“I see him!” Claude said, in his deep voice. “I done got him cold. Gimme the gun, Odie.”
They apparently had an agreement that the one who first saw the victim was the one who got a shot at it, for Odie walked around the tree and handed Claude the gun. Joey watched in fascination as the small boy hoisted the gun, which seemed to dwarf him, and pulled back both hammers. He took a step or two and shot. There was a tremendous roar, flame spouted two feet beyond the muzzle, and the entire forest seemed to tremble; it seemed incredible that Claude wasn’t driven two feet into the ground. The squirrel fell out of the tree, Charley grabbed it, and after the usual chase had to give it up. Claude put it into his pocket and grinned at the other two. “I reckon that fixed him,” he said, and he looked so small and so triumphant and with it all so droll that Joey had to move off, turn his back, and pretend a coughing fit to keep from laughing aloud.
“That’s sure some gun,” he said, when he had got control of his amusement. “I thought it was going to knock you down.”
“It’ll knock me down if I ain’t set for it,” Claude said. “It’s a buster, and that’s a fact.”
“Yes, sir,” Odie said. “You don’t keep a-holt of it, it’s liable to kill at both ends. You like to shoot it?”
Joey wouldn’t have shot it under any consideration. “Thank you, but I reckon not,” he said. “I’m used to my gun; I better stay with it. Would you like to shoot it?”
He had never made this offer to anyone before and it popped out before he realized what he was saying, but he didn’t regret it. Somehow, because of the incident just finished and Mr. Ben’s talk, the two boys weren’t odd and dubious strangers any more. He felt differently toward them, and they, because of his offer, felt differently about him. They didn’t draw together to communicate secretly with nudges but smiled and nodded.
“Sure would,” Odie said.
“Sure would too,” Claude said.
They set off again, and the feeling between them held for the rest of the afternoon. The next two squirrels were shot with Joey’s gun, one by Odie and one by Claude; they both had a little trouble changing from a hammer gun to a hammerless one with a safety, but they both managed to get their squirrels. Joey saw the next squirrel first and killed it; the fifth one got away from them. It was in the top of a very tall cypress, and after being dusted several times jumped out, spread itself, and half sailed and half fell to the ground. It bounced a foot into the air when it landed and then ran straight at Joey. Odie, Claude, and Charley all knew this maneuver and began to chase the desperate beast as soon as it hit the ground, but Joey had never seen a squirrel do this before. He had a fright; he thought the squirrel was going to attack him, and when he saw the squirrel, the dog, and the two boys all bearing down upon him he froze; he couldn’t have moved to save his life.
The squirrel ran between his legs, and Charley was so close behind it and so intent upon it that he ran between Joey’s legs too and upset him. The two boys hurdled him as he fell, and the whole pack went roaring on for a few more yards until the squirrel came to a hollow at the bottom of a tree and disappeared into it.
By the time Joey got to his feet again he had realized that the squirrel had only run in this direction because that was the way it was headed when it hit the ground, and hadn’t time to look about. He was quickly over his fright and began to laugh. Odie and Claude were laughing too when they came back to him, and they stood together laughing.
“Great balls of fire! We like to run you down!”
“We like to stomp you!”
“I thought I was charged by a man-eating squirrel,” Joey said. “Great day, I was scared for a minute. I was too scared to move.”
“Charley moved you. He moved you good.”
“Sure did.”
“I didn’t know a squirrel would jump out of a tree like that,” Joey said. “I got a little mixed up.”
“They’ll do it, do you push ’em,” Claude said. “He was all the way in the top, he didn’t have no place else to go, so he spread out like a flyin’ squirrel and turned loose.”
“You looked real funny fallin’ down,” Odie said, and they laughed together again. “I wish we could get a couple more, but we better quit. We get back too late, Pa’ll wear us out.”
“Sure will.”
Odie stuck two fingers in his mouth, gave a piercing whistle for Charley, and they turned back toward the house. When they got there, Charley was waiting in the yard and Mr. Ben was sitting on the porch steps. He had a suit and necktie on and was freshly shaved; he had apparently been to town. Charley looked longingly at the biscuit can, but Joey decided that he had better not feed him with the boys there.
“Sure liked shootin’ that gun,” Odie said. “She’s so pretty and so light it’s just like holdin’ up a stick.”
“Sure did too,” Claude said. “Thank you. She kills good, too. Y’all want our squirrels?”
“No, thank you,” Joey said. “Don’t you want mine?”
“You keep it,” Odie said. “We had a right good time. Pa turns us loose, we like to go again sometime.”
“I would too,” Joey said. “Thank you for stopping for me.”
“Sho!” Claude said. “Good-by.”
“Good-by,” Joey said, and watched them walk around the corner of the house with the dog following them. He turned for a final look and disappeared after them.
Joey sat down beside Mr. Ben. “I wish I could have fed him,” he said, “but I thought I better not.”
“I think you did the wise thing,” Mr. Ben said. “It might hurt their feelings. Did you have a good time?”
Joey told him about the hunt, and about the squirrel that ran at him. “Sure scared me for a minute,” he said, “but I did have fun. They weren’t like the night of the possum hunt. That Claude was funny when he shot their gun. I thought it was going to knock him down, or blow up or something. I really had a good time with them, Mr. Ben. They’re different now.”
“Don’t count on them always being like that,” Mr. Ben said. “The way they act depends on how rough Sam’s been on them, and I guess he’s had something else on his mind lately and let them be. I mean it when I say not to get too close to them, Joey. You’re liable to have another bad time if you do.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said, and took the squirrel out of his pocket. It was curled up in death; its small paws were over its eyes, as though it had tried to avoid seeing its approaching end. As Joey stared at it an odd and piercing little pain of regret entered into him. He had a surprising and fugitive wish that he hadn’t shot it, which he quickly suppressed; how could he be a hunter and not shoot anything? Nevertheless, he turned away from it; he didn’t look at it again. “Will you skin it, Mr. Ben?” he asked.
Mr. Ben nodded, and Joey tried not to think of it any more. To avoid thinking of it he ran over the events of the day in his mind and suddenly remembered the turkey. “Great day!” he said. “I forgot the most important thing. I had a shot at a turkey and got so excited that I forgot to push the safety off.” He went into the affair of the turkey in great and excited detail. “I reckon I’d have killed him,” he said, suddenly mournful, “if I hadn’t been so dumb. Gosh hang it, why did I have to do that?”
“You got buck fever,” Mr. Ben said. “I guess almost everybody gets it the first time they have a shot at a turkey.” He looked at the sky. The sun was almost down and shadows were long across the yard. “You wait here,” he said. “It may not be too late. I’ll be right back.”
He got up quickly and went into the house, and soon came back with his everyday clothes on, carrying his old L. C. Smith double-barrel gun. “Come on,” he said. “If we hurry we might hear them. Take me back where you saw it.”
As they hurried down the path behind the barn he explained what they were up to. “It’s almost time for those turkeys to go to roost. They fly up in trees for the night and make a lot of noise, and we’ll sit there and be still. If they’re still anywhere nearby we’l
l be able to hear them fly up, and then we can leave quietly and come back in the morning early and call them together when they come down again.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ll separate, and sit still and listen. Be as quiet as you can when we get near the place.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said. The excitement was building up in him again, and although Mr. Ben made pretty good time for his age, it seemed to Joey that they were crawling along.
They crossed the bridge, turned down the stream, and finally came to the place where the greenbrier thickened and the swampy places began. The sun had dropped by now, although the sky was still light; the woods, the bark of the trees, had taken on a little of the sunset colors of the sky. Joey was by this time in a fever of anxiety and indecision; he couldn’t locate the spot, for the woods looked everywhere the same.
“It must have been around here somewhere,” he said. “I wish I could be sure, Mr. Ben. I sure wish I could.”
“This will do,” Mr. Ben said. “I’ll stay here, and you go on for maybe a quarter of a mile. Get on a high place if you can, and sit down and be quiet and listen. If you hear their wings beating against the branches when they fly up don’t make a sound. Locate it as near as you can and wait awhile. I’ll call you when I think we ought to go.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said, and went on. He tried to hurry and be quiet at the same time, avoiding stepping on dead sticks or making sucking noises with his boots when the going got swampy. Finally he thought he was far enough from the old man, found a little knoll, and sat down in the leaves. He sat there listening with intense concentration, turning his head this way and that with painful slowness as twilight slowly turned the woods dim around him.
The profound silence stretched out, the trees grew black against the slowly darkening sky, the forest floor about him began to grow dim; Joey longed desperately for the sound of wings, but heard nothing. Finally Mr. Ben gave a “Halloo,” and he got up and started back. He was greatly disappointed. Halfway back to Mr. Ben he was startled half out of his skin when a barred owl let go with a volley of blood-chilling hoots in objection to him. He picked up his pace, blundering into bushes and scratching himself; he had to call several times to find Mr. Ben.
“Hear anything?” the old man asked.
“No, sir. Nothing but that owl. Did you?”
“Not a thing. They must have got together somewhere else. Well, some other time.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said sadly. Then he brightened. “But I’ll get one yet. I got a mind to start practicing on that call, if you’ll let me.”
“Help yourself,” Mr. Ben said. “Another thing you could do is always be still and listen for a while when you’re in the woods toward sunset; turkeys roost where night catches them, and you may find some anywhere.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, we’d better go, or we’ll be here all night.”
They started out, stumbling around, for it was dark now. Joey followed Mr. Ben, holding his gun upright before him to ward off branches and underbrush. The stars had begun to come out, twinkling high above the interlaced limbs over their heads, and far behind them the owl spoke to the night again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was raining the next morning when Joey awoke, and he didn’t get up right away. He couldn’t hear Mr. Ben moving about and thought that probably the old man felt the same way that he felt himself: satisfied to lie still, warm and comfortable, and listen to the rain on the roof for a while. He fell into a half-dreamy state, and fragments of the things that had happened to him since he had come to the Pond without grownups drifted through his mind; he made a sort of recapitulation. He had learned some things. He had been lost in the swamp and been frightened and had found his way out again, and now he would keep track of where he was in the woods; the big bass had shown him an unsuspected meanness in his nature that he would probably manage better when it appeared again. Sharbee and his coon had been another lesson, and Mr. Ben had helped him there; he still wanted the coon but he understood now why it wouldn’t be fair to take it. He had learned from the White boys as well. His friends at home were disciplined with an attempt at affection and fairness; they had their rages and frustrations, but weren’t pushed into such actions as he had seen on the possum hunt. It was the first time he had encountered, and realized, that there were ways of life different from his own and that boys were caught in it.
His mind circled this unhappy thing, and as it did so there came into it the recollection of the dead squirrel with its paws over its eyes and the odd stab of pain it had given him. Why, he wondered, why? It had been fun to shoot it, the excitement had caught him up as it always did; but after he had seen it hiding its dulling eyes, stiff and cold, the scurry of life gone and the triumph of hitting it past, he hadn’t wanted to see it again. Why had he felt like that? Was it that death was rather frightening, or was it more?
He couldn’t solve it and didn’t really want to, for he felt that the question threatened the new pleasures he had found. His mind moved on in its drowsy musing and he remembered a line or two of poetry that he had read. Magic casements opening on the foam, he whispered to himself, Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn. This was mysterious too, for why should these lands be forlorn? Why were grown-up things mysterious? Mysterious, but beautiful too: the singing words, the shifting half-glimpsed images bathed in a radiance of soft, soft golden light. …
He awoke sometime later, to find Mr. Ben standing beside the bed; he smiled at the old man. “I reckon I went to sleep again,” he said.
“I did too,” Mr. Ben said, “but it won’t hurt either of us. It’s close onto eleven o’clock, and it looks like it might clear, or at least not rain so hard. What will we have for breakfast?”
“Pancakes,” Joey said. “We haven’t had pancakes for a long time.”
“Good,” Mr. Ben said, and went out into the kitchen. Joey could hear him starting the fire as he dressed, and when he went to the kitchen himself the fire was roaring in the stove and the dank chill was off the room. They made a great stack of cakes and attacked them in companionable silence; when the time came to wash the dishes Joey saw that their water supply was low, and after the dishes were washed he put on his raincoat, picked up two buckets, and set off for White’s.
By the time he turned in at their gate the rain had changed to a slow, soft drizzle which looked as though it would continue the rest of the day. The woods behind the house were half lost in it, misty and changing, and Joey was so interested in looking at them that he walked past the well and suddenly found himself around the corner of the house. There was a little porch there with a roof over it, and beneath it a boy was sitting in a little express wagon looking at him. The boy was small, about as big as a twelve-year-old, and had on an old sweater; his face was normal size, but above it his head swelled to monstrous proportions. It was Horace, the “afflicted” boy that Mr. Ben had told him about.
Joey had a moment of cold horror; he would doubtless have turned and run if he’d been capable of it. He stared at the boy for a long, awful moment, and then the boy’s face was lighted by a smile of wonderful sweetness.
“Hi!” he said, in a soft, clear voice. “I reckon you’re Joey. Claude and Odie told me about you. I’m Horace.”
The boy’s fine smile and his soft voice brought with it an immediate impression of intelligence and friendliness; the feeling of horror drained out of Joey and he accepted him. The rigidity left his muscles, and he put the buckets down. His own smile was a little uncertain at first, for he had been quite shocked, but the immense relief that he felt soon made it warmer. He took a deep breath. He said, “I’m glad to meet you, Horace. Mr. Ben told me about you, too.”
“Mr. Ben’s nice,” the boy said. “He’s kind.”
He smiled again, a smile with an ephemeral hint of melancholy in it; and from the smile, and the words that had gone before it, Joey realized that kind treatment was not always his portion and what his life must be like. F
or he was intelligent; it looked out of his eyes. Joey knew that he longed for the wide world and all that was in it, and was tied forever to his little wagon and the sandy, empty yard. “Claude told me how Charley overturned you,” he said. “I reckon you were surprised.”
“I was scared,” Joey said. “I’d never seen a squirrel jump out of a tree before, and when he ran at me I thought he was going to bite me.”
“I reckon I’d thought so too. Have you hunted very much?”
“Not very,” Joey said. “Just since I came down here. I’m not very good yet.”
“You like it, so I reckon you will be. I often wonder what it’s like to shoot and see something fall down.”
A crease appeared in Joey’s brow, for this had been the wonder that he had slid away from before he had fallen asleep again this morning, and he came a little closer to it now. It bothered him, and he was afraid that his father or even Mr. Ben would think it sissy if he asked them about it, but Horace was different; Joey felt that Horace would understand him. “Sometimes it’s sort of sad,” he said, “but when there’s another one, you want to shoot that one too. Why is it sad? Why do you want to do it again if it’s sad?”
“I don’t know,” Horace said. “I reckon there’s a lot of things people do that make them sad afterwards, and not bad things, either.”
“You don’t reckon that it’s … well, sort of sissy to feel like that?”
Horace looked at Joey with a gaze as clear as spring water; he knew what troubled the boy, who was at once sensitive and surrounded and influenced by people who were hunters. Horace, unable to be active, lived in his thoughts; he had often reflected on the baffling question of how a hunter can feel great respect and affection for the creature he kills. He wondered whether Joey would be able to do this or whether he would finally stop shooting altogether. He didn’t like killing, but he liked Joey. Joey would have to make his own adjustment in his own time, but meanwhile Horace didn’t want him to feel guilty about a thing he so obviously enjoyed. “Sissy?” he asked. “No, I reckon not. I reckon it’s sort of nice. You’ll never be a mean kind of man if you feel like that.” He watched Joey’s relieved smile and changed the subject. “You read much, Joey?”
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