“He’s not a mongrel!” Dragonfly exclaimed behind us. “He’s a purebred Airedale.”
“He’s a picayune!” I told Dragonfly. “He’s a thing of trifling value.”
“He’s a person!” Dragonfly cried. “Here, Jeep! Here, Jeep!” he called. “Come back here and leave that rabbit alone! We’re going coon hunting!”
Pretty soon we came in sight of Circus’s sort of old-looking house, where there was a light in an upstairs window with somebody moving about, maybe turning down the covers for some of Circus’s many sisters who lived there. He was the only boy.
Circus’s dad and Big Jim’s dad’s hired hand, who lived close by, were there waiting for us with two more kerosene lanterns and a long, powerful flashlight and one long rifle. Tied close to the woodshed were two big, sad-faced, long-nosed, long-eared, long-bodied hounds, one a rusty red and the other a kind of blue-and-gray They were leaping and trembling and acting like wild things, trying to get loose so they could go where they wanted to go.
Circus put his pony away in the barn, came back to where we were, and in less than three minutes we were on our way.
His dad, who had on a sheep-lined brown coat and high boots—as also did Big Jim’s dad’s hired man—went over to the dogs, scolded them so they would be quiet, and unsnapped their leashes. You should have seen them go, just like two streaks of greased lightning, out across the yard and over the fence and straight for Sugar Creek.
Maybe the dogs smelled something out there and knew just where to go, for we hadn’t been following along behind them more than a half minute when one of the dogs—Old Bawler, the gray-and-blue one—let out a wild, long, sad bawl that sounded like a loon and a woman crying for help and running at the same time:
“Whooo … whooo …”
Then Old Sol, the red-and-rusty hound, took up the cry, and his voice was deep and hollow as though it was coming through a hollow log in a cave and he was in a lot of trouble:
“WHOOO … WHOOO …”
“It’s a coon!” Circus cried, and so did his dad and almost all of us, each one trying to be first to tell the other one what we thought it was.
“It’s headed straight for Sugar Creek! Come on! Everybody!”
And away we went—lanterns, boots, boys, Dragonfly, Jeep, all running, sbshety-crunchety, slippety-sizzle, through the woods, over logs, up and down little hills, around brush piles and briar patches, panting and feeling fine and excited and wondering if it was a coon or a fox or what.
2
I couldn’t help but notice that, just a minute or two after we had started, the dogs changed direction and were running not toward Sugar Creek but toward the little stream of water that we called the “branch” and which emptied itself into the creek quite a long way away from where we were.
It looked as if they were going to take us right back toward Circus’s house, and we all followed along behind them, running or walking, whatever we had to do. Sometimes we had to hurry to keep up with the dogs, and then again we had to just amble along at a snail’s pace because the dogs would lose the trail, going around a tree or a brush pile or something else.
“What do you know about that!” I heard Circus say. “That coon’s going straight for our orchard!”
And it looked as if it was. It had left the woods. The dogs were far ahead of us. Jeep was darting in and out and around. First he would be with us, then he would be away up ahead with the “real” dogs.
The men were ahead of us, too, following the hounds, which had already turned and started toward Sugar Creek again.
Pretty soon, while we were walking along, I heard little Jeep barking all by himself. It was a funny sort of bark, entirely different from any he had barked yet. It sounded as if he felt he had done something wonderful. He wasn’t ahead with the other dogs either. He was all by himself, barking up a little tree right at the edge of Circus’s orchard. In fact, he was barking up a persimmon tree.
Circus, Big Jim, Poetry, Dragonfly, Little Jim, and I stopped to see what Jeep was after, which we supposed was a house cat.
Poetry squawked, “I’ll bet it’s one of Circus’s sisters, and that picayune doesn’t know the difference.” Circus had many sisters, but he couldn’t help it. For that reason he didn’t know how to dry dishes very well.
I had Big Jim’s flashlight, and I shoved its light toward the top of that tree and around it but couldn’t see anything. Some of the leaves of the persimmon tree were still on. They were dark brown and not round and oval as they are in the summertime when they are large and shining and green. Now they were curled up the way old Jack Frost had left them.
Then my flashlight showed me, about halfway up, a strange looking little light-gray creature of some kind. Jeep was all around that tree now, barking and yelping and jumping up and down, scratching his claws on the thick, scaly brown bark.
Do you know what I saw when my flashlight was focused up there? Right in the crotch of a limb was something all right. The underpart of it was very dark. Beginning about the middle of its sides and going up toward its back, it was black-and-white, its fur mixed like a man’s hair who is maybe about forty-seven years old. Its fur was nice and long.
The animal swung around a little then and shut its eyes against the light, and I could see that its head was a different color, a sort of yellow-white. Its cheeks were as white as the snow would be in another two weeks—or maybe even that very night if it should happen to snow, which I wished it would.
I knew right away what the animal was, because of its tail.
“Boy, oh, boy!” I heard Poetry say. “It’s a possum!”
“Sure!” Little Jim said. “It’s a big possum! Look at his little black ears, would you!”
“Those ears aren’t black,” Dragonfly said. “Not all black, anyway. See that little yellow streak up there on the tiptop of its ears!”
The fur on the underpart of this possum was dark, and it was also shorter than the rest, with just a few white hairs sprinkled in.
“I don’t think it’s a possum,” Dragonfly went on to say, “because—look how black its legs are, and look how black its feet are.”
I lowered my voice disgustedly. “It’s a possum!”
I focused the flashlight on its tail, then moved the light right up the possum’s body until the gray-furred little varmint scrambled around, turned his tail toward me, and began to climb on up the tree.
“See that tail!” I exclaimed. “That’s what they call a prehensile tail!”
Big Jim, who was standing quietly looking on, said, “Here, Bill, let me have that flashlight!”
He had it almost before I could let loose of it, and he was directing the light still closer to the possum, reaching as high as he could.
Well, with all that noise going on, all of us jabbering to each other and Jeep barking and yelping, we forgot about Old Bawler with her loonlike voice and Old Sol with his hollow, gruff voice. We forgot all about Circus’s dad and Big Jim’s dad’s hired man. We were excited because Jeep had proved that he wasn’t such an ignorant dog, although I still claimed that he was a picayune.
So I said to Dragonfly, “It’s just an accident that he ran onto this possum here.”
“Yeah,” Little Jim said, probably feeling like teasing somebody himself. “I bet he didn’t know the difference when the possum’s trail crossed the coon’s trail, and he got off on this sidetrack.”
“Sure,” I said. “He thinks a possum is important.”
Circus spoke up. “It is important! That possum is worth two dollars!”
Well, the possum was not interested in having us too close to him, so he squirmed on up the tree, reaching one long front leg after the other from one limb to another, and pretty soon he was going up very fast. I could see his long tail dragging along behind him.
“See his prehensile tail!” I exclaimed.
Dragonfly answered by saying, “What’s a prehensile tail?”
As I told you, I’d been looking up useful
words and learning how to use them by using them, so I said, “A prehensile tail is a tail that can hold onto things almost as well as a boy’s hand can.”
“A possum can hang by its tail as easy”—Poetry turned to Dragonfly, wanting to tell what he knew, too—“as easy as Circus can hang by his!”
Circus, as you know, was our acrobat.
Well, that was a bright remark, and we all had a good laugh.
“That,” Circus answered gruffly, “is a bright remark without the glow!”
I heard a bit of scuffling behind me and looked around just in time to see Poetry beginning to get up off the ground.
Well, Circus decided it was time to go into action. He swung himself up into the branches of that persimmon tree and started up, hand over hand, after the possum. It was a funny sight to see Circus going up the tree following the possum and to see the possum hurrying and scurrying up ahead of him.
Still on the way up, he called back to us, “It’s a good thing we are catching this possum. We’ve been missing too many chickens out of our chicken house!”
That was a fact. Possums eat a lot of different things that they shouldn’t. They not only eat all kinds of insects in the summertime, but they are very destructive animals. Nearly every bird that nests on the ground around Sugar Creek has to be afraid an old possum will come along and tear up its nest and eat all the baby birds or destroy the eggs. Not only that, possums go right into people’s chicken yards and chicken houses at night. If they get a chance, they will eat the little chickens too. And if it’s a large possum, it will catch even the big chickens and eat them.
I remembered all that while Circus was on his way up the persimmon tree. He stopped once to pick and eat one of the little plum-sized yellow persimmons, which, since fall and frost had come, were ripe and tasted very good to boys and possums. But in the summer and early fall, they made your lips pucker if you tasted one.
Little Jim, who never liked to see anything get hurt, called up to Circus, “My dad says that possums are very good to catch all the mice on the farm, and they catch the moles too.” That was just like Little Jim—always defending something or somebody, which maybe is a very good character trait to have.
Big Jim was holding his flashlight on the little gray varmint and on Circus, who knew that tree almost by heart and where every limb was. He’d climbed every tree on their place and almost every one along Sugar Creek, so he didn’t have to wonder where the next limb was even if he couldn’t see it. He just went right on up that tree.
“I’m going to shake him down!” he called back to us, and he started to do what he said he was going to do.
By that time, the possum was close to the top of the persimmon tree and was on the end of one of the branches, way out among the twigs.
Circus grabbed the small limb that the possum was on and started to shake it as hard as he could, holding onto the tree trunk with his other hand. I can tell you, the possum held on tight with his gray hair and his blackish stomach and his very black legs and feet. He even held on tight with his long, gray, round, tapering, prehensile tail.
But Circus knew how to shake possums out of a tree. He just jerked and shook and jerked and shook that branch and stopped and shook and jerked, and suddenly the front feet of that possum were loose. And then not only his front feet were loose, but every single foot was loose, and that clever gray-furred little rascal, who had his eyes shut because he didn’t like to look into the flashlight, was hanging by his tail only. His back feet were reaching up, trying to clasp the limb his tail was still holding onto, the way a turtle’s legs search all around trying to get hold of the hand of the boy who is holding it up by its tail—and also the way a crawfish’s pincers do when you have hold of it somewhere. Generally it does find your hand or finger just before you let go of it and it gets away.
Circus gave another quick, sharp jerk, but the possum just that second managed to get a grip on the limb again, and he scrambled up and onto it.
Big Jim threw up an idea to Circus. He called, “How about this? Maybe your dad wants that persimmon pruned up there a little!”
That was a good idea, so Circus had his knife out right away and decided that the possum’s limb wouldn’t be needed anymore. It was cut off in almost no time. Circus gave it a little shove, and out went Mr. Possum down through the outer branches of the tree to the ground. The minute he struck, he curled himself up into a ball the way they say porcupines do when they’re about to be caught.
Well, Jeep didn’t know what to make of it. He darted in there and started to grab hold of the possum with his teeth. Then he let go and jumped back. Then he dived in again and jumped back, and barked and panted and panted and barked and dived in again.
All the time the possum was still curled up in a ball, acting as though he was sound asleep.
“He’s playing possum,” Poetry cried, and that was true. Possums do that, you know, when they’re about to be caught. They curl up into little balls, shut their eyes, open their mouths with a silly, sickly grin on their white faces, and look as if they are dead. Then if you leave them alone, they will run away.
Jeep darted in again, and this time grabbed the possum with his teeth, shook him as if he was a big rat, then jumped back, looking scared.
You couldn’t wake up that possum, though. He lay on his side and had his head down between his forelegs. His sharp, long nose was almost touching his stomach, as if he was trying to protect his head or maybe to keep from getting bitten in the throat, the place a weasel likes to bite first when it catches a live supper.
Dragonfly spoke up then. “I wonder if he thinks he’s safe just because he has his head down between his two front legs, like an ostrich does when it buries its head in the sand when there is danger.”
Poetry answered him by saying with his ducklike voice, “Possums don’t think. Possums can’t think. Animals don’t have brains enough to think.”
“Dogs do,” Dragonfly said, and it looked like the argument was in his favor.
We didn’t have time to have an argument right then, though. Big Jim told them both to keep still.
Circus knew exactly what to do with a possum and how to kill it so it would die very quickly.
Little Jim turned his face away while Circus did that.
Then Circus took the possum by its prehensile tail and said, grunting a little, “He’s pretty heavy to carry all the way. I think I’ll lock him up in our woodshed. Come on, everybody!”
We all came on, following him up to their weathered old house where we waited at the gate. All of us boys felt very bashful on account of Circus having so many sisters. Only one of them would even look at a boy with red hair and freckles. Her name was Lucille, and she wasn’t afraid of spiders.
Pretty soon Circus was back again, and we all started to holler to each other, “Hurry up, or we’ll never catch up with them.”
Almost as soon as we were out in the woods again, we heard Old Bawler’s high voice—and it sounded very far away—going “ Whooo …”
A fraction of a second later, we heard Old Sol’s baritone voice also bawling, “WHOOO …”
“I’ll bet they’ve really found a coon’s trail,” one of us said to the rest of us, and we ran still faster.
“If it is a coon,” Circus yelled to us, “we’ll have a real fight on our hands.”
3
It’s a weird feeling—running lickety-splashety-crunchety-sizzle through the woods, panting and stopping for breath and hurrying on and climbing over rail fences and dodging around trees, not being able to see very far on account of the dark, and with everybody else around you or in front of you or behind you as excited as you are.
We could hear the bawling of the hounds and also the sharp, quick nervous barks of Dragonfly’s Airedale, who was also in the coon chase, far ahead of all of us and running with the hounds.
When I caught up with Circus’s dad and Big Jim’s dad’s hired man, I heard Mr. Browne say, “Any dog that will leave a coon’
s trail for a possum’s can’t be trusted.”
And that’s how we came to find out that the men had known all along that we were catching a possum back there.
“We thought we’d let the Sugar Creek Gang have some fun of their own,” Circus’s dad explained to us. “Besides, we couldn’t leave the hounds on a trail like this one.”
Just the same, the men wanted to know all about the possum, which we told them. We also handed each one of them a ripe persimmon, which some of us had filled our pockets with just before we’d left the tree. They were right about Jeep, though. He simply ran off on every sidetrack there was, diving in any direction after any rabbit that jumped up and ran.
But we couldn’t let that spoil our fun. Boy, oh, boy! Bawler with her high-pitched voice and Old Sol with his deep gruff voice knew what they were doing, and they stuck to it. They kept their noses not more than a few inches from the ground, running this way and that, wherever the coon’s feet had gone, and it didn’t make any difference how many rabbits jumped in front of them. They acted as if a rabbit wasn’t any more important to them than a crumb of bread that fell from a hungry boy’s roast beef sandwich while he was eating.
Once, when for a while Old Bawler and Old Sol were having trouble finding the coon’s trail, which they’d lost, Little Jim and I had a very interesting visit. And I found out what he’d tried to tell me about old hook-nosed John Till.
The hounds sounded worried as they tried to untangle the coon’s knotty trail. They were jumping over logs and running around trees and splashing across the little stream of water we called the “branch” and splashing back again, whining and complaining and not bawling at all. They were acting like a boy when he is stuck with an arithmetic problem and his dad isn’t there to ask helpful questions and maybe give an idea that will help him know how to work it.
It was while the hounds were having that trouble that we all sat down and waited beside and on a big maple tree that had fallen in a summer storm.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12 Page 2