Then Little Jim said, “Do any people who aren’t Indians sometimes come to the grave houses and bring offerings of food or things?”
Then I knew it was time to tell what we all knew. So we all started in, and each one of us squeezed in his words wherever he could find a place to squeeze them in between the hundreds of excited words of the rest of us.
In only a little while we were through, and Poetry had given Barry the glasses case and the piece of broken glass he’d found, and the broken piece of lens exactly fit part of a lens that was still fastened into the glasses frame.
We looked into the grave house and saw only a few dozen reddish, smooth-skinned June-berries, which grow on a lot of small shrubs and trees up here in the forest. They were what Eagle Eye had pushed into the hole half an hour before.
Pretty soon the afternoon’s adventure in the cemetery was over. We didn’t know there was going to be an even more exciting one later on. We’d had a lot of fun and had learned a lot of things about Indians. Also some of the things we had learned from the Bible seemed even more wonderful than they had before.
After we’d all told about the man in the white boat with the fishing tackle box, we drove as fast as we could to the fire warden’s house, which was between where we were and our camp. There Barry phoned the police about what we’d seen, and we knew that some of the smartest men in the North would pretty soon be watching all the lakes and all the resorts in our territory for a man in a white boat with a new tackle box and a large battered gasoline can.
Pretty soon the man would be caught—maybe that very night, although nearly half the boats up here were white! Poetry and I were alone for a minute after we got back to camp, and we talked it over.
Almost right away it was time to go on the fishing trip with Barry, who was going to use the new minnows we’d bought for him earlier in the afternoon. It was almost two hours to sundown, and just before sundown would be the very best time to fish.
I was still feeling a little sad, though, and I said to Poetry, who was doing something to his fishing tackle, “It hardly seems fair that we didn’t catch the kidnapper ourselves, when we could have done it as easy as pie.”
He was winding a new nylon line onto his reel. “Detectives and police have to work together,” he said and grinned as though he wasn’t worried a bit.
“That’s a pretty line you have there. What test is it?”
“Oh, about fifty or a hundred pounds,” Poetry said proudly. “In fact, you can’t break it, it’s so strong. We could almost make a swing out of it like we do out of ropes down home at Sugar Creek.”
We were sitting on a log not more than fifteen feet from the Indian kitchen we’d made when we pitched camp the afternoon before. Big Jim and Circus were laying sticks of wood in place, getting it ready for cooking supper, which we’d have to cook quick so that we could get going right afterward.
Away over on the other side of the Indian kitchen, I could see Barry with his fishing rod, walking back and forth, back and forth between two trees and winding up his line.
“What’s he doing that for?” Tom Till wanted to know, and Circus said, “He’s winding up his dry line.”
“How’d it get unwound?”
“Goof!” Circus said. “Any good fisherman always unwinds his line just as soon as he comes in from fishing so the line’ll dry. If you leave your wet line on your spool, it’ll rot, and then sometime when you get a big fish on, it’ll break and your fish’ll get away.”
I looked at Poetry’s yellowish new nylon line and wished I had one that was strong enough to catch a one-hundred-pound fish, if there was such a big one in any of the lakes up there.
When Barry had his line wound up, we watched and also helped him put a new sheer pin in his outboard motor.
After a while we were ready for our hurry-up supper, which was fried eggs and bacon. We used paper plates instead of our tin plates, because we didn’t want a lot of dishes to wash when we were in a hurry to get started fishing.
At the dock our two boats were waiting. Besides Barry’s two dozen chubs, we had two other pails with smaller minnows in them, which were called shiners and were good for catching crappies, the kind of fish most of us were going to fish for.
One of the boats belonged to Eagle Eye, who was going along with us to show us just where to catch the biggest crappies.
Dragonfly, Little Jim, Poetry, and I went with Eagle Eye. Eagle Eye himself was running the motorboat. Barry took Little Tom Till and Circus and Big Jim in his boat and came along behind us, following the widening V-shaped path our boat made as we plowed our way up the crooked woodsy shoreline.
It certainly was fun to go put-puttety-sizzle along on the water like that, and it felt good to sit where I sat, in the prow, riding backwards, with the cool early evening breeze blowing against my hot neck and flapping my shirt sleeves and with drops of spray splashing up against me.
I liked to watch Eagle Eye’s bronze face, with its very high cheekbones, and the big reddish-brown muscles of his arms, which made me wish I was as strong and as big as he was. When he moved his arms, which were bare up to just above his biceps, I imagined that the bulging muscles looked like snakes wiggling under the skin.
On the way, Eagle Eye told us different things about the Indians of this part of the country. “There are eleven thousand of our tribe up here,” he told us, which was ten times as many people as lived in Sugar Creek and was a lot of people.
Pretty soon, after a mile or so, we came to a place called The Narrows, and Eagle Eye said, “We’re in the Mississippi now. This’ll take us into another lake.”
Poetry looked at me, and I at him, and we knew from the direction we’d been coming that this was the same route the kidnapper had taken when he’d gone to the lake where the cemetery was.
7
It was certainly an interesting ride. Our boat glided along in The Narrows. Sometimes tall weeds were on either side, and sometimes there were just shores with all kinds of trees growing on the riverbanks. All the time I was thinking about the mystery and the man with the newish tackle box.
Also all the time, Eagle Eye was telling us things about his people. This month, August, was the month when the wild rice up here turns yellow and looks like the golden wheat fields in other parts of the United States. Indians gathered the rice from the rice lakes just as they used to gather it almost three hundred years ago when an exploring Franciscan, Father Louis Hennepin, first came up here in 1680. The men still stood up in the bows of the canoes and with long poles poled their way into the rice lakes. In the stern of each canoe would sit an Indian woman.
Eagle Eye went on to tell how each woman would very gently reach out and press the tall rice sheaves between flails, which she had in her hands, and knock the ripened rice heads off the stalks into a basket or a piece of canvas in the bottom of the canoe. “Any rice that is left in the lake, sinks to the bottom to take root and grow for next year’s mah-no-men,” Eagle Eye explained.
“What’s mah-no-men?” Little Jim wanted to know.
Eagle Eye said, “That’s the Chippewa name for wild rice.”
And Little Jim, who’s studied the Bible a lot, said, “Sounds like manna, the kind of food the people of the Old Testament used to eat, which God gave them from heaven every day.”
“That’s right,” Eagle Eye said. “It does. Our people call wild rice mah-no-men, which means ‘the great gift from the Spirit of Heaven.’”
Our boat putt-putted along with none of us saying anything for a while, only thinking. The other boat was behind us maybe a hundred feet, nosing its way along as the rest of the gang got their lines and hooks ready for the fishing we were going to do in that other lake.
I was also working on my line, getting it ready so that the very second we reached the place where our anchor would be let down, I’d have my hook in the water and ready to catch a whale of a big crappie.
All of a sudden Little Jim, who had had a faraway look in his eye—and who
wasn’t doing anything to get his line ready but was just sitting there with a dreamy expression on his smallish face—piped up and said, “I’ll bet if Sylvia’s dad was preaching a sermon to the Indians up here, he’d start out by telling them how much he liked wild rice—he’d probably eat some first—and how easy it is to digest or something. And then he’d tell them about the manna of the Bible, like he does us sometimes. And after that he’d tell them about how Somebody once called Himself the Bread that came down from heaven …”
Little Jim got interrupted just then by our coming out into an open place where we saw a bridge up ahead with maybe fifty people, Indians and white people, fishing from it. I didn’t get to hear the rest of what Little Jim was thinking about and was going to say, but I knew it was important, because he had those kind of ideas nearly all the time.
Our boats slowed down while we went under the bridge, so that we wouldn’t seem impolite to the people whose lines were hanging down in what is called the channel of the Mississippi. Some of the fishermen moved their lines to one side so our boats could get through.
Out in the other lake, Eagle Eye opened the throttle wide, and so did Barry behind us, and we roared out in the direction of what was going to be a very pretty sunset after a while, to a place where the hungry crappies would be waiting for us.
And then we were there. Eagle Eye shut off our motor and let our boat drift to a slow stop off a point of land that jutted out into the lake. We let down our anchor, and those of us in Eagle Eye’s boat started fishing for the crappies he said were there, and which in only a short time we found out really were.
The guys in the other boat—Big Jim, Circus, Tom Till, and Barry—rode around in their boat farther up the lakeshore, where there was a sandy bottom, all of them doing what is called “trolling” for walleyes.
Boy oh boy! It was wonderful to catch a fish every few minutes and slip it into the net that we had tied to the side of the boat. Even Little Jim caught almost as many as I did, and also Dragonfly and Poetry. I caught not more than three more than each of the rest of them.
Time passed, and the sun went down and left the place in the sky where it had been the prettiest red-gold and purple I ever saw. The colors spread out over almost all the sky and made the water we were fishing in the same colors.
Suddenly I noticed that Little Jim was leaning a little against Eagle Eye, who was in the seat beside him, as though he was either tired or sleepy or else he liked that big bronze friendly Indian very much. Little Jim didn’t have a big brother of his own to like, and maybe he was wishing he had one. He was looking up at the sky as I’d seen him do along Sugar Creek sometimes when he was thinking about something important and maybe getting ready to ask a question.
And because I wasn’t getting any bites right that minute, I looked at the sky too.
Then I heard Little Jim say to Eagle Eye, “It’s a pretty sky.”
And Eagle Eye’s voice answered, “The Great Spirit made it.”
Then Little Jim said, “Is the Great Spirit the same as God?”
“There is only one true God,” Eagle Eye said. “And He is everywhere.”
I watched Little Jim watching the sky, and all of a sudden I had a feeling that maybe the thoughts that were in his mind were as pretty as the very pretty red and gold and purple sky that, because of its being reflected in the water, seemed to be all around us as well as above us.
“How come the Indians don’t believe in Jesus?” Little Jim asked.
Eagle Eye right that minute got a terrific bite on his line and quickly landed a whopper of a crappie before answering. And this is what I heard him say, “Many do. But they are like anybody else—they have to hear about Him first.”
Little Jim sighed as if he was wishing something important, which maybe he was. And right that second he got a whopper of a crappie on his line too, and you should have seen him come to life and land him in real Little Jim style.
Well, it was nearly dark, and we knew that on the shore it would be darker than it was on the lake.
Barry and the rest of the gang came around a bend just then with their motor roaring and came down toward us. We all got our lines out of the water, winding them onto our reels, and got ready to make the long motorboat ride back to camp.
“I’m hungry!” Dragonfly said.
And so said we all to each other. We wished we were already back in camp so we could have a bedtime snack. But we wouldn’t get there as quick as we wanted, because Eagle Eye lived in a different direction from where we did, and he needed to get home right away.
Since there wasn’t room enough in Barry’s boat for all of us, Barry decided to let some of us stay at the bridge and fish if we wanted to. He would go as fast as he could through The Narrows and out into our own lake again and back to camp, get the station wagon, and drive back to the bridge and get the rest of us.
I say “us” because I had already made up my mind I wanted to try fishing from the bridge. If it got real dark before the station wagon came for us, we would use my pocket flashlight to bait our hooks.
It only took a minute or two to decide who was going to stay and wait for the station wagon, because different ones wanted to go in the boat. And a little later, Poetry, Dragonfly, Circus, and I were left alone to wait on the bridge.
It was fun fishing from the bridge with all the other people, some of whom were Indians. But after while, when Barry didn’t come, we got tired of waiting.
Poetry said to me, “Maybe they had a flat tire or got stuck in the sand. Let’s start walking up the road to meet them. We can’t miss them, because that’s the only road there is to here.”
It sounded like a good idea.
But Circus stopped us by saying, “Maybe the station wagon had a flat tire right at the camp. If it did, they’ll maybe come for us in the boat. We’d better wait a while longer.”
“We could have hiked almost all the way to camp by now, if we’d started at the same time they did,” I said.
Dragonfly yawned and said sleepily, as he and all of us reeled in our lines, winding them up clear to the ends of our rods, “I’m too tired to walk an inch. I’m so sleepy I could lie down right here and sleep forever.”
“If you want to sleep forever,” Poetry said mischievously, “better wait till we get to the Indian graveyard. The road goes past there, you know.”
Say, did Dragonfly ever come to wide-awake life. “Indian graveyard!” he exclaimed so loud that two or three people near us jumped.
We finally decided not to wait any longer but to follow the lonely old sandy road back to camp. All the way to the Indian cemetery, we had trouble with Dragonfly, who made us let him carry the flashlight so that he could shine it on different things along the road to be sure there weren’t any bears or a kidnapper or something else.
“What would a kidnapper want with a dragonfly?” Poetry asked him. “They only want people, not insects.”
But it wasn’t funny—at least not to Dragonfly. He didn’t let his feelings get hurt, though, and was smart enough to think to say, “And who would be dumb enough to kidnap a lot of poetry?”
“That reminds me,” Poetry said. “I haven’t quoted a poem for a long time. When there’s a pretty moon like that one up there, it’d be a good time to say:
“Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.”
Circus, who hadn’t let out a bloodcurdling loon call for a long time must have been reminded of a loon because of “moon” and “spoon” rhyming with one another. All of a sudden he stopped in the road in front of me, straightened himself up with his face looking toward the moon, and let out a fierce, long, trembling wail that was so much like a loon that nobody could have told the difference.
“Stop!” Dragonfly burst out. He also said fiercely, “You’ll wake up all the ghosts in the Indian cemetery!”
> We were trudging along, half happy and half worried, wondering what had happened to the station wagon and the rest of the gang and Barry, when Poetry shushed us all from what we were saying and said, “It’s right up ahead of us.”
And it was. In the moonlight, those little grave houses looked very spooky. You couldn’t see the one for the medicine man though, because it was in the shadows under the big pine tree.
We all stopped at the same time, I guess because we all must have heard something at the same time. I felt a tingling sensation up and down my spine, for I had heard something very strange.
We all huddled close to each other, and only our quick breathing and the sound of something out in the cemetery could be heard. The sound came from somewhere way at the other end, beyond the pine tree. In fact, it sounded as if it was coming from behind the sumac where we’d been hiding in the afternoon.
What on earth? I thought, and then I knew what the sound was. Somebody was sawing a board.
8
It’s a strange feeling knowing you and three of your pals are alone on a sandy roadside at the edge of an Indian cemetery. And it’s night, and the moonlight on the eerie-looking grave houses makes them look like somebody’s farmyard full of chicken coops or dozens and dozens of extralarge beehives.
For just one minute while Circus, Poetry, Dragonfly, and I were standing in the dark shadow of an oak tree looking out on that moonlit cemetery, I was reminded of home. And right in the middle of my spooky feeling I was remembering my dad, who sometimes would have his straw hat on, with mosquito netting thrown over it and tucked into his leather jacket at the throat to keep the bees out, and wearing leather gloves to keep from getting his hands stung. He would be stooped over, using a smoker with bellows to squeeze little puffs of smoke into the hive and make the bees scatter in different directions, so he could get the honey.
And also even at that very second I got a sort of lonesome feeling for my folks. I thought about how Dad and Mom would maybe right that minute be sitting quietly out on the side porch of our house on our two red outdoor chairs that I had painted myself that very summer. Maybe they’d be talking about me being away up North. And Mom would be worrying out loud a little, the way she sometimes does. She does most of that kind of worrying at our house. And Dad would say, “Oh, don’t worry about Bill! He’s with Barry, and they have camp rules that won’t let them be out at night where there’s any danger.”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 5