against his will—which I knew was sometimes very stubborn—was Dragonfly Gilbert, the pop-eyed member of the Sugar Creek Gang, whose nose turns south at the end and who is allergic to almost everything and who is also a great little guy.
The boy on the end of the other rope was as barrel-shaped as Poetry, but his mind wasn’t any more like Poetry’s than the man in the moon.
In another second, the blue cow, which didn’t seem to realize what she was doing or where she was going—only that she was trying to keep from being stopped from doing something—that blue cow would cut a path right through our little huddle, and we’d get pretty badly hurt.
So most of us yelled, “Watch out! Everybody scatter!”
We did, and just in time, as a blue tornado followed by two different-sized boys went tearing madly past!
And that’s where Poetry’s nice, new, six-mesh-to-the-inch, nine-foot-long minnow net with lead weights on one end and large wooden floats on the other helped make matters even worse.
Swish, double-swish, swooshety! What on earth was happening?
Not only the four feet of that cow—each foot having two hooves, making a total of eight—but somehow the horns on her head also got tangled up in that strong-meshed net. And then she got mixed up in her mind, not knowing how to run, and down she went with Dragonfly and Shorty doing almost the same thing.
And that was the rest of the gang’s getting its introduction to the strange wild animal along with the boy who was supposed to take care of her.
I don’t know how long the centipede in the poem lay distracted in the ditch, considering how to run, before it came to its senses, put its many legs to work again, and ran on. But it certainly didn’t take that scared cow long to get going again. In seconds, she was putting her four legs to work, getting up hind feet first, the way cows always do, and accidentally trampling Poetry’s nice new minnow net into the ground.
Then, like a shot she was off in the direction of the linden tree, with Dragonfly and Shorty still holding onto their ropes and whirling along after her. The three of them resembled a terribly big blue kite with two kite tails dangling and tossing around in a windstorm.
And was Poetry ever mad!
We all were mad only a few seconds later when she reached the linden tree above the spring, and both Shorty and Dragonfly stumbled and fell and let go.
Down the steep incline she shot, all the way to the spring itself, with all of us up and after her. And I was imagining what would happen to our nice clear pool of sparkling drinking water, having seen her land yesterday with her four feet in the branch and charge up it, under the bridge and through the fence on the other side!
What would I see when I got to the spring?
A minute later most of us were at the top of the incline, expecting to see most anything, such as a blue cow lying on her side with a broken leg. Or maybe she would have charged right on through the drinking pool, through the mud on the other side, and through the two-strand barbed-wire fence. By this time she might be halfway up the path that led to
the other side of the bayou.
It was an astonishing sight that we saw. There, standing with her front feet right in the middle of the cement pool and with her hind feet in six inches of mud, was our four-footed, blue-haired mammal. Her sides were heaving from running so hard, and she had her nose thrust into the water and was trying to drink and swallow between breaths.
“Wonderful!” Shorty cried with a happy voice from behind me. “That’s what we’d been trying to get her to do! She wouldn’t go down the hill to drink, and she would have starved to death for water. We were trying to lead her!”
“But look at what she’s done!” Poetry cried. “Look at our paper drinking cups—all smashed and squashed to nothing! Look at our wooden bench upside down in the mud! Look at her muddy feet standing in the middle of our drinking water!”
And before anybody could have stopped him, Poetry was working his way down that steep slope on the left side and yelling, “Get out of there with those muddy feet, you—you—”
It was hard to believe that Poetry was so mad, because he was nearly always so happy-go-lucky. But when I remembered he had made the little wooden bench that had been beside the pool and had also painted it himself—Poetry was especially good at carpentry and was always making something out of wood with his set of carpenter’s tools—well, his temper was easy to understand.
But then Mrs. Cow, seeing us and seeing and hearing Poetry charging down the hill at her, came to life. She pivoted and started up the incline on the other side of the linden tree. I knew that in another moment she would be up the slope, and, if nobody stopped her, she would be racing through the woods again. Like Little Bo Peep’s sheep, she would have her tail behind her, but also she would have the two ropes dangling from her halter.
Then things really began to happen. Those two ropes got mixed up with her feet and hooves. She stepped on one of them with one of her front feet, the other with one of her hind feet, and got stopped in her tracks. The ropes were caught between her cloven hooves. She lunged forward and was down again.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 50